I had the really good fortune to check my email shortly after a message showed up from Foodbuzz offering the first two Featured Publishers to respond a ticket to attend the Seattle Chocolate Salon on their behalf. (This was back in mid-July–did I really start writing this post a over a month ago? Fortunately, chocolate never goes out of style, but I still want to give FoodBuzz a big thank you for being kind and patient with an exhausted and preoccupied pregnant foodie!)

My fortune wasn’t favorable just because I got a free ticket; Chris attended as my trusty photographer and we both felt that the experience was well worth the $20 he spent to get in. No, I also count myself lucky because if it hadn’t been for that email, I never would have known about the event at all. I don’t know if I live under a rock or what, but the only other place I’ve seen a mention of the event was in another food blog after I already had scored myself a ticket. To make matters worse, in the days leading up to the Salon, I felt a bit confused by the layout and wording of the site, and was unsure exactly what kind and quality of event I was going to be attending. So even if I had found out about it another way, if I hadn’t had that ticket already, I’m not sure the website would have convinced me to go.

Which would have been a huge shame, because the event itself was all kinds of awesome. Several different varieties of awesome, in fact, that far exceeded both of our expectations.

There was an overwhelming amount of chocolate to taste, really good chocolate made by people who really think about their craft. When the very friendly event staff at the will call table had banded us with VIP wrist straps (I’m pretty sure everyone was a VIP, but hey, it always feels pretty cool to be Very Important), one of them told me we were free to go in and make ourselves sick on chocolate. We got there almost four hours before the salon ended, and we still didn’t quite manage to hit every table, much less go to any of the chocolate demos they were holding in a side room off the main floor. Even so, I have to admit I did end up making myself ill.

In my defense, this probably had as much to do with being pregnant as with the pound or two of rich, delicious chocolate I consumed. And I did it in the name of good journalism! I mean, really, it wouldn’t have been fair not to attempt to try every chocolate on display, even if I ultimately failed in that goal. What if I only tasted the chocolates I didn’t like on a table, and missed a few stellar ones I’d end up waxing poetic over?

Eventually, I realized that was not the best way to go about things and started picking and choosing what I tasted. I noticed that certain flavors made appearances at a plurality of tables, and comparing the variations on chili, mojito or grapefruit chocolates ended up being a much better way to compare and contrast quality and style than trying to take everything in. I also went for the most unusual flavors the more creative chocolatiers were offering, and rarely was disappointed by what I chose.

As time ran short, I reached for smaller and smaller chunks of chocolate and pieces of cut up confections, but I learned all those lessons too late. Still, the wonderful thing was that the whole room seemed to have magic chocolate bubble around it. Even as I got fuller and fuller, I was still enjoying chocolate up until the very end. I didn’t start feeling queasy until we’d trudged back up the hill to our car, leaving the experience of the Salon itself untainted in my memories.

Let’s leave the cautionary tale behind and proceed to the sights and tastes of the show!

Oh! Chocolate

Oh! Chocolate is a local chain of Seattle chocolate shops, with locations in Mercer Island, Bellevue and Madison Valley…as well as far off Peachtree, Georgia, of all places. (I wish I’d known that before the show so I could have asked how they ended up there!)

Theirs was the first table we stopped at, which was great because I believe they were the only table making chocolates on site. It was a fun way to get drawn into the festive atmosphere.

They were hand-dipping glacéed apricots and handing them out, soft and dripping with still-melted chocolate. The apricots were moist, plump and sweet, perfect with the dark but not too bitter chocolate.

They were also offering two dipped chocolates: a mango habenero truffle and a fleur de sel orange honey caramel. I was impressed by both. Many chocolates boast chilies on their ingredient list, but previous to the Salon, neither Chris nor I had found any that captured enough chili flavor or heat to warrant mentioning the peppers on their packaging. We finally broke that unlucky streak, and Oh! Chocolates set the tone for the afternoon with a truffle that had a noticeable overtone of spiciness, well matched to the mango.

A few years ago, while working a booth at the Taste of Washington, I tasted my first (and I thought last) salted caramel from a different, well-established local chocolate company (who was oddly absent from the Salon) and couldn’t understand the appeal. At all. Since that was A.D. (After my love of Dark chocolate began) and not B.C. (Before I discovered good Chocolate), I don’t think my tastebuds have changed that much in the interim. So I must have been turned off by that one particular version of the flavor combo, because I quite enjoyed Oh! Chocolate’s salted caramel and many others I tasted after it.

Theo Chocolate

Theo Chocolate is located in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle. They are one of only a handful chocolate makers in the US–meaning that they grind and process their own cacao beans–and they have the commendable distinction of being the only organic, fair trade chocolate maker in the country.

Okay, I have to admit something: I was not super excited when I saw the massive number of chocolates that Theo had out for Salon attendees to taste. Back when I went through my obsessive chocolate tasting phase in pastry school, I bought a bar of Theo chocolate and didn’t like it at all. It was better than some of the other organic bars available at the time, but I wasn’t taken by the flavor or texture, enough so that I remembered disliking the chocolate after the intervening years.

I don’t know if they’ve improved or if I was smoking something metaphorical the day I did that tasting, but I was very, very wrong about Theo. I tasted everything on their table, and enjoyed pretty much all of it. First came their range of single origin chocolates and straight chocolate blends. You should be able to spot a pattern in these bars in this peek into my tasting notes:

• Theo Costa Rica Dark Chocolate Bar 91%: decent mouth-feel; fruity; not super bitter, despite the high percentage
• Theo Ghana Dark Chocolate Bar 84%: sweeter than the Costa Rican bar, which brought even more fruit flavor out of the beans
• Theo Madagascar Dark Chocolate Bar 74%: strong zing of fruit
• Theo Jane Goodall 70% organic Dark Chocolate: smooth; fruity
• Theo Jane Goodall 45% organic Milk Chocolate: yummy, caramelized flavor to the milk chocolate; very rich flavor and texture

You guessed it: Theo has super powers when it comes to coaxing the fruitiness of chocolate to the forefront. I found this was particularly interesting given that two of those single-origin bars come from Africa, and African chocolate is generally more on the bitter, coffee-ish side of the flavor spectrum, rather than on the fruity end. Not that I’m complaining; the bitterness is why I generally don’t like chocolate from Africa.

Next came a few bars from Theo’s line of “classic combination” bars. Both the Orange bar and the Mint bar had nice, fresh, true flavors to them. I was a little less taken by the Cherry and Almond bar, since I found it difficult to search out much cherry or almond flavor in the piece I sampled.

Then I tried a couple of their confections: the Ghost Chile caramel–great caramel center paired with a nice, definite heat that haunted the back of my throat as the chocolate went down–and the Peanut Butter Big Daddy–rich, with a nice crunchy layer inside.

Finally, I made it down to the end of the table with the 3400 Phinney Bars, Theo’s line of more adventurous flavor blends. I didn’t taste all of them, but out of the ones I did, the Coconut Curry was the star. It somehow satisfied a savory curry craving and tasted great in the chocolate at the same time–quite a feat, really. Paired with the Chai bar, you can have a full meal and dessert at the same time.

Among the other bars were the Fig, Fennel and Almond bar–very strong on the fennel flavor, not so much on the fig and almond–and the Hazelnut Crunch bar–lacking in hazelnut department, but with a surprising but pleasant saltiness to it. One of the big hits is the Bread and Chocolate bar, featuring toasted bread crumbs inside. We have a friend who is addicted to these. I just don’t get the attraction, mostly because I can barely taste the bread, but apparently I’m in the minority with that opinion.

