Chocri
What: Gift-worthy chocolate bars topped with a custom mix of toppings
Price range: Roughly $10 to $15 based on my bars, depending the toppings
Recommended chocolates: All of them
Recommended toppings: Honey chocolate drops, strawberry chocolate drops, real gold flakes, dried raspberry, dried strawberry, anise seed, hazelnut brittle, toasted hazelnuts, marzipan rose

When I received a very friendly email from Carmen at Chocri offering to send me three of their custom chocolate bars in the hopes of hearing my opinion of them, I jumped at the chance to do a review.

Okay, okay, I got very excited about the prospect of free fancy chocolate and then didn’t respond to the email for months. Oops. Pregnancy does odd things to the brain. But once I started to get the hang of my new full-time mommy job, the siren song of my food blog started calling to me, and I remembered the offer. Then I jumped at the chance, and Chocri was kind enough to give me a belated shot at it.

Now, I have to admit my first thought when I checked out their site (http://createmychocolate.com/) was I could make that. Anyone with a creative bent has had that thought before, whether looking at something in a boutique or magazine or online. Usually it accompanies an urge to purchase said item. But no matter how much you want it, no matter how much you acknowledge the ingenuity of the person or company who came up with it and or at least put a novel spin on it, I could make that is usually enough to keep your wallet in your purse or pocket, even when you know you never will get around to it.

I was getting the chocolate bars for free, but even so I was haunted by the I could make that vibe as I set off to explore the site. I had this idea that the bars would be way better or more fun or something similarly vague yet persuasive if I made them myself. And I certainly wouldn’t pay for something I could make in my own kitchen.

But as I started designing my bars, I could make that met a fearsome opponent: Hey, this is really fun. First, you select what kind of chocolate you want: dark, milk or white. All three are organic, fair trade Belgian chocolate. (I would add “rich” or “delicious” or something similar to that description, but that would be getting ahead of myself.)

Then you add up to five toppings. I had a lot more fun picking them out than I expected. Not that I didn’t expect it to be fun; it was simply more fun than I had anticipated. There are six different topping categories (excluding seasonal categories): fruit, spices, nuts, confections, decor and grains. The heading “grains” includes a lot of things I wouldn’t consider grains–most notably bacon and flower petals–but it’s a fun category with a lot of variety so I’ll forgive them if something got lost in the translation from their original German site.

The pictures of the toppings appear against the variety of chocolate you’ve chosen, making it easier to imagine the overall aesthetic effect. Clicking on the names of the toppings takes you to educational and entertaining descriptions. If you’re looking for inspiration (or just want to leave the creativity to someone else), Chocri has a page of recommended creations and top five bar names of the week lists on their blog (as I was researching for my review, I saw that one of my bars made the list…very fun!).

According to their website, there are more than 10 billion possible combos. I’ll take their word for that, because I don’t have time to do math these days beyond how long the Microfoodie has been napping. (Forty minutes at the moment, in case you’re curious.) Faced with such a vast selection to choose from, I decided to take advantage of the opportunity to give the bars names (up to two lines of text on the packaging) and create them each with a theme based on something in my life.

Time passed, and my bars showed up more or less on schedule, maybe a day or two later than the estimated date of arrival. I was very impressed with their appearance; the red boxes are quite striking against all three types of chocolate. It was fun seeing the names I’d come up with for the bars right there on the packaging, looking very crisp and professional.

What really got me excited was the look of the bars themselves. I never expected the toppings to be arranged with such care and artistry. That appeased a large part of my remaining I could do that. One of the main reasons I would have wanted to make a bar like this myself was to give my inner perfectionist control over what it looked like, but the bars from Chocri pretty much satisfied that desire.

On the back of each box a list of the toppings appears along with the code that allows you (or the recipient, if the bar was created as a gift) to reorder the exact same bar in the future. Inside the box, the bar is wrapped in shiny plastic, lending a glamorous sparkle to the toppings beneath. I know, I know, it’s wrapped in plastic, big deal, but for some reason I thought this particular plastic wrapper looked sharp and special, seeing as it was holding my own creation.

One of the things I was most surprised with was how thin the bar was. Most of the toppings-heavy bars I’ve seen offered for sale have been chocolate-heavy as well. While you might expect less chocolate to be a negative thing, I liked the chocolate-to-toppings ratio of the Chocri bars. Keeping them on the thinner side also accentuates the well-tempered snap of good chocolate.

