Temper Mental

Yes, it’s been a while since my last update, but no, it’s not because I’ve been traumatized by Darth Chocolate. Yet. On the contrary, aside from the occasional razor-sharp sarcastic sneer or withering stare, he has been great fun.

For one thing, he is a master of truly awful puns. I mean, astoundingly, spleen-quiveringly bad puns.

Introducing his lecture on fudge, including how it differed from the more tempermental ganache, he deadpanned, "In the words of Tina Turner, what’s fudge got to do with it? Who needs ganache when ganache can be broken?"

Maybe you have to be a kitchen geek to get it, but trust me, if you didn’t groan in legitimate pain from that one, consider yourself blessed.

I respect him because he suffers no fools - even as I dread doing something foolish in his presence.

"That’s not nearly good enough," he said to one classmate who had labeled her chocolates less than perfectly.

"Is that the best temper you can manage?" he asked Zesty of her not-quite-tempered chocolate.

And to her teammate: "Why are you carrying the sheet pan that way? Why do you want to hurt yourself or one of your colleagues?"

You have to understand that when he speaks, it’s in that quiet, even, slightly over-enunciated but arctic-cold and just a tad bored voice the supergenius villians always use in the movies.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, think back to "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die," or anything Grand Moff Tarkin said in "Star Wars," and you’ll have Darth Chocolate.

He is also, fortunately, an excellent teacher. I understand chocolate and sugar so much better now, not just the what and how but the why, that I’m starting to feel as comfortable with both as I do with Italian buttercream and jocunde.

I have even mastered... heheheh... the death-defying trick of testing sugar by sticking your fingers in it while it’s bubbling away on the flame at temperatures approaching 311 degrees.

"You have to learn to overcome your self-preservation instinct to work with sugar," Darth Chocolate noted drolly on the day we started cooking sugar.

He showed us how to stick our fingers into the crazyhot cooking sugar, right into the pot, without suffering terrible burns (the thing about sugar is, unlike boiling oil or water, which roll off you, it adheres to wherever it lands and merrily burns right through to the bone if you let it). No one in my class was willing to try it, though. Except me.

You’re shocked, I’m sure.

And I have to admit, it was really, really hard to stick my bare fingers into the sugar, knowing how much sugar burns hurt, even though I knew I wouldn’t get burned (because I did the secret cheffy trick to protect myself, which I’m not sharing here lest someone read this, attempt it in some half-assed manner, burn themselves horribly and launch legal action against me... plus it’s a hella cool party trick that I want to own without sharing).

The funny thing is, after that first attempt, when I actually did an embarrassingly girly squeak as my fingers descended into the bubbling, cooking, searing hot sugar, I got addicted to it. Mandilicious kept yelling at me to get my fingers out of our sugar, but it was a thrill to do it, especially in front of my more squeamish classmates who would run away shrieking.

And no, I did not burn myself. Not one bit.

To recap, this past week we did hard candies, caramels, brittle, taffy, gianduja (nut-flavored chocolate) and confectionary fondant (Mandilicious and I made the artisan equivalent of Peppermint Patties with fresh mint, for example), but the memory card on my camera was full so I didn’t take it to class. I do, however, have some shots of our handiwork from the first week, when chocolates and truffles were on the agenda.

Here’s a shot of a couple pieces each of what we made in week one:

The white truffles in the center are white chocolate raspberry (close-up below).

The rest, clockwise from the bottom of the group photo, are:

Rainiers: a brandied cherry and cherry ganache filling, enrobed in dark chocolate and capped with white chocolate to evoke the snowy shoulders of Mount Rainier... when giving us the formula, Darth Chocolate noted they were named for "the still seismically-active volcano in Washington State... the cherry represents the molten lava that will one day burst forth in a long overdue eruption. Or perhaps I watch too much Discovery Channel." I couldn’t resist asking what we should add to evoke the pyroclastic flow sure to follow. An approving but reptilian smile spread across his face. "I suppose we could add some shards of glass," he said wickedly.

Anise Sticks: milk chocolate flavored with Pernod. I’m not a huge Pernod fan (if I’m going to set my throat on fire, I want it to be with absinthe), but these were quite yummy.

Habanos: mango and habanero ganaches enrobed in dark chocolate and sprinkled with Maldon sea salt. I like mango well enough, but not with chocolate, and count me out on habaneros. I like heat, and I love some chiles (particularly ancho), but habaneros to me just taste metallic, like a cruel joke by God on humans who want to hurt themselves. Here’s a close-up of what the Habanos looked like on the inside:

Grand Marnier Truffles: not very exciting, either to make or to eat, or to photograph, for that matter, but they will be part of our fifth term practical next month, so I consider them a necessary evil.

Dark and Stormies: Darth Chocolate just happened to develop a formula based on my favorite drink (a long time before I ended up in his class, of course) and just happened to assign it to my team to make it. Sadly, the school does not stock the right rum (Gosling’s Black Seal Black Rum, the only rum to ruin your liver with, as far as I’m concerned), so we had to make do with Myer’s dark rum (yuck) and a ginger ganache. It was okay, though my favorite part was getting to make the three little waves on the top. 180 times. (Yes, most of our formulas yielded 160-190 pieces.)

The upcoming days will be spent on gummies and jellies and, be still my heart, marzipan (mmmm... marzipan), but I am dreading Tuesday. Every team has different duties around the bakeshop, and Mandilicious and I have to inventory Darth Chocolate’s tool cabinets and lock them at the end of the day. Only he has the key to unlock them, and Thursday, by chance, we locked the cabinets prematurely and had to ask him not once, not twice, but three times for the keys to open them to put away a stray piece of equipment (not to shirk responsibility, but I was only at fault for the first time... Mandilicious was to blame for the other two). We received a deserved but still painful tongue-lashing for that.

On Friday, eager to avoid a repeat, we decided to leave the cabinets open until the very end of class in case any tools not explicitly counted in the daily inventory showed up.

Oh, we left the cabinets open alright.

I was walking Wiley Friday night when all of a sudden my mind registered the horrible realization: Shit! We left without ever locking the cabinets!

It was too late to go back, of course, and I’m sure Darth Chocolate noted their open, unlocked state, in the same omniscient way he can tell from across the room when someone’s chocolate is out of temper or two teammates are arguing in whispers and angry glares. I’m sure he locked them, and that none of his precious, zealously guarded tools will go missing (I think if he could have Cerberus on watch over his cabinets without violating sanitation codes against live beasts in the kitchen, he would).

And I am sure, so sure, so terribly sure, Mandilicious and I will suffer his wrath about our negligence on Tuesday.

Yes, we will deserve it, having neglected our duties. But ouch. It’s gonna hurt.