Chocolate Showpiece

My Chocolate Showpiece

For our Chocolate 2 exam, we have to make a showpiece. The class theme was "movies." I decided to take that literally and do a general movie-themed piece rather than a piece based on a specific movie. I made a classic film reel and film strips with classic movie stills.

I made the outside pieces of the reel by molding two identical pieces of dark chocolate using a tart ring and small rings made of acetate to block off the holes (I could have used a cookie cutter to cut out the holes at the exact right moment, but I am not convinced that that way would have been easier.) I lightly brushed the disk that I was using as the front of the film reel with silver luster dust to give it a slightly metallic look. The inside part (that would hold the film) is a very thick block of unsweetened chocolate that I molded in a cake ring. Once it was hardened, I brushed this with more unsweetened chocolate to make a rough texture of concentric circles, reminiscent of the edge of film in a reel. I glued the two outside pieces to the inside piece--very carefully to ensure that it stands up straight. 

I molded a small disk for the base and glued the film reel to it. That was surprisingly easy, because the film reel could stand up on its own. All I had to do was very slightly melt the bottom of the reel so that it didn't roll and then use tempered chocolate to glue it onto the base.

I made the curved piece of film by painting white chocolate onto an acetate strip and then, once it was tacky, covered the whole strip in dark chocolate. Once that whole thing was at the cutting point I curved it around different sized cake rings and let it harden and painted white chocolate squares on the plain side. Then I peeled off the acetate and with quite a bit of difficulty (because it was so fragile and because chocolate melts when you hold it) I glued it to the film reel sticking straight up.

Finally, I had to make the small film strips. When I made the long piece, I made some short, wider pieces of chocolate spread on acetate. After I peeled off the acetate, I carefully brushed them with a dry pastry brush and then painted--literally, I used a paint brush--white chocolate on to make the frames and designs of the stills. I'm not terribly good with a paint brush and real paint on a piece of paper, and chocolate is harder to work with (it's quite thick, can harden onto the brush while you are using it, and you have to have the temperature exactly right) and paint onto (if you hold it, it melts) so they aren't quite so perfect, but I like them anyway!

Can you guess what the stills are depicting? (Answers on the next post.) 

Homemade Marshmallows and Rocky Road

Homemade coffee marshmallows

I'm not a huge fan of homemade marshmallows and unfortunately these were not an exception. I just find them a little to wiggly and slightly damp. Still, it was cool to make marshmallows and the coffee flavor was nice.

These rocky road candies came out a little
unattractive because the tempered chocolate
was a bit too cool so it got lumpy. Ah well,
it didn't change the taste.

We used the marshmallows in our rocky road candies. As it turns out, adding candied nuts and chocolate to the marshmallows makes them much nicer. 

Kahlua Bonbons

We had to come up with our own bonbon recipe. I was going to do earl grey tea, orange zest, and dark chocolate. Then it hit me that my aunt was coming to visit and that she loves Kahlua and cream (in fact it's the only drink I've ever seen her order...although I really haven't seen her order many drinks at all, so maybe it's just that.) So I decided to make a Kahlua and dark chocolate bonbon instead. It isn't that hard; just add Kahlua to the chocolate ganache filling (making sure to reduce the amount of cream accordingly) and make the bonbons as usual.

I decided to color the bonbons with cocoa butter based food coloring rather than luster dust (what I used for the saffron-honey bonbons). I'm not sure why, but I had some trouble with it sticking to the mold rather than the chocolate. Perhaps I heated it too much an threw it out of temper. Ah well, I still had some that looked very nice with a touch of red (I picked red because it matched the Kahlua label and I don't like yellow as much) and some plain ones that looked very nice too. More importantly, they tasted very nice as well and my aunt liked them!

Two-Tier Chocolate Cake

This is the first multi-tier cake we make. It's chocolate genoise imbibed with a raspberry liqueur spiked simple syrup, filled with chocolate-raspberry mousse, covered with chocolate buttercream, and decorated with bands of chocolate and a modeling chocolate rose.

