a variety of thanks

a breakfast hash to begin: onions, sweet potatoe, butternut squash, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, garlic and sage.

sans rival: meringue base 1/4.

italian buttercream finish

sisters

trio grapefruit curd.

povitika

rolled

baked

oops

roasted corn truffles and sea salt caramels - a long time in the making

After weeks of emailing, discussing recipes and truffle combos, we finally got together to temper.  I came up from Portland to Seattle for a weekend full of chocolate making and preserving with Neeta and my sister, Melissa. 

This month’s daring bakers challenge was to create two candies at home, one of which had to be made with tempered chocolate. Melissa took the lead and got us fancy smancy Valrhona dark and white chocolate and dark cocoa powder!

Splurging on Valrhona instead of a marble slab, we used the seeding method to temper the chocolate. Here’s a bit about tempering from Neeta: Tempering is a process where you melt chocolate, take it to a few different temperatures, all with the intent of manipulating the molecular structure - in order to end with chocolate that has a nice snap, sheen, won’t hold a fingerprint and most importantly, locks in the cocoa butter to prevent that white smudgy stuff you sometimes see lingering on your candy bar. Tempering chocolate makes it super easy to work with because at the certain temperature/structure where it is ready to temper, it will cool and contract by a small percentage, making it super easy to pop out of a mold. I can write more about the process of tempering later…for now…here’s what we got to make!

Sea salt caramels! above we’re filling mini muffin tins - that were filled with tempereed chocolate - with a simple gooey caramel + a dose of sea salt

I think we actually did reach a temper point but the sides of the muffin tin were not coated so well and thus we ended up with a lot of shattered caramel cups. delicious and messy.

TAKE 2: Melissa’s brainchild: roasted sweet corn white chocolate truffles dusted with cocoa powder and a heavy dose of chipotle pepper

An afternoon bbq, inspired us to add roasted corn. In addition to classic white chocolate/heavy cream ganache, we also made a dairy free version:  sweet roasted corn steeped in coconut milk. 

To flavor the ganache, we steeped the roasted corn in heavy cream, and then mixed it with melted white chocolate

The final product was dusted with cocoa powder/chipotle pepper mix.

voila!

melissa also hosted a fantastic summer bbq! she even had watermelon ice cubes ready to put into a summer drink of gin/lime/simple syrup. Cheers.