Forte Chocolates

Forte Chocolates hails from Stanwood, Washington. In addition to some really good chocolate and caramels, they offer chocolate classes and custom chocolate and sugar showpiece creation. Chris didn’t get a photo of it, but she had a large, pretty monarch butterfly shimmering on her table, an element like the ones she would be featuring in a chocolate sculpture that was debuting that week at Teatro Zinzanni in Seattle.

Also on the showpiece side of things was this gorgeous, delicate white chocolate rose. I was amazed at how realistic it looked, far beyond anything I could imagine being made out of modeling chocolate. She told me that it was her own blend of white chocolate, gumpaste, fondant and corn syrup, but was still composed of more than 50% white chocolate–amazing!

Even the chocolate itself was aesthetically pleasing. I loved the shape the bars were molded into. The little squares showed off their well-tempered shine in the light coming from the bank of windows behind that row of tables. The 71% dark chocolate was creamy and fruity, and the 64% was it’s lighter, sweeter counterpart.

Even the white chocolate was good–and I rarely enjoy white chocolate–with a full measure of the wonderful creaminess that all of the Forte chocolates shared.

I liked the light touch of the salt on the sea salt caramels.

The Chipotle Honey Caramels were getting the most attention at the Forte table. They were rich and buttery, with a distinct honey flavor and a sneaky kind of heat that only crept up on you once you had the whole, chewy piece in your mouth and couldn’t get away from it. These were the kind of caramels that I could easy be satisfied with one tiny nibble off of the end, both because of the heat and the sticky richness.

L’Estasi Dolce

L’Estasi Dolce specializes in Asian-fusion and wine-infused chocolates. We got to their table a little later in the day than we should have, as we missed out on a few of their confections. But we were lucky enough to catch the last samples of some of the others, which was good because these were some of my favorite chocolates of the day.

We missed out on most of the the Asian line of chocolates, based on the family recipes of the company’s founder, Rose Ramos-Benzel. But the two we did get to try were delicious: a Mint Ginger truffle bursting with fresh flavors and an amazing Lemongrass Ginger truffle. The lemongrass seemed to pair with the chocolate better than ordinary lemon ever could in any form. Apparently the recipe was based off of a crème brûlée they had once in New York. I’d definitely like to try to whip up my own version–both of the chocolate and the crème brûlée, and perhaps both at the same time.

The wine truffles were also delicious, but more than that they were very intriguing in the way they morphed the wine into other flavors. The Cabernet truffle–their best seller in the line of wine truffles–tasted of black cherry. The unexpected flavor in the Champagne truffle eluded Chris and me for a few minutes, but I finally spotted it: jackfruit, but only if jackfruit actually tasted good, because the truffle did. I also enjoyed the Mimosa truffle, which had a nice orange flavor from juice rather than rind. The Pinot Noir truffle was similar to the Cabernet but lighter in flavor, and the Port truffle was surprising in that it had less flavor from the alcohol than the others, when I was expecting more flavor from port than wine.

Choffy

Choffy makes brewed chocolate–and yes, that’s “brewed” as in brewed coffee.

Both Chris and I liked this stuff. The flavor is light, falling somewhere between barley tea and coffee–well, a slightly chocolatey coffee.

Whether or not I’d go out of my way to drink it instead of something else more readily available, I’m not sure, but I’d certainly enjoy having a full cup of it sometime to investigate further.

Eat Chocolates

Eat Chocolates is another local chocolate company right here in Seattle. In addition to selling molded chocolates, they offer chocolate work classes (with a cap of 6 people per class), and you can even rent the kitchen and equipment to make your own chocolates with her assistance. I’m not sure how much that would end up costing, but considering how much I shelled out last year for just two chocolate molds, it could be a pretty good opportunity for some of us not-quite-professional chocolate types.

While this style of chocolates is typical for molded chocolates–cocoa butter transfer sheets, etc.–they still looked very pretty, especially displayed on the colorful slabs of marble. Hopefully I have these photogenic truffles matched up with the correct flavors–if not, oh well, they’re still pretty!

The Lavender truffles had a nice blend of lavender and chocolate. I was afraid the lavender would be overpowering, which often leads to the feeling that you’re eating soap (fancy soap, but soap nonetheless), but these were well balanced, with just a light suggestion of lavender.

The Honey Thyme truffles were really different: almost savory, but in a good way, like Theo’s Coconut Curry bars.

The 5-Spice Hazelnut Pralines packed a lot of flavor–a lot of spice, and I’m a person who triples the measurements for spices in recipes–and had a great crunch to them. The Orange White Chocolate truffles weren’t so powerful, though. I couldn’t taste much orange flavor in them. The Cardamom truffles were also light on flavor for my taste, but considering my love of cardamom is already well-documented, it may have been enough cardamom for most other people.

And these were just plain cute.

Carter’s Chocolates

Carter’s Chocolates is another Washington chocolatier, this time in Port Orchard, WA. Their chocolates are also available at the Chocolate Box and Pike Pub in downtown Seattle, online, and at farmers markets in Port Orchard and Gig Harbor.

They had quite a spread to sample from! Sadly, time and stomach-size restraints prevented us from tasting all of them. But with that many chocolates, fifty percent still adds up to quite a few to taste, and I got to enough of them to determine that they really know what they’re doing with flavor.

One of the really cool things about these chocolates is that rather than being molded in magnetic molds that hold a transfer sheet with a cocoa butter pattern so that it shows up on the top of each chocolate in the mold, Carter’s are individually hand-dipped in hand-tempered chocolate, then topped with a chocolate cutout with the colorful pattern on it. This gives them both a handcrafted feel and a professional, colorful finish at the same time.

As for the flavors: the Blackberry Wine had a wonderful blackberry flavor to it, and the honey in the Honey Mead came through in a strong caramel flavor. The Raspberry Wine was similar to but lighter in flavor than the Blackberry, so I’d go with the Blackberry if I had to choose. The Orange Muscat was also sort of a repeat flavor for me, but this time with the Honey Mead.

The Mint was weirdly similar to the curry chocolates I tasted that day–in a good way once again, but it was a strange connection for my taste buds to make. The Chai Tea was good, with plenty of spice, and the Sweet and Spicy Herbal Tea had a cool cinnamon finish to it. Their Chili truffle was one of the few to have both the flavor and heat, rather than one or the other (or neither).

The Pike Old Bawdy Barley Wine was delicious, sweet and flavorful. The Pike XXXX Stout wasn’t my favorite (it had a sort of bitter beer flavor at the end), but Chris says it’s the best beer-flavored chocolate he’s ever had.

I was very taken with their turtle-shaped turtles, even if it was hard to get a good photo of them. What a great idea!

La Châtelaine Chocolat

La Châtelaine Chocolat is a French chocolate shop in the Rocky Mountains in Montana. They were definitely in my top three at the Salon, all of which came, of course, once I was already getting much, much too full. If only I had decided to make the loop around the room in the other direction.

In their flavors, their textures, and even the thought and craft that I could tell went into their creation, La Châtelaine’s chocolates had that wonderful subtle, sophisticated quality that the best French pastries and confections have.

I was a little wary of grapefruit-flavored chocolate, especially grapefruit-flavored milk chocolate. I love grapefruit, but I have a hard enough time finding orange chocolates that I like, and I couldn’t really imagine how this combination would work. Well, it worked beautifully, because they earned not only a star in my notes, but a “wow”. I loved how much grapefruit flavor came through the chocolate, without there being a hint of bitterness at all. These were also visually interesting, with the grapefruit rind texture on their tops.