Before we decorated our cakes, we had to assemble them. To do this we used wide straws (like the kind for bubble tea) as supports. We cut them exactly to the hight of the bottom tier of the cake and then stuck them in, so they would support the top tier (which was on a cardboard circle) and keep it from caving into the bottom one. You can do this same process on each layer to support a very tall, multi-tiered, wedding cake.

Apologies, I know it's a bit difficult to see the lovely
flowers and leaves on the branch. The problem is two
fold: the colors were a bit darker than I'd anticipated,
so they didn't contrast as well with the dark chocolate
as I would have liked; and I had left my proper camera
at home so I took this with my phone.

The chocolate band around the bottom tier was remarkably simple to make. I used a small paint brush to paint cocoa butter based food coloring on a band of acetate. Then I spread tempered dark chocolate over the design and, when the chocolate was at it's cutting point, wrapped it firmly around the cake.

The top tier was even easier. I just drizzled tempered chocolate on another band of acetate and wrapped that around the top layer.

Chocolate Showpieces, Jacques Torres, and the Best Class Ever

Me and my class with Chef Jacques Torres

Today I had the best class ever--Jacques Torres taught it. In college, I had many professors who were leaders in their fields and I would sit in the lecture hall or at the seminar table listening intently to what they had to teach the class. This was different than that because, in addition to him teaching us and showing us amazing techniques and tricks that could only come from Mr. Chocolate himself, I got to cook in the same kitchen as Jacques Torres, not just listen to him teach (like I get to do at the demos).

Chef Jacques with the main structure of
the showpiece. The blue thing in front
of the showpiece is one of the silicon
molds that I discuss below.

We have a chocolate showpiece project coming up, so Jacques Torres--or Chef Jacques as we are told to call him--demoed how to make a chocolate showpiece. He talked about finding the focal point, designing a shape that is pleasing to the eye, and the proper proportions of width to hight. He showed us how to mold odd shapes out of chocolate using rubber or cardboard bands (which enables you to make the piece thicker than you could if you were trying to cut it out) and how to use metal rings to mold the circles for the base (again, this makes things thicker than if you just cut out the shape.) That's how he made the main structure of the showpiece.

Chef Jacques making flower petals and the tuile mold used for
curving them. Also you can see the notching in the edges of
curved pieces of chocolate that form the showpiece's structure.

He also showed us how to make abstract flowers (by forming petals with a pairing knife dipped in chocolate and curving them in a tuile mold) and paint chocolate onto textured molds--in this case to make wings for a butterfly and leaf-like decorations for the base. He taught us how to cut fluted edges out of chunks of chocolate and glue everything together. 

The flower.

Finally he showed us a really cool technique to make a kind-of dough out of chocolate that will harden properly (in contrast to modeling chocolate that doesn't harden completely). Basically you put chocolate (regular old pistoles/chunks from a bar of chocolate) into a food processor and blitz until the chocolate becomes a dough--this may require adding a bit of external heat, but don't use too much or it will met as Chef Jacques so helpfully demonstrated. Once it is a stiff dough you can mold it like clay into complex shapes--in this case, the stamen of the flower, antenna for the butterfly and decorative curvy bits to add movement to the top of the showpiece. These decorations, plus a little bit of petal dust on the butterfly, made for a beautiful showpiece. The most amazing thing about it is that Chef Jacques made it from scratch in about 2.5 hours, including gathering equipment! (To give some perspective, we have more than 8 hours to make our showpieces.) I have to say, I this makes me feel somewhat more confident about being able to make my showpiece...not to mention, I have some really great ideas for techniques I want to use. I almost can't wait until I make my showpiece...almost.

The finished showpiece.