Honeyed Paradise: a foodie’s love letter
Dark Chocolate with Paradise Grains, Honey Chocolate Drops, Real Gold Flakes, Rice Crispies in Chocolate Coating and Bourbon Vanilla

I designed this first bar with Chris in mind, drawing on his love of honey, fine liquor, spices and spiciness. This was the biggest visual hit of the three bars, its appeal based in the monochromatic exploration of texture enhanced by the dusting of glittering gold. In other words, we thought it looked cool. The grains of paradise came to mind because I was a bit disappointed in the chili options among the toppings, which were limited to chili powder and whole dried chilies. We all quite liked the way the subtle and unusual spiciness of the grains of paradise played off of the strong fruit notes in the chocolate and the sweetness of the honey drops.

However, at the end of every bite, everyone who tasted this bar ended up chewing on a grain or two that had gotten stuck in their mouth, a slight detriment to the overall experience. It sort of ruins the balance of flavors when one of them stays behind as a hard little nuisance between your molars. I understand why the spices are left whole as they’re much prettier that way, but I think it would be great if you could choose to have them ground before being added to your bar. I would’ve also liked the rice crispies to be a bit crispier and lend more crunch to the bar. But the flavor was quite an intriguing combination, especially the intersection of the chocolate, honey and grains of paradise components, and one I’d like to explore in my own chocolates in the future.

Parisian Breakfast Memory: muesli, banana, macaron
Milk Chocolate with Banana Chips, Hazelnut Brittle, Candied Rose Petals, Toasted Hazelnuts and Organic Muesli

We had some of the best and worst food of our European trip during our four days in Paris, scaling the heights with a rose-flavored macaron Ipshan from Pierre Hermé’s shop and plummeting into the depths with one too many baguettes laden with a few slices Swiss cheese and more mayonnaise than I had consumed up until that point in my life. Eating well as a vegetarian on a budget in Paris apparently takes more planning than I had done.

Along with the divine macaron I mentioned and the fresh morning bread and pastries at the bakery half a block from our hotel’s front door, one of my favorite food memories of Paris is going across the street to the tiny grocery store. In fact, from that point on, I got excited at any chance I got to go to a regular food store. Not only because of the whole vegetarian-on-a-budget thing, which made the prospect of a banana and some really good yogurt exciting in comparison to what we found in the touristy areas of the cities we visited, but also because it’s fascinating to see what products are on the shelves. I was particularly fond of some hazelnut cereal bars I found in the little market in Paris. Americans don’t use hazelnuts nearly often enough.

This bar spans the gap between the high class patisserie and the hole in the wall market not much bigger than a convenience store. Rose petals for the macaron, bananas, hazelnuts, hazelnut brittle and organic museli for the breakfast I had before I set out in search of the macaron, and Belgian milk chocolate just to round out the European theme.

I think Troy, my best friend, said it best when he described the bar as tasting like a high-quality cereal bar coated in really good chocolate. All of the chocolate we got from Chocri was really, really good. But this was the one bar where I thought the toppings could have had a more assertive presence. I think I would have liked it better if it really was a cereal bar covered in that chocolate instead of the other way around. I could barely pick out the flavor of the muesli, and couldn’t taste the rose petals at all. However, I did like the crunch of the toasted hazelnuts and the hazelnut brittle.

My Sweet Anise by Pie of the Tiger
White Chocolate with Raspberry, Strawberry, Strawberry Chocolate Drops, Anise and Marzipan Rose

The story behind this one is much shorter:
a) Dilettante Chocolates, a local chocolate company, makes a white chocolate and anise truffle. This was possibly my first taste of a chocolate flavor pairing more challenging than peanut butter or caramel, and I still really enjoy it.
b) I wanted to put pretty red and pink toppings all over the white chocolate bar.

I think I meant to tie those two plot points together by connecting the romantic marzipan rose to my having first had the truffle at my brother’s wedding, or acknowledging the influence of this white chocolate and raspberry bar by Divine Chocolate that I tasted at the Seattle Chocolate Salon, but really, this one was almost entirely about the pretty.