These Pink Champagne truffles were very striking in person, rolled as they were in sparkling pink sugar. They had a nice, sweet champagne overtone and a very smooth texture.

I loved the pates de fruit layer in the Black Currant chocolates…

…but the Montana Huckleberry chocolates won the pates de fruit battle for me. I’d always wanted to try a huckleberry truffle, and these did not disappoint!

I also loved the Geranium Bourbon chocolates, and the Olive Oil and Almond ones. All in all, I was really impressed with what I tasted at La Châtelaine’s table.

Chocolopolis

Chocolopolis is a chocolate shop in the Queen Anne neighborhood of Seattle. I have yet to get to the shop myself, but I’ve occasionally run across job postings to work there and daydreamed about working at such a fabulous-sounding place. What chocolate lover wouldn’t want to be surrounded by fine chocolate all day?

While Chocolopolis generally sells rather than makes chocolate, they were launching a new line of in-house truffles at the chocolate show.

They had a progression of six chocolates set out to taste. I thought it was interesting that they were serving small squares of a firm ganache rather than squares of straight chocolate. I asked if that was how they normally conducted their tastings, and it’s not–the ganache was to go with the truffle launch. But that got me thinking about doing a side-by-side tasting with some distinctive chocolates, both in their normal form and as ganache. It could be a great exercise for anyone interested in learning to taste chocolates with an eye to using them in the pastry kitchen. Watch this space…I may do a trial run of the idea soon.

Divine Chocolate

Divine Chocolate is another socially-conscious brand of chocolate. It’s really wonderful to see so much delicious fair-trade chocolates on the market these days.

The Mint Dark Chocolate bar was awesome–kind of crunchy, with a more traditional mint-chocolate flavor than some of the more herbal mint chocolates we tried at other tables. I also liked the Fruit and Nut Dark Chocolate. It had a kind of trail-mix vibe from its tiny bits of nuts and fruit, which were much more prominent than the nut/fruit bars I tried at Theo’s table. The Hazelnut Milk Chocolate had an assertive milk chocolate flavor followed nicely by the hazelnut flavor as the milk chocolate wave subsided.

My favorite of Divine’s chocolates was the White Chocolate with Strawberries bar. I got excited about it in the way I get excited about a good Merlot: I hate Merlot as a rule, so any time I taste one I actually like, I have to buy it. The same thing goes with white chocolate, although my dislike for Merlot does run quite a bit deeper. The reason I loved this bar was the way the acidity of the strawberries cut through the white chocolate. It made the white chocolate make sense.

I Love Chocolate Jewelry

And now for a non-edible interlude! I Love Chocolate Jewelry specializes in glass jewelry that evokes the colors and shapes of chocolate. I really loved the rich browns and golds, so different than any of the glass I was able to find on our trip to Venice last year.

Posh Chocolat

Posh Chocolat, another chocolate company of several that represented Montana at the Salon, was the second of my top three tables of the day. As I mentioned before, all three fell at the end of our chocolate tour, when stomachs were overfull and palates should have been dull, and so that these companies broke through the chocolate glaze over our taste buds to win my top honors is all the more impressive.

What I loved about Posh Chocolat was the savory quality of the flavor combinations, a quality that highlighted the chocolate that each flavor was blended with rather than fought against it. A comment on this brought out the news that the husband-and-wife chocolatier team came originally from the savory side of the kitchen. Even so, it still takes real talent and uncommon skill for a chef to apply their hot side sensibilities to the pastry world, especially with chocolates.

We got there too late for the Bacon Caramels with Applewood Smoked Sea Salt. Not that either of us could have tried them–we’re not of the odd but creative variety of vegetarians who count bacon as a vegetable–but we would have snagged a sample for the resident bacon enthusiast among Chris’ friends to try for us.

When it came to the White Truffle Oil Caramels with Flaked Cypress Sea Salt, my first reaction upon tasting it was, and I quote: “salt…truffle???” But despite the strangeness of that combo on my taste buds, and the inclusion of truffle oil (truffles are another ingredient that I don’t care for, though I wish I did), I enjoyed this one. The flavor was incredibly complex, with the truffle adding to the experience rather than overpowering it.

The Thai Peanut Caramels with Ginger Sea Salt were one of my favorite things I tasted all day, and a perfect example of what I was saying before about their deft touch with savory flavors in their chocolates. While the Coconut Curry bar at Theo’s table focused on pairing the curry flavors with the sweetness in the chocolate, Posh’s Thai Peanut Caramels seemed to marry the curry spices to the essential chocolate flavor in the chocolate, rather than the sugar.

The Ras al Hanout chocolates were once again–and I hate how I’m overusing this word, but nothing else really fits what I tasted–very deliciously savory, with a surprisingly subtle use of the famous Moroccan spice blend.

The Rose Water chocolates had a very strong, beautiful flavor, with the rose coming through most intensely at the end. Rose water and chocolate could have had that sad, soapy flavor that I was talking about with lavender earlier, but these were really wonderful. Apparently they use rose oil rather than rose water to flavor them, and that makes all the difference. The Mojito chocolates were also outstanding, very minty with a hint of rum, and the lime played straight into the fruitiness of the chocolate.

Posh also offered a pair of chili chocolates, one a 74% Ecuadorian Dark Chocolate bar that had an immediate assault of spice on the tip of my tongue, the other a 57% Single Origin Ecuadorian Milk Chocolate bar with Tipus Chilis that had a great chili flavor, a rare accomplishment as I’ve mentioned before.

Our trip to the Posh table ended with a taste of some of the richest, most decadent hot chocolate I’ve ever tasted.

Crave Chocolate

Crave Chocolate also hails from Montana. Despite the state’s drive-quickly-through reputation, apparently there are lots of places for chocolate lovers to visit there!

Both the Rainbow and the Apres Ski had nice, strong flavors–raspberry and lime, respectively. The Lavender Blueberry chocolates tasted strangely like the chocolate-covered blueberry confections we got from Harry and David for our candy buffet at our wedding. Not that that’s a bad thing, but it left me wondering why my mind was making that connection. I finally decided it must be the subtle influence of the lavender. The Mint Julep chocolate wasn’t my favorite, with a muddled, less-defined flavor profile, but the Yellowstone had a creamy chai flavor that was quite pleasant.

Amano

Amano’s table was perhaps the table that suffered the most from being at the end of our loop through the Salon. They had several varieties of artisanal chocolate set out, plus had several kinds of nibs to sample. My poor tongue was too exhausted for a true chocolate tasting at that point. Mix in some lime or spices and those I could taste, but I was not up to the task of identifying and contrasting subtle flavor differences.

Still, I was able to figure out which were my favorites in the bunch, or at least which tasted best to my compromised palate. Out of the chocolates, my favorite was the Madagascar 70%, which was very fruity with a warm yet bitter finish. “Fruity” and “bitter” pretty much characterized all of their chocolates (or what flavors I could still taste), and the particular variations on those flavors in the Madagascar bar worked the best for me. The Ocumare 70% tasted quite a bit like the Madagascar, but with a more muted fruit flavor and an odd bitterness that showed up in the middle of the flavor curve. The Montanya 70% was sweeter and milder, but the bitterness in this bar presented itself as a weird dry feeling on the top of my tongue. The Jembrana 70% was milder yet, and worked much better in the milk chocolate form I sampled next. Typing this up now, I wonder if I started at the wrong end of this table, as my impressions might have been very different if I’d gone from the mildest chocolate to the most intense.

