CHOCOLATE EVERYWHERE

We started our first day of the decoration rotation, which essentially consisted of melting, tempering, and then doing stuff with chocolate. Let's just say every exposed piece of skin and clothing was covered in chocolate by the end of the day.

First, though, Jean-Luc showed us some Thanksgiving-themed recipes, including a pumpkin pie (that we got to eat at the end of the day - yum!) and a pumpkin/milk chocolate cake. He only did the cake part today, and he's going to show us the next two steps tomorrow and Friday. So we'll have a classic recipe (pumpkin pie) and a more modern recipe (the cake) if we want to bake anything for Thanksgiving weekend.

The decoration booklet of recipes isn't very big, so there aren't many recipes to get through. Still, we only did two of them today. We each made a batch of modeling chocolate, which is dark chocolate mixed with a sugar/water/glucose mixture. That is in the fridge, to be used tomorrow.

Then we each made a batch of vanilla truffles. I didn't actually know what truffles were made out of, but now I do! We basically made a ganache - melted semisweet chocolate and then mixed it with a cream/sugar/glucose mixture and then crumbled in a bit of butter at the end, and stirred until it was dissolved. Then we cooled it down a little bit by placing it in a bowl of ice water for a few seconds, mixing it, and repeating until it was at a temperature that would be easier to pipe with. Then once it had cooled down / thickened a little (but not too much -- a bunch of us had to re-heat it because it had passed the perfect piping consistency) we put it into a piping bag and piped little blobs (seriously) onto parchment paper. My chocolate would not really stay the right consistency, so it was harder than it sounds. Some of it hardened on the inside of the piping tip and then the rest of it got really runny. Eventually, it sort of worked. We all weirdly ended up with completely different amounts. Then we rounded them off into little spheres. Sort of. I think throughout the entire process, I had to wash my hands like fifteen times, because the warmth of my hands was making the chocolate even meltier. After that, we melted down and tempered a bunch more chocolate and rolled our truffles in this and let them sit for a bit, so they could dry. Then we rolled them in another layer of melted chocolate and covered them in cocoa powder.

They don't look particularly appetizing, but they are. Also,
this is before we sifted the extra cocoa powder off.

The truffles are basically all we made today. After that, we just put all of our leftover chocolate from earlier into one big bowl, melted it down (surprise surprise) and practiced our chocolate piping skills. We have to choose ten designs from a booklet that he gave us earlier in the year and then in December, in the last week of school, we are going to be tested on piping these ten patterns across a sheet of parchment paper. So... better start practicing. I would have taken a picture of my adventures in piping today, but I'm waiting until they are slightly more impressive.

---

Today's Recipes

Modeling Chocolate335 g dark couverture chocolate
100 g glucose
25 g sugar
25 g water 

Vanilla Truffles 
350 g dark chocolate
125 g cream 
30 g fondant (but we used glucose)
5 ml vanilla
12 g butter