This bar was my unexpected favorite. Even my anti-white chocolate taste testers admitted it was good, and it turned out to be quite pretty indeed. Chris and Troy both felt the anise seeds presented the same problem the grains of paradise had in the first bar; I thought they were less of an issue in that respect than the grains of paradise had been.

I loved the way the bold flavors–super sweet white chocolate, distinctive anise, acidic raspberry, bright raspberry and bold almond–both blended and stood out. Each one took it’s turn on my palate, the others supporting without detracting from the star of the moment. It was the sort of flavor progression I’ve admired in the best chocolates that I tasted at the Chocolate Salon last summer. Granted, I don’t think any adult could eat more than one square of this bar at a time, but that just makes the chocolate last longer, right?


Overall, despite my nagging I could make this thoughts, I’d consider going back to Chocri to buy a bar in the future. Let’s face it, I’m not exactly overloaded with free time to putter around my kitchen making chocolates, and even when I was, I rarely got around to it. And I’d certainly recommend them to anyone who’s first thought when seeing these photos is I could get someone to make one of those especially for me? Cool.

The prices are about what you’d expect for a chocolate bar custom-made with organic, fair trade chocolate and high quality toppings and presented so stylishly. Had I purchased them, my bars would have run in the $11 to $14 range. This puts the bars squarely in gift territory for me, as I’d probably make truffles to experiment with flavor combinations for myself. But a Chocri bar or the experience of creating one provided by a gift certificate would make a fun and delicious gift for almost anyone, from a sweet tooth with a favorite chocolate mix-in to a foodie playing with flavors to a kid piling on colorful candy.

I had one other suggestion I was going to email to Chocri–sort of an Amazon Associates-style program where you could design a bar, link to it from your blog and earn a chocolate bar for every X number of people who bought your creation–but I see that they’ve recently started a program that’s almost as cool. They call it the 5+1 Rule: for every five chocolate bars you create, they’ll add a surprise bar to your order. I have to admit that what they say about it makes me kind of curious to see what I’d get.

Even cooler are the big coupons they’re giving out to anyone following them on Facebook or Twitter by May 3rd, based on the number of followers they have by that date. They’re already up to enough to cover around half of the cost of a chocolate bar, so if you’re interested in giving them a try, go forth and follow them. (While you’re at it, you now can become a fan of “like” Pie of the Tiger on Facebook. Not much to see there yet, but just wait!)

Extra special bonus challenge: Whether or not you want to buy a bar, head over to Chocri’s site and design one based on a theme inspired by your life. Then come back here and tell me about it. I’d love to hear what other people come up with!

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.

Tres leches, move over. There’s a new cake in town with three iterations of the same component: tres (or maybe it should be trois?) ganaches chocolate raspberry cupcakes. Sounds decadent, right? Well, they were. Decadent, extravagant, and definitely delicious…if possibly slightly unnecessarily complicated.

Not only that, but I used expensive eating chocolate for all of them. Bars and bars of the $3-$5 for two frickin’ ounces kind of eating chocolate. Valrhona raspberry ganache fills both the raspberry inside the cupcake and the one on top. Around the interior raspberry is a Scharffen Berger ganache. Finally, Michel Cluizel ganache frosting swirled on top crowns it all. The only reason I said that it was possibly unnecessary was that while eating the cupcake it wasn’t necessarily apparent that there were three different chocolates in play. But you definitely could tell that the chocolate involved was really, really good chocolate.

Now, before you think that this is a completely inappropriate post for the current economic climate, let me explain: I’ve been using up ingredients in my pantry, one of the thriftiest ways to save money in the kitchen. Let me introduce you to my secret source of unending shame: my chocolate collection.

Now, I know I’m not the only one who has chocolate hidden in her kitchen cupboards–in my younger and sneakier days, I used to liberate sweets from a hiding spot or two that I knew about. But I’m not ashamed of my collection for the usual reasons. No, I’m ashamed because I’ve had bars and bars and bars of high-quality chocolate in my possession for ages and never got around to eating it. I’ve meant to rectify the situation for a long time now, but somehow the enormity of this crime against chocolate and checkbook makes it even harder to do anything about it. I was saving these bars for a purpose, so it seemed like eating them for the sake of eating them rather than for some grander reason was doing them yet another disservice.

It all started in pastry school. In one of the few actual take-home assignments they ever gave us, we were assigned to write a paper on a single ingredient used in the pastry kitchen. At that point, I