The nibs were harder to compare, but in the end I decided I liked the fruity Ocumare nibs the best. What struck me the most about tasting the nibs is that their flavors didn’t really line up to the flavors of the corresponding bars. I have a lot of respect for anyone capable of selecting and blending beans into a fantastic chocolate.

All in all, I really wish I’d visited this table first. The chocolate seemed to be very good quality, and I would have enjoyed tasting it on a fresher palate.

Intrigue Chocolates

Intrigue Chocolates is another local chocolate business–very local, as in from right here in Seattle. They were one of Chris’ favorite tables (hard for them not to be, since they had his favorite of all the chili chocolates at the Salon), and I was impressed with their bold, complex flavor combinations.

The best part about the Salon for me was the chance to talk to and learn from the chocolatiers, and the guys at Intrigue explained something about flavoring chocolates that should have been obvious but had never occurred to me: many of the things we use to flavor truffles are water-based flavors, steeped in the cream that’s used to make the ganache. But chocolate is oil-based. That means that oil-based flavors are going to mix into the chocolate itself better than water-based ones, demonstrated in their vibrant truffles.

The Grapefruit, Mojito, and Saint Basil truffles all showed off Intrigue’s ability to pack fresh, true flavor into their chocolates, something that was especially noteworthy in the Grapefruit truffle. The Paradise truffle takes its name and subtle peppery flavor from the Grains of Paradise spice–interesting, but the flavor was perhaps a little too subtle in comparison to their other offerings. The Jamaican Hot Chocolate truffle was the chili chocolate that won Chris over, and I was amazed at the ring of spiciness that hit the back of my throat when I tried it. Due to the fact that it gets it chili infusion from habaneros steeped in rum, we now have an incredibly spicy jar of rum in our house, waiting to be experimented with.

Suess Chocolates

Suess Chocolates & Pastries in Madison Valley is dedicated to handcrafting German chocolates and pastries based on their German grandmother’s recipes. It is–according to its owners–the only kid-friendly chocolate shop in Seattle. Children are encouraged to participate in their own complimentary chocolate dipping. As the current constant carrier of a future foodie, this sounds like a very kid- and parent-friendly idea, because at least you could leave whatever part of the mess that didn’t fall on the little one behind at the shop. They also hold weekend chocolate classes for kids and adults.

I’ve had tea-infused chocolates before–I think I may have even made one myself before–but never any with a strong enough tea flavor to really make it stand out. Suess’ Matcha Green Tea truffles broke that pattern. The intense green tea flavor seemed to ride the white chocolate, and I liked it a lot more than I expected. Now I understand!

I also tried the Raspberry Wasabi and Creme Fraiche truffles. The Raspberry Wasabi was really interesting in the way the wasabi counterpointed the raspberry flavor without trying to be the star of the show, a blend that I liked a lot. The Creme Fraiche was okay, but more sour than I expected. Suess is pushing the boundaries of adventurous truffle flavors, though, and more often than not I was surprised and pleased by what I tasted.

William Dean Chocolates

As I rounded the corner of the inner square of tables at the Salon, we were racing against the clock, but there were only four or five tables left to visit. Surely we could make it before time and/or chocolate ran out! But the first of these was William Dean Chocolates, and after only a few minutes of talking to William Dean Brown and tasting a few of his chocolates, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

His was the last of my top three tables I mentioned above, and it was also my favorite out of the three. I tasted some amazing confections that brought me back to the time in pastry school when I was first exposed to so many ingredients and classic recipes. I also learned a lot just from talking to this chocolatier who was so obviously passionate about his craft and so willing to pass on what he’d learned. Our conversation made me really miss being in the business and learning from experienced chefs, but only in the best of ways. It was wonderful to revisit the excitement of the world opening up for my eyes, mind and palate at the same time.

Not only do his chocolates look absolutely gorgeous, but they taste absolutely gorgeous as well. He orchestrates the order in which the flavors hit your palate.

For example, in this pina colada pate de fruit, first I tasted the pineapple, then the rum, and then, finally, the coconut. I always thought that such feats were happy accidents. However, the more I talked with him, the more I realized that he was ordering the flavors this way intentionally, so that you really taste each one, clear and clean.

I had to ask if there was a method to it, or if it just was a product of experience and lots of trial and error. He explained that certain types of flavors hit in a certain order: fruits first, then herbs, then heat. Also, over time, the flavor of herbs gets stronger, while that of citrus gets weaker, and so you have to account for that when you make the chocolates so they’ll be well balanced later. Obviously, there has to be more to this, but I’m really fascinated by these concepts and eager to learn more. You can definitely expect to see a post from me testing them out.

I also learned other things, like the trick of adding extra chocolate to chocolate nougat (so, so good) to prolong the shelf life, and that they use microwave popcorn in their gourmet popcorn line because it’s the only popcorn that stays crisp–microwave popcorn! Amazing.

(Speaking of which, their Macadamia and Coconut popcorn is to-die-for good.)

As for the individual chocolates and confections…I must say, the conversation was so interesting and the samples were coming so quickly that my tasting notes are a mess of hasty scribbles accompanied by stars (my way of marking the chocolates that really stood out to me at the Salon). There was some sort of delicious amaretto cherry marzipan–at least, I think that word I mangled there is cherry, but I can’t find it on his website to confirm–that was just amazing; a Peanut Butter Krunch chocolate that really crunched from the bits of peanut brittle inside; a Lavender/Lemon soft caramel in white chocolate that had a light, smooth caramel infused with fresh lemon flavor; a macadamia nut marzipan that had a really fun texture to it; a mango chili chocolate–I think perhaps his Mexican Mango–with just a beautiful blend of the mango and chilies to it; a Grapefruit & Tarragon chocolate–very different from any of the other grapefruit chocolates at the Salon–that really impressed me with the way he used a slight bit of the bitterness of the grapefruit to blend with the tarragon…and on and on.

Chris and I also both thought that William Dean’s packaging was very well designed. This was the only table we actually bought something at–a box of twelve chocolates that met a truly tragic demise during Seattle’s recent wave of extreme heat–and while we were blown away by how good the chocolates were, the visual appeal of the chocolates and the box they came in definitely factored into our decision to pull out the plastic. The boxes feel substantial, and they just look like something you want to own, want to give someone as a gift.

But, really, the main reason we bought a box of William Dean’s chocolates was those were the kind of chocolates I was so inspired by in pastry school. And that’s how I felt as I left the Salon: inspired. Well, inspired and very, very full. I never thought I’d ever say this, but I hope I never eat that much chocolate in one day–much less four hours–ever again in my life.

Except, perhaps, when we go back the the Chocolate Salon next year. We’ll see if I’ve learned my lesson, or if the siren song of all those chocolates wins again.

And now I’m going to put my left hand on my copy of The Professional Pastry Chef, raise my right hand, and vow never to write another blog post this long again. And I thought some of my older ones were epic! Now I can focus on some of the other posts I have patiently waiting their turn: a berry lemon tart and lemon curd recipe review, a Dala horse cake for my mother’s birthday, and my discovery of the best cake recipe I’ve made in my life, along with the peanut butter milk chocolate ganache I invented to go along with it for Chris’ cousin’s camping-themed groom’s cake. I’ve only got about fourteen more weeks until the Tiger Cub comes out into the world, so I’d better get my food blogging in now.

