And using the mold required tempering chocolate. For some reason, I decided to do white chocolate, which is notoriously finicky to temper because of its lower melting point and working temperature.
Undaunted, I got together my chocolate (the Baker’s brand, because it was the only cheap chocolate I could find that didn’t have yucky additives), cream and lavender for the ganache filling, and all my tempering stuff. Because my kitchen is tiny and has virtually no counter space, I decided not to bother running to Home Depot to buy a slab of marble for tabling (one method of tempering) and instead used the seed/block method.
Oh yeah, just in case you’re wondering, tempering chocolate is the process of melting chocolate by heating it to a certain point, cooling it while constantly agitating it to a specific point and then bringing it back up to a working temperature. The actual temperatures depend on what kind of chocolate you’re using and its cocoa liquor percent (not actual liquor, that’s just what they call the chocolatey essence of what makes chocolate). For white chocolate, you melt it at about 105F, take it down with agitation to 80F and then bring it gently to a working temperature of 86F.
Why do we temper chocolate? Because we are obsessive yet sad people with no social lives to speak of. No, no, no, wait, that’s why we make puff pastry from scratch using only our hands and a rolling pin. We temper chocolate so that it sets quickly, has a nice shine and snap to it and feels creamy in the mouth. All of this happens because the melt-cool-agitate process encourages the formation of the right size and shape of fat crystals.
One way of tempering chocolate is tabling, which I have the most success doing. Plus it looks really cool to spread the melted chocolate in a thin layer on marble and get all cheffy on it with two spatulas going back and forth acting as the agitators.
The other methods are seeding, blocking and the seed/block combo. Essentially, you melt the chocolate and then cool it by adding a lot of little pieces of already tempered (not melted) chocolate, which is seeding, or by adding a big chunk of already tempered chocolate, which is blocking. Blocking takes forever and seeding runs the risk of lumps, so one of my chefs, the Divine Chef M*, taught us the combo method. Early on, you do seeding to get the chocolate to cool quickly, but then instead of adding more small bits, you add one big block to finish the process, as it’s easier to fish out and less likely to break into unmelted lumpy bits.
(*The Divine Chef M was my cakes chef, and the first woman chef I had as an instructor. I adored her... I know I say that about all my chefs, and it’s true, but I learned a tremendous amount from her and loved her teaching style, as well as the gleam in her eye that she’d get when theorizing how many people would die from your dessert if you didn’t properly store the pastry cream. Another tip: always make yourself a big batch of margarita popsicles, heavy on the tequila, when throwing a pool party for your kids. In the words of Chef M: "it’s so innocent! Oh look, Mommy’s having another popsicle! No one will suspect anything, and it will make the pool party go by much faster.")
So I seed/blocked the chocolate, though I didn’t have marble to set the bowl on (marble does an excellent job of drawing away thermal heat), the glass bowl I was using stayed way hotter than the stainless steel we use at school and... did I mention I have an electric range? Ugh! I hate cooking on an electric range.
Anyway, before starting the tempering process, I’d painted the molds with an iridescent pale purple that looked so cool. I’d also made a soft white chocolate-lavender ganache. I was really excited about the prospects.
The chocolate had other ideas.
Whenever I temper chocolate, I think of what my favorite chef, der Erlkonig, said before our first tempering adventure: "Chocolate is like a wild stallion. It will do what it wants with you."
The chocolate got too hot too quickly, took forever to cool down and then, before it even reached 80F, started to set and got all thick and crusty on me, even with nonstop stirring. I took it back up and brought it back down again with the same result. It was getting late and I still hadn’t done my homework. Let’s just say the chocolate wasn’t the only thing getting agitated.
I finally brought it down again and then tried taking it up to 86F but overshot it and went to 90F. At that point, with midnight approaching, I decided just to get the chocolate off my damn stove and went ahead and filled the molds.
Sadly, the cool cocoa butter design melted when it came in contact with the too-hot chocolate and went from curvalinear lines to random swirls. As soon as it cooled, I piped in the ganache (successfully, I might add) and then, once that set, sealed the chocolates and threw them spitefully in the fridge overnight just to get them off the counter (I know many people will tell you never keep chocolates in the fridge, and we don’t at Cookin’ School, but interestingly enough, on extern every outlet I worked in kept their chocolates refrigerated. Go figure.).
Here’s the result:
In a word, very disappointing. Okay, that’s two words. But in any case, lousy shine, too many air bubbles even though I tapped the bejesus out of the mold, and the design was ruined. That said, I will say that the actual shell was surprisingly superthin (a good thing) and that the ganache, which at first I thought would be too strong, was perfect with the white chocolate shell. I was also pleased that the chocolates popped right out of the mold... one master baker on extern warned me that if you put too-hot chocolate on a cocoa butter design, it would never come out of the mold and you’d spend the rest of your days trying to wipe the mold clean like Lady Macbeth scrubbing her hands.
I’m going to try again, and again, and again if need be. I’m already thinking of a white chocolate with rhubarb ganache (mostly because I have rhubarb and rhubarb wine that I want to use up) for this coming weekend. Stay tuned. And stay tempered.
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