Saffron Honey Bonbons

Bonbons are a bit tedious to make and more than a bit difficult--between the price of chocolate and the labor involved, I understand why the cost so much at chocolate shops. The basic procedure is to make the filling (more on this filling in a moment) and temper chocolate for the shell. At this point get a clean, dry mold, decorate it with cocoa butter cutters or luster dust (I used a light coating of gold luster dust), and warm it slightly over an open flame (i.e. a gas burner) then fill up the mold with chocolate. Tap it or knock it off the table to get rid of bubbles and then, at exactly the right moment, pour out the excess chocolate tapping the underside of the mold to make sure all the excess chocolate drips out. Then scrape off the outside of the molds, so that the bonbons are flush with the top edge of their cavities. Let harden upside-down on a cooling rack until the cutting point and then turn rightside-up and scrape off any excess chocolate that may be on the outside of the mold. Let harden fully. Then fill with your desired filling almost to the top of the shell, but not all the way up or the bottom won't stick. Cover the bottom with more tempered chocolate (there are number of different ways to do this--my favorite is to coat a piece of parchment cut to fit the mold with a layer of chocolate, put it on top of the mold and scrape across the top to force the chocolate onto the bonbons, when it's hardened peel off the parchment.) Finally, when the chocolates are fully hardened, unmold them like you would get ice out of an ice cube tray.

The filling I used in these is a saffron, honey and dark chocolate. It was absolutely amazing. I could have just eaten it with a spoon! The mild sweetness of the honey and the subtle earthy-ness of the saffron mixed with strong dark chocolate was delicious. It's no wonder why they're called bonbons--they really are goodgood!

Happy Pi Day

As you may know, March 14 (3.14) is Pi Day. To celebrate, I made pie (yesterday, since I have class tonight). This maple-buttermilk pie is from Baked Explorations (the second cookbook from the Brooklyn-based bakery Baked, that I have yet to go to but love already because their cookbooks are wonderful.) It's a classic southern custard pie, with a lovely flakey pie crust--granted I used my own pie crust not the recipe they gave--and a buttermilk based, maple syrup laced custard filling. It's certainly not the prettiest pie, but it sure is tasty!

Peanut Toffee Brittle

This was nice. It's not my favorite thing and it's no where near as good as the peanut butter nougat we made during the same class. It has a fine flavor, but like most toffee was a bit too sweet for me. The nice thing was the texture...we used baking soda to make it porous, which makes it slightly easier on the teeth.

Peanut Butter Nougat

When I saw that we were supposed to make nougat in class today, I was not thrilled. I had flashbacks to the disastrous petit four class in Level 2 when my partner and I ruined one batch of traditional nougat and made a second batch that was only just barely soft enough to be edible. I really didn't want to start Level 3 (today was my first class in Level 3, the last level, by the way) by making nougat that could be used as a hammer. Happily, this nougat was significantly easier to make and absolutely delicious!

The texture was somewhere between nougat and fudge and it tasted like the filling of a peanut butter cup. Once we coated them in chocolate they were even better--I mean, what doesn't chocolate make better?!

Nougat without the chocolate coating--not terribly pretty,
but absolutely delicious!

Pastillage Cake Stand

My Rapunzel cake stand and favor boxes

First let me say, pastillage is easy enough to make but not easy to work with. We didn't really get practice time to work with pastillage before we had to start on the cake stand--the final project for Level 2--so it was very intimidating. I did't like going into an exam never having worked with the main material we had to use. Ah well. At least the class picked a really fun--albeit overly specific--topic: fairy tales that involve food. This narrowed it down to about ten stories to base our cakes off of. I picked Rapunzel, because I thought it leant itself nicely to a cake stand. I should point out that I picked Rapunzel not Rapunzel-as-portrayed-in-the-movie-Tangled, so it doesn't have quite the whimsy of a part wattle and daube tower with a shingled roof...instead it's a proper stone tower.

I figured the stand and the cake would be the tower, Rapunzel could have a 'window' in the tower to let her hair down out of, and the base of the tower would be the witch's vegetable garden (complete with marzipan vegetables, keep out signs, and a black cat) that Rapunzel's father steals from (yes, I know that the garden isn't really at the base of the tower...wouldn't be a very good hidden tower if anyone could just wander up to it, but you get the point.) We also had to make 'favor boxes' completely out of pastillage. I decided they they would have little marzipan radishes (admittedly I made them look a bit like turnips) as handles.

By the way, the cake isn't real cake...it's a styrofoam cake dummy. That gave us much more time to make the stand, plus it was easier to cover with fondant than a real cake.