This hole in the vegetarian’s candy jar is hard enough in the summer, surrounded by blissfully happy s’more-toasters at any campfire you twirl a veggie dog over. But months later, Easter hops onto the scene, and suddenly us vegetarians are surrounded by not only chocolate-covered marshmallow eggs, but Peeps, glorious Peeps.

A few years ago, I started satisfying s’mores cravings with a complicated procedure involving a low-heat oven, Marshmallow Fluff and a blow torch, but then homemade marshmallows became all the rage. It killed me even more than I not only couldn’t eat regular marshmallows, but I also couldn’t make their gourmet grown-up cousins. I saw a recipe for marshmallows made with agar at one point, but I was never really keen to try it knowing the kind of brittle, flaky gel agar tends to produce. At one point, there was a brand of vegetarian marshmallows on the market, but they were outed as not actually being vegetarian before I got my hands on a bag.

Fortunately, the situation is on its way to being resolved. Last year, Chris started getting curious about molecular gastronomy stuff, and one of the interesting recipes he came across was a recipe for marshmallows set with xanthan gum rather than gelatin. It’s from Texture: A hydrocolloid recipe collection, a free PDF download at khymos.org that contains all sorts of interesting recipes, from the weird to the ingenious. He made them, and even though he over-cooked the sugar and made “caramel marshmallows”, I was really amazed at how good the texture and flavor were.

We meant to make them again, getting the temperature right this time. Months passed and it didn’t happen, but those Peeps have been taunting me from the shelves at the drugstore, so today I printed off the recipe and decided to give it a go myself. I knew they’d taste good, but could I pipe them into real, actual Peeps?

The procedure for making the marshmallows was so quick and easy, I’ve decided that it was easier than going out to buy marshmallows at the store. The recipe has you grind the xanthan gum with one tablespoon of the sugar, but my mortar and pestle smell suspiously of Indian herbs, so I did my best in a regular bowl with the back of a spoon. As far as the cooking goes, you boil water, sugar, corn syrup, cream of tartar and half a vanilla bean to 120°C (soft ball stage).

The syrup (without the vanilla bean) gets drizzled into the egg whites while the mixer is running. Next, you sprinkle the xanthan gum/sugar mixture on top of the expanding egg whites. Then you just continue whipping until the marshmallow begins to pull away from the sides, like it has here in this photo.

Working quickly, I began preparing to pipe my Peeps. I like to use a tall cup to hold my piping bags while I fill them, and fold back their tops like shirt cuffs to keep them as clean to work with as possible. Even with this help, the marshmallow really didn’t want to let go of the spatula.

Finally, I got enough marshmallow goo into the piping bag to at least see whether or not it was going to work. And did it work?

Uh, not so much.

I could pipe the shapes just fine. The marshmallow wasn’t hard to squeeze or direct. The problem was it just wouldn’t let go of the pastry tip! It would stretch forever without letting go, and so in my attempts to shake, pinch or otherwise wrench the bag away from the half-finished Peep, any resemblance to a Peep was entirely lost.

I kept trying until the piping bag was empty. Then I moved my deformed Peeps and added more sugar to the little quarter sheet pan (by the way, I was using vanilla sugar from the jar I keep my vanilla beans in, just to add a little more flavor) and dumped the rest of the marshmallow in the bowl onto it. After liberally dusting the top of the marshmallow mound with more sugar, it was surprisingly easy to press it flat in the pan. I was even able to pick it up from underneath and stretch it with my hands.

I wrapped the pan tightly with plastic wrap and left it in the fridge for about four hours, then took it out. I still wanted the marshmallows to be Peeps, so instead of cutting them into squares, I got out my favorite little flower cookie cutters and the chick-shaped one I used to make the decorations for my Cadbury Creme Brul’eggs. I found that greasing the cutters with a little oil and dipping them in sugar was enough to keep the marshmallow from sticking to them. To cut out the centers of the flowers, I used the end of a plain round pastry tip. As I cut each shape out, I put it in a container with more vanilla sugar in it, making sure to get the sticky sides coated and giving the whole thing an occasional shake and toss to keep everything covered nicely in sugar.

In the end, I have to say that these are definitely Peeps, even if they don’t look quite like the mass produced variety. Why? Because my mouth thinks they’re Peeps. The have the same crunch from the coating of sugar contrasting with the squishy marshmallowiness, except the homemade type aren’t stale. I have to say, I think these xanthan gum marshmallows might even be more marshmallowy than normal marshmallows or Peeps, partially because of the qualities of the gum (it’s used to add a “fatty” feeling in nonfat and lowfat dairy products), and partly because they contain egg whites, whereas most marshmallows are little more than sugar and gelatin. They have a rich, luxurious mouthfeel, and the flavor from the vanilla bean doesn’t hurt, either.

However, I still want to be able to pipe out real Peep shapes. After studying the differences between regular marshmallow recipes and ones made specifically for piping, I think I may have figured out the problem with piping the xanthan gum recipe. If my new formula works, you’ll being seeing some 3D Peeps here in the next week. If not, I’ll probably keep that FAIL to myself next time.

Ingredients
1 36 oz. jar maraschino cherries
1 recipe Cherry Fondant (recipe follows)
reserved cherry syrup, as necessary
1/4 teaspoon invertase
2 – 3 pounds coverture chocolate

Procedure

1. Drain the cherries, reserving the syrup. Set the cherries in rows on a cooling rack lined with a double thickness of paper towels, discarding any stemless cherries. Let dry for at least one hour, preferably more.
2. In a bowl set over a pot of simmering water, heat the fondant until it reaches 160° F, stirring as needing. Reduce the heat under the pot to low. If necessary, thin the fondant with some of the reserved syrup to a consistency that allows easy dipping. Add invertase to the fondant and stir to combine.
3. Keeping the fondant over the hot water, dip the cherries by their stems, dragging them back and forth and side to side. Cover each cherry completely, but in as few passes as possible to avoid building up too much fondant on the cherry. Raise the cherry over the bowl, touching it to the surface of the fondant in the bowl once or twice to encourage as much excess as possible to drip off. Place the cherries on a sheet pan covered in parchment paper or a Silpat. When the fondant has set, twist any fondant that has cooled around the cherries’ stems off.
4. Temper the chocolate. Pipe small, flat discs of chocolate on parchment or a Silpat, leaving ample room between them to accommodate the cherries once they’re covered in chocolate. Allow the discs to set. Dip the cherries in the chocolate in a similar way as they were dipped in the fondant, and set each one on a chocolate disc.
5. Store cherries at room temperature. They will be ready to eat in three to four days with the invertase, but they make take up to two weeks to liquefy without it.

Cherry Fondant

adapted from Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner by by Peter P. Greweling

Ingredients
500 g sugar
100 g reserved syrup from maraschino cherries
100 g glucose syrup

Procedure
Combine all ingredients and bring them to a boil while stirring constantly. Once the syrup is boiling, stop stirring and heat the syrup to 243° F. Pour the syrup on a Silpat-covered marble slab and sprinkle with cold water. Let cool to 120° F, then begin folding the edges into the warmer center by raising alternate edges of the Silpat. Once the fondant is cool enough to handle, start pulling it and working it until turns opaque and short-textured and generally looks crystallized, about 15 to 20 minutes. Place in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, then let rest overnight if possible.

