Piping woes.

The day began with Jean-Luc doing another step in the pumpkin/milk chocolate cake. It sounds really weird, but we got to taste the cake and the cream he was putting between the layers after and it was actually really delicious. The cake recipe he used was really, really moist and paired with the milk chocolate cream for the inside... man, it was good. He is going to decorate/put the final touches on the cake tomorrow.

And... it went downhill from there. Today was basically a day of piping chocolate. Not my greatest strength, as you may have surmised by now. AT LEAST I am getting better at making cornets out of parchment paper. That's something. We had to pipe this adorable pastry chef onto a plastic sheet in dark chocolate and then fill it in with white chocolate. Sounds simple. But getting the eyes of the chef to look not crazy was really difficult. I did okay on the first one and then took maybe eight times longer to do the second one. We were interrupted by a fire drill. But that's not even why I took so long. I just kept having to redo the eyes, over and over and over and over again. After we piped the dark chocolate and let it harden a bit, we filled it in with a layer of white chocolate. We were supposed to use a cornet to pipe around the edges and then fill it in with the cornet as well. But I sort of just poured it on with the spatula because I just wanted it to be over. The problem, I think, with this approach, is that you end up with a lot of air pockets in your white chocolate, because plopping it on with a spatula and then smoothing it down with your fingers doesn't quite give you that precise result that using a cornet does. Alas. After the white chocolate was "piped" in we refrigerated our little chefs so they could set.

Then we made the bases. We poured more melted and tempered dark chocolate onto textured plastic (you can use any kind of textured plastic, which is pretty cool) and let it set a little, and then cut out our base shape with a circle cookie cutter. Leaving them on the plastic until they are completely set (after you've cut out your shape) gives them a shinier finish, whereas leaving them on parchment paper, for example, would give you more of a matte finish. So, once we'd made two circles and two little rectangles, we put those in the blast freezer to harden.

Then we removed our chefs from the plastic (that's when I noticed all of the pockets of air) really carefully. After our bases had cooled a little, we used more melted chocolate to stick the chefs onto the bases, and the little rectangles were used as supports behind them. I think, with time, my piping skills WILL get better. Not bad for a first attempt though.

...And that's basically all we did today.

Tomorrow we're going to be doing something with our modeling chocolate, because we took it out of the fridge to warm up overnight. I think we're making flowers.

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No recipes for today because we didn't make anything. Just melted a lot of dark and white chocolate.