I digress, to make the stone pattern and the writing on the pastillage keep out signs, I thinned gel food coloring with a bit of clear liquor (vodka is the best to use, but we didn't have that, so I ended up using framboise) and painted with it on the already molded and hardened pastillage tower and the covered cake. I made the vegetables, the cat, and Rapunzel (hair and all) out of marzipan that I colored some of the marzipan with gel food coloring mixed into the dough before I molded it and some with an airbrush after the shapes we already formed, depending on the colors and look I wanted. I stuck all the pastillage pieces together with melted isomalt--more on that another time. I also used it to glue the radish handles to the box lids and Rapunzel to her fondant window and the window to the tower. I attached the marzipan vegetables and cat to the base with a bit of green royal icing piped with a grass tip since they didn't need to be as securely fastened.

All in all, my tower could have been a bit more cylindrical and favor boxes could have come out smoother looking, but I'm really happy with how my marzipan work came out and I love how the whole thing ca

Another view

Sugar Paste Tulips

My red and white striped tulip

Oops, I forgot to show you these along with the other sugar paste flowers I made. I think the tulips came out lovely and quite realistic. You have to make each petal with a wire in it, just like we did for the rose leaves. Then you attach them to each other using floral tape. I've dabbled in flower arranging and have, on occasion, wired flowers for use in an arraignment or as a boutonniere; the procedure for using wired sugar paste petals or leaves is very similar to that for using wired flowers/petals/leaves in real flower arranging. A little petal dust can give realism to the outer edges of a rose and it can do the same for the center of a tulip. It gives depth to the center and also looks like a little pollen from the stamen got on the petals (which often happens in flowers like tulips).

These tulips look like parrot tulips in full bloom. But with a different cutter, you could easily make a standard tulip. I'm not sure how close you can gather the petals--because the sugar paste must be completely hardened before you can put the petals together--but you can probably get a flower that is more closed than the ones I made.

My white tulip

Sugar Paste Flowers, con't

All my sugar paste flowers!

We finished the flowers that we started last class. They came out amazingly well! Seriously, they look natural(ish) and beautiful. While they are time consuming and somewhat tedious to make, the final product more than makes up for the effort.

Before the petal dust.

After the petal dust--see how the
color is slightly varied and the edges
aren't bright white in the light.

What makes them especially realistic is the petal dust (a sort of eatable, colored powder that you brush on dry). This gives depth to the flowers and a more realistic color to the leaves.

I'm not thrilled with the rose leaves because we didn't have the right press, so they look a little strange. But I love the roses and I'm shocked at how life-like they look.

The finished roses

Calla lilies (a.k.a arum lilies)

Sugar Paste Flowers

I have a bone to pick with the FCI. Ron Ben Israel--the famous chef and cake designer--was supposed to teach us two lessons on sugar paste flowers (as the admissions officers were all to happy to tell me when I was considering applying), but apparently he doesn't teach the class any more. We were the first batch of students to not get him and no one really told us this until the unit started...so we all were expecting Ron Ben Israel and we just didn't get him. That said, the lesson was still really interesting and I learnt a ton. Actually, it was probably a lot more fun and relaxed than it would have been if we had all been trying to impress the chef.

We made three roses (a big one, a medium one, and a bud), rose leaves, tulip centers and petals (enough for two tulips), and calla lily centers. Next class we will finish putting the roses and tulips together and make the calla lilies. Sugar paste--also known as gum paste--is difficult to work with, but the results can be pretty darn amazing. I can't wait to finish the roses, which already look beautiful without their leaves, and put together the tulips, which look pretty interesting as just petals.

It's not easy to work with sugar paste, but then again it's not too hard. You have to be careful not to let it dry out too much as you are working with it...but on the other hand you do occasionally want it to dry a little. It's a hard balance to strike. But it's definitely worth it!

Nougatine Basket with Marzipan Fruit

We made nougatine baskets to hold our marzipan fruit. It's not the easiest thing to work with, but it looks pretty cool. Basically, nougatine is caramel with toasted sliced almonds in it. It's moldable when it's hot but hardens very brittle. The problem is, it doesn't stay hot enough to work with for very long. We used royal icing to decorate the baskets. I think the icing was too thick and dry and very difficult to work with. But that could be me; I'm not great at using royal icing. Regardless of my difficulties with the nougatine and royal icing, one it was filled with my marzipan fruit, it looked pretty darn good!