This past Saturday, I was making the birthday cake for a very dear friend of mine’s birthday party. I wanted it to be spectacular, because the birthday girl is pretty darn spectacular herself. I ended up deciding to do cupcakes, and I set out to do two different flavors as soon as I woke up Saturday morning, a chocolate cupcake recipe from The Modern Baker by Nick Malgieri and a white chocolate cake recipe from Pure Chocolate by Fran Bigelow of Fran’s Chocolates. I’d had success with the devil’s food cake recipe in Malgieri’s book twice last fall, and one of my chefs at pastry school used to work for Fran Bigelow and helped with the production of the photos and drawings in the book (if I remember correctly, the hands in the drawings at the beginning of the book are hers), so I trusted both books to have good recipes.

Now, as I said, I’ve had way too many bad baking days before, and I really wanted to get it right this time. Most of my misadventures in the kitchen have been centered around birthday cakes. I actually swore off making them for a long time, thinking that it was my old, malfunctioning oven’s fault that the cakes never turned out right. Also, I knew that the other main cause for substandard baking is my tendency to cut corners and get lazy when I’m cooking in my own kitchen. This was never a problem in school or at the restaurant or the B&B, so now I make very sure now to do things deliberately and professionally when I bake.

I was off to such a good start. Other than some worry over the way the batter for the chocolate cupcakes turned out, I felt very organized and in control of the situation. The white chocolate cake batter turned out to be gorgeous, this billowing silky mass that I’m guessing is what Cloud 9 must be made out of. But the dark chocolate cupcakes…well, I can’t tell you for sure whose fault the disaster was on that one. Was it the recipe? Was it my paranoia of over baking them? Was it the unsweetened chocolate I used, that was maybe a little past its prime? Without making the recipe again, I can’t say for sure.

The batter was weird, very watery, but I assumed that was because the author’s stated intent was to make very moist cupcakes (they were, indeed, very moist, almost fudgy, which I can’t fault at all). It was very hard to get into the cupcake wrappers cleanly, even pouring it from a measuring cup with a pour spout, because it was so thin it just ran down the outside of the cup as soon as I tipped it downward. The chocolate also was an issue, as it didn’t melt but stayed in little tiny flecks. I wanted to blame the recipe on that one, too, because he instructed to melt it by pouring boiling water over it (and thus, in my mind, creating an environment perfect for the chocolate to seize if it didn’t emulsify right away), but then the same thing happened later with a different recipe and the same chocolate. I feel like I underbaked them, but they were in the oven for ten minutes longer than the recipe said, so…I’m still perplexed.

They looked and smelled beautiful in the oven, but fell when they came out, quickly and drastically. I wish I had a picture of those chocolate sinkholes. I was disappointed, mostly in myself because I knew that’s where the blame should probably land, given my past track record. But then the white chocolate cupcakes went in, and they looked and smelled so beautiful that I wasn’t too worried. After all, cupcakes are easy to hide under mounds of frosting.

Back to the white chocolate variety. I had high hopes these would outshine my failure with the dark chocolate ones. I knew that using a cake batter for cupcakes was risky, but I thought the problem would be overbaking them, not underbaking them. So, once again, I pulled them out way too soon. These, unlike the chocolate ones, ended up being beyond repair, because I waited too long to decide to put them back in the oven and never managed to get them to bake all the way through.

Cue mental breakdown. Tears were shed. Oaths to never bake again were uttered. It wasn’t pretty. Bad baking days never are.

Fortunately, Baker Bee rode up on his white horse (i.e. rolled out of bed) brandishing a shiny whisk and saved me, despite my ranting and raving and general foul mood. While I took a soothing shower, he made another batch of cupcakes, this time using a recipe from our trusty copy of Joy of Cooking, which is where I should have gone for my cupcake recipe. Other than the chocolate not melting properly, his were cupcakes–high rising domes of very cake-ish cake.

I was feeling a bit down in the dumps about my lousy cupcakes. The white chocolate ones, despite tasting fabulous, weren’t something I could serve to anyone (except Baker Bee, who thinks they taste like the perfect pound cake of all things). My chocolate ones were visibly inferior to Mr. Bee’s, which is fine in other areas of cooking but I like to think that I got some sort of useful skills out of pastry school that I can contribute to our kitchen.

Time was running out. I turned to the quickest thing to frost them with that would look impressive: torched meringue. It just looks cool, and it’s one of those things like ganache that really isn’t hard to make at all, but if you don’t know how to make it and brown it you wouldn’t know where to start. We had meringue on my wedding cake and everyone loved it. So I started piping it on Baker Bee’s cupcakes. I played around with it a bit, remembering the way that piping meringue on top of meringue produced an interesting visual contrast. It looked fun and festive, but what would I do to make the fallen cupcakes not look like ugly stepsisters beside them?

Then it came to me. Earlier in the week, I’d had this strong urge to make Obama cupcakes–faux Hostess chocolate cupcakes, but with the white squiggle writing “Obama” in cursive. Not an original idea, but I really wanted to do it…and then didn’t. But on Saturday I had 18 cupcakes with gaping holes staring up at me, and a Kitchen Aid bowl full of Swiss meringue, and…well, you do the math. The fun twist I came up with was to fill the hole with meringue and mound some on the top of the cupcake as well, then torch it before dipping the top in the ganache. That made the meringue a lot more stable, and possibly imparted a hint of toasted marshmallow to the flavor (more research is needed to confirm this). Plus, it made the cupcakes look like they had risen and stayed that way, which wasn’t a bad thing at all.

On some of them, I tried to pipe the white squiggle, but the meringue wasn’t behaving properly when piped that thinly (hence the bad handwriting on the cupcakes…normally, I’m pretty good at that–oh boy, there goes the old ego again), so I just left a lot of them dressed in only their glossy ganache. Baker Bee thinks I should figure out how to make them fall again in the future so I could make filled cupcakes again, and although I pointed out that there are techniques for getting the filling inside the cupcake, I think it might not be a bad idea.

At the party, I stacked them tiered-cake style with the help of a few cake stands. All together, they looked great. Not perfect, but that’s coming from the mouth of a self-critical perfectionist. I was happy with them at the end, and they provided a great sugar high for the rousing round of Cranium and custom vampire-themed Mad Libs. (If you look closely, you’ll see that one of the cupcakes was meant to be a vampire.)

The funny thing is that even though both batches were chocolate cupcakes, and I used the same meringue on both of them, with the only difference being the ganache, they were both very, very different cupcakes, both good in their own way. A lot of people seemed to think my fallen ones with the ganache were better, and they certainly were more intense on the chocolate, but the day after I went to have one bite of Baker Bee’s cupcakes with a huge crown of spiky meringue on it and ended up eating the whole thing.

Here’s the Swiss meringue recipe I use out of my notes from pastry school, in case you’re in need of a good one. The beauty of Swiss meringue as opposed to Italian and French is its stretch, gooey, marshmallowy consistency. Technically, Italian meringue is more stable, but Swiss meringue holds up very well on cakes in my experience, and I love the texture of it. The meringue on the gelato coppetta I wrote about in my last post was undoubtedly Swiss, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Swiss Meringue
(printable version)

Egg whites 8 oz (250 g)
Fine granulated sugar 1 lb (500 g)

Procedure

Place the egg whites and sugar in a stainless steel bowl or in the top of a double boiler. Beat with a whisk (more near the end than at first) over hot water until the mixture is hot about 120°F.* Transfer to the bowl of a mixer and whip at high speed until stiff peaks form. Turn down speed to cool.

