Life is like a box of chocolate.

So, we did (surprise) more chocolate work today. We made these boxes out of chocolate which was pretty intense and not my favourite thing. There was a reappearance of the heart acetate paper which I loved so much the first time around. If I did the entire thing again, I think I could do a better job. Jean-Luc mentioned how one of the downsides of the program being only a year is that there isn't really time to try things over again; you basically have enough time to do it once and if you screw up, you screw up. Put a bunch of perfectionists in a room and only let them try something once for a very specific amount of time, and the results aren't very pretty. In the case of our chocolate boxes, though, the results were okay.

First, we melted and tempered our chocolate. The room was really cold today, so when I tempered the chocolate, it mostly got stuck to the marble and was over-tempered so it got super lumpy. Not ideal. We had to eventually re-melt and re-temper it. But, before we did that we made the outside of the box. We used a sheet of bumpy acetate and spread the chocolate on it with a palette knife then placed it in a cake ring. I don't think I did a very good job of placing it in the ring, because as it was drying and setting, it pulled away from the sides a lot, giving it a less round and more awkward appearance. Then we made the tops of our boxes by pouring the chocolate onto a clean sheet of acetate and waiting til it started to set, then cut out a ring slightly larger than the cake ring we used for the actual box.

Once we had re-melted and re-tempered our chocolate, we poured some into the inside of our cake rings to create the bottom of the box. Easy enough. Then, we had to spread chocolate onto four strips of the heart pattern acetate -- a one-inch, three-inch, four-inch, and five-inch strip. The one-inch strip we just set on this plastic thing with ridges in it so it would have a curved appearance. For the other strips, we first spread the chocolate on, then we waited til it started to set, then we took a knife and used the back to make lines, creating approximately one-inch segments of chocolate. Then, we folded the strip onto itself and used the chocolate to hold the ends together. The result was sort of a giant teardrop-shaped tube. We did all three strips and then set them aside to dry. The temperature of the room was really messing with us today, more than it did yesterday. Because the chocolate started to set so quickly, when I pulled the knife through to create the segments, it pulled up a lot of the chocolate with it. I also made the layer of chocolate a little too thick, which I tend to do a lot. But, the more you know...

One of the annoying things about working with chocolate is that it gets EVERYWHERE and then it takes forever to clean up and then you just get chocolate on everything again... but I think I am growing to like chocolate work a lot more this round than I did earlier in the semester, even though the stuff that we've done has been challenging.

After our heart chocolate was dry, we pulled off the acetate carefully and the pieces came apart pretty easily. Not everyone in the group cut all the way through the chocolate with the knife, so the pieces stuck together more / broke in the process of gently prying them apart. We also leveled out the tops of the box by flipping it over and running the top edge on a warm metal plate (over a pot of hot water), which melted the chocolate down so it was all the same height.

Then, we made a "bow" on the top of the box by using melted chocolate to stick the ribbon pieces onto the top. We did the outside first and then refrigerated til set, then we did the inside pieces. Then, we cut our one-inch strip in two and placed those on as well. Except someone accidentally knocked into mine so the ribbons in front are not in the picture. But, that's okay.

Not actually supposed to be rough on the inside.

If I did it again, I would alter the outside ribbon placement.

The pieces were an awkward shape to fit together.

I really don't know how I feel about this.

Not my favourite thing we've done so far.

 After the chocolate boxes, all we did was caramelize some almonds. We are going to cover them with milk chocolate tomorrow. To caramelize them, we just put 50 grams of sugar and 20 ml of water in a pot, brought it to a boil, and added blanched whole almonds. The sugar eventually starts to crystallize around the almonds and as the sugar/almonds are stirred around, the sugar will eventually start to re-melt and caramelize. Once the the almonds are coated in a golden brown caramel coating (and they start making popping sounds), we added some cocoa butter and mixed it in. The cocoa butter is to keep the almonds from getting too sticky and I think it also improves shelf life. Then we just lay them out on a baking tray lined with parchment paper to cool for tomorrow. I may have eaten a few in the process. They were delicious.