* I learned to test the temperature this way from my chef at pastry school: dip your finger in, and if you have to pull your finger out immediately because your cuticles feel like they’re on fire, it’s ready. The warmer the egg and sugar mixture gets, the more stable the meringue will be.

Last time on As the Fondant Liquefies, we made cherry-flavored fondant and dipped maraschino cherries in it, in preparation for dipping them in chocolate. Really, that’s the hardest part of the whole process.

I decided to make another batch of cherries after the ones I documented in the original post and test the theory the Geeky Gnu and I had about pulling the hot fondant from the start instead of trying to cool it with a scraper on my small piece of marble. That and I wanted to prove I could do it all by myself. It worked very well, actually. After awhile, I got into a rhythm where I was kneading it like a cat, pressing half the mass of hot sugar down on the Silpat-covered marble with one hand and then the other half with the other, stretching it as high as I could each time. The fondant seemed to turn out much better–and crystallize much faster–this way.


Here’s what it looked like when I managed to pull it away from my fingers and deposit it in a bowl:

After that, it’s just a matter of covering the cherries in chocolate. I found that holding the stem and dragging the cherry from side to side once or twice, letting the chocolate come right up to the stem, coated them nicely. Then I pulled them up, let a little of the chocolate drip off, and touched the bottom of the cherry to the surface of the chocolate once or twice to encourage more of the excess chocolate to stay behind. Once I was satisfied that there wasn’t enough chocolate to form a gigantic foot around the bottom on the tray, I set the cherry on one of the discs I piped beforehand and left it to set up.

As for storing the cherries, if you don’t have a baker’s rack and zillions of sheet pans in your kitchen (someday, someday….), I recommend hitting up your friendly neighborhood pizza joint and asking very, very nicely for a few unused boxes. (Leave a generous tip in exchange, so they’ll be open to doing it again!) Mr. Gnu was kind enough to stop at Pagliacci’s on the way over and pick up ten extra large ones (we didn’t need that many, but I know they will get used in the future since I already am temporarily storing coconut macaroons in one, and I’ve used them to dry royal icing flowers in the past). Line the box with parchment or wax paper to protect the box from leaking cherries, and you’ll be able to reuse it.

If you use invertase in your fondant (see the first cherry post for more info on that), the cherries will need to sit out at room temperature for three to four days before they will be completely liquefied. If you don’t have invertase, the cherries will take up to two weeks to liquefy, which means you have to plan ahead. Invertase is easily purchased online and inexpensive, although I now have a larger quantity of it living in my fridge than I’ll use in my lifetime.

In the end, the cherries were a huge hit with everyone we gave them to. I wrapped two packages together for each family and couple in clear-topped plastic containers, one of cookies and one with chocolate-covered cherries and rainbow cookies. More than once, the person opening the present handed the cookies to the other recipient and hid the cherries for themselves! I think the best part about them is that they aren’t hard to make, but enough delicious ingredients and extremely pleasant work go into them that they truly feel like you’ve made them with love, which I know I did.

As I was dipping a second round of cherries yesterday, I had three lose their stems and become “test cherries” or, in other words, the cherries I get to eat before they’re ready without feeling guilty for wasting one I could be giving to someone else, or at least eating in its final form. (Of course, I have cherries from last Wednesday that are already liquefied, but I have to do quality control on every batch, you know.)

In the interest of tracking how quickly the invertase liquefies the fondant, I decided to dissect and photograph them before taste testing each day.

After (not quite) twenty-four hours, the invertase and cherry juice have converted the fondant immediately around the cherry to liquid, but most of the fondant is still firm and attached to the chocolate coating.

Heading into my senior year in college, my mom and I realized that I was going to most likely be moving not just across town but out of town after graduation and my wedding the next summer, ending the days of having just a short trip on the freeway between us. I’d been getting more and more interested in cooking since the trip we took together to Turkey two years before that, and we both wanted to learn to decorate cakes, so we ended up enrolling in the beginning Wilton classes. And so I started down the path toward pastry school, elbow-deep in Crisco-based frosting in the back room of the local gigantic craft store.

I’m not entirely sure what prompted it, but that Christmas I became obsessed with making fancy little candies for everyone’s presents. Most of them are not so fancy in retrospect, utilizing grocery store coating chocolate and far too much sugar, but then and now the crown jewel of it all was the chocolate-covered cherry. I actually used real chocolate to coat those. I didn’t know anything about tempering chocolate then, so they were soon covered in blooming cocoa butter (not that I even knew that was the problem), but they still tasted delicious. Ever year since, I’ve intended to make them again–and make them right this time, with tempered chocolate and invertase (the enzyme used in commercial cherries to make the centers liquefy)–but even when I’ve acquired the required cherries, they haven’t gotten made.

This year, things were going to be different. This year I lined up a cherry-candying buddy, sort of like a workout buddy but more fattening. Geeky Gnu and I made plans to get together and make them as soon as the invertase showed up. We had to wait a bit longer than we liked on account of the fact that Chef Rubber was waiting for the invertase to be made, but it finally showed up on Tuesday. I was feeling lazy earlier in the week, but fortunately I was talked into making the cherries on Wednesday night rather than Thursday night, which was good because the difference between the two was seven inches of snow.

Part of doing things right this time was finding a recipe that called specifically for the invertase, rather than just adding a few drops of the stuff to the one from Woman’s Day I’d gotten off of the internet all those years ago. I found some hopeful-looking info by searching eGullet, but as of Wednesday afternoon I still didn’t have a recipe in hand. I was wandering through Barnes and Noble, picking up a couple of presents I’d waited too long to order off of Amazon, when what to my wondering eyes should appear but the book I’ve been looking for all my life, standing there on B&N’s prominent cookbook display: Chocolates and Confections: Formula, Theory, and Technique for the Artisan Confectioner.

It had a recipe for fondant–the confectioner’s sort, not the kind you peel off of wedding cakes before eating them. It had a full explanation of invertase and how to use it. It had all sorts of technical information about chocolate and sugar I didn’t have memorized yet.

It came home with me. I couldn’t resist.

After a quick perusal of the pertinent pages, I drained the cherries, reserving the juice, and set about lining them up to dry on cooling racks padded with a double layer of paper towel to absorb the juice. A lot of recipes recommend doing this the night before, but we had to be somewhat flexible dependent on the weather.

A couple quick facts for calculating recipe size:
- Average number of cherries per 36 oz. jar (Star brand, from a two-pack bought at Costco): 73.25
- Average number of wasted cherries per a jar due to missing stems: 6

Once Geeky showed up, we started in on a half batch of the fondant recipe in my beautiful shiny new book. The general idea is to take five parts sugar, one part glucose syrup, and one part water and bring them to a boil while stirring constantly. Since I was approaching this whole fondant thing with a teensy-weensy bit too much confidence, I figured I’d go right ahead and substitute the cherry juice for the water in the recipe without bothering to do any boring math to keep the ratio of sugar and water in line. Whether or not this contributed to some of our later troubles, I can’t say. I can say with certainty that it turned the fondant a fairy-tale shade of pink that made the dipped cherries look like a smooth, shimmery bonbon out of a computer-generated cartoon. There’s a certain magic to dipping these cherries that makes you not care about the evils of artificial redness.

Once the syrup is boiling, we quit stirring (okay, maybe there was a little forgetfulness in play here and it took awhile before we figured out we were supposed to stop) and cooked the syrup to 243° F (it may have gotten a little higher than that before we got it out of the pot).


Next, we poured it out onto my woefully small marble slab. The directions say to sprinkle cold water on the marble first and then also on top of the sugar; we managed to sprinkle it on top of the sugar, which started spilling toward the edge of the too-small marble due to the fact that I set it down on the one part of our counter that our discount granite guys didn’t install anywhere near level.

The action didn’t stop once we had that under control. We let the sugar cool to 120° F, more or less, and then began the process of agitating it into crystallizing by scraping it back and forth on the marble, much like one would do with chocolate only much, much more of a pain since chocolate flows and sugar sticks and holds on like the marble is the last life preserver on the Titanic. This required a lot more strength than I was anticipating, so I mostly tried to hold the marble in place and scrape the sugar off the main scraper with a metal bench scraper.

The book says this step should take twenty (very long) minutes for the fondant to fully crystallize, “turning into a short-textured mass.” Twenty minutes came and went without the fondant changing from its consistency of a very gooey, sticky cousin of pulled sugar, even as it became tougher and tougher to scrape.

Finally, we resorted to scraping it entirely off the marble and pulling it like it actually was pulled sugar. This helped…to a point. We never got that short-textured mass, but after awhile it did take on more of a…well, I wouldn’t say it got any less shiny, but the inside of the mass looked more and more matte somehow, and thus seemed to be fairly well crystallized.


The next step in the directions is to allow the fondant to rest overnight, but we didn’t have overnight, so we went straight to dipping the cherries.

To coat the cherries, we heated the fondant over a water bath to 160° F, thinned it a little with some more of the cherry juice (the recipe suggests brandy), and added 1/4 tsp of invertase just before dipping.

Once all of that was accomplished, the dipping went very easily. Keeping the bowl over the water bath (with the gas turned down to the lowest setting) kept the fondant thin enough to coat the cherries without too much trouble. As each one was coated, we let them drip over the bowl, removed the extra fondant hanging from the bottom with the edge of a wooden spoon, and set them to cool on a sheet pan covered with a Silpat.


I don’t think anyone who was there could get over how pretty they looked. I really wanted to leave them like that…only the invertase would have left all of that shiny pink sugar in a puddle around the cherry after a day or two. We did give into temptation and try a couple of misshapen and stemless cherries that way, though, and as pretty as the pink ones are, they’re much better with the chocolate. So that makes up for having to cover up the sugar coating.

One thing we didn’t learn until later was that it’s better not to let the fondant coat the stem as well as the cherry. Coating the stem gives the invertase-laced fondant an express lane to the open air, along which it can ooze out and drip all over the chocolate.


Because we only made a half batch of the fondant–enough for about a quarter of the cherries I had drained and dried for us–I made some of the home-style “fondant” I had used the first time I made the cherries and had a couple of helpers cover them with me while Geeky dipped the other cherries in the real fondant. The recipe itself is very straightforward and my only addition to it was 1/2 tsp of invertase, so I won’t get into detail on that, but I have a tip or two about how to get it onto the cherries in a smooth and even fashion.

The main trick is to dust your hands/latex gloves with enough powdered sugar that the “fondant” remains dry as you roll. Also, using a smaller piece than you think you need to cover the cherry and squishing it to fit helps avoid making big, clunky-looking cherries. Once you have the cherry covered, put it between your hands with the stem sticking out between the middle and index fingers of your dominant hand. Roll the cherry very quickly and very lightly, around and around. This should make the top and bottom of the cherry smooth, but make the middle stick out, so turn the cherry so the stem pokes out toward you (between your thumbs) and roll it again, still quickly and lightly. Finally, roll it around sort of every which way in your palms to smooth it all over, once again quickly and lightly.

I emphasize the quickly and lightly part because the less pressure you put on the cherry, the rounder and nicer it will look. All of that should take 30 seconds at the most–the quicker you do it, the lighter your touch is likely to be. Hopefully.

Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part 2

Printable Recipe

I made a few mistakes along the way. Mistakes like forgetting the egg in the citrus pate sucree (I put it to the left of the food processor and the rest of my mise en place to the right) and experimenting with a store-bought carton of egg whites for the meringue when I didn’t have time to make a second batch. However, even without that egg, the pate sucree was possibly the best tart crust I’ve ever made, and several people complimented it. It uses both lemon and orange zest, a flavor combination that I used in my wedding cake years ago that really seemed to punch up the flavor.

But there was no blessing in disguise in regards to the meringue, unless I count the reminder that things never go well when I try to cut corners. At least this time it was in the spirit of experimentation and not just out of laziness, as usual. I used the Trader Joe’s 100% egg whites, and I knew that they weren’t going to be ideal when I saw how cloudy they were, but I went ahead and made the meringue. The foam ended up looking, well, very insipid and watery, not the airy dollop of heaven that I wanted to recreate from the magazine. By the time I was done, there was no time left, so the mediocre meringue went on the tart and I did my best to torch it, even though it didn’t want to brown properly.

Despite all of that, I don’t think I’ve ever had a dessert disappear so quickly at a big family event or gotten quite so many compliments and questions. I kept being surprised that people liked it, because I wasn’t entirely pleased with the mouth feel of the cranberry filling, as pretty as it was. It had that gross texture that comes from too much cornstarch, so next time I make this I’ll either decrease the cornstarch or experiment with some of the alternate thickners my husband has been playing with in his attempts at molecular gastronomy, now that we have a kitchen that we can actually cook in again. The xanthan gum marshmallows he made last week were a huge success, so I’m reading up on hydrocolloides now, too.

As I said above, I picked out a number of new holiday recipes to try this year. When I ate meat, Thanksgiving was one of my favorite holidays, and I’ve been trying to recreate that experience in a vegetarian way for eight years now, with varying amounts of success. This year, though, inspired by the new kitchen, I decided to try to find some new flavors to turn into new traditions, rather than continue to try to recreate the omnivore’s version of the holiday. Pretty much all of them (other than a new twist on the savory seitan and mushroom dish I’ve come up with to stand in for turkey) came from Martha Stewart–I rarely turn to her during the rest of the year, but the recipes in the holiday issues of the magazine are always really appealing to me, so much so that I keep them in their own binder on my cookbook shelf.

Cauliflower Gratin with Endive was delicious–cheesy without being greasy at all, and the Israeli couscous scattered in the bottom of the pan absorbed the sauce but held its shape in a texturally interesting way.

Stuffing was always my favorite part of Thanksgiving, so it took a lot strength to turn my back on the plain old crouton, celery and sage type stuff we always had. The Cornbread, Wild Mushroom and Pecan Stuffing I settled on was so good I just wanted to hold it on my tongue and not swallow it, or even chew it.

We used maitake, hedgehog and oyster mushrooms–I’d never cooked with hedgehog mushrooms, and they were extremely tasty!–so it wasn’t inexpensive. Otherwise, I would’ve made another pan straight away and wolfed it down at home. I have plans to try it with less expensive mushrooms soon. The pecans were a revelation. I’ve often put walnuts into savory cooking, but I think this was my first time using pecans that way, and they complemented the mushrooms very well.

It seems like we made another new dish, but I can’t think of what it was, other than the seitan stuff, where the newness of it lay mostly in my husband’s interpretation of how to cook it based on my instructions I yelled from the shower. That and he tried a trick for quickly browning onions by adding baking soda to them that he read about somewhere online. It worked. But it also made the onions completely dissolve…which had the effect of coating the seitan in the onion pulp and frying it onto it. Not what we were going for, but I think I’ll do it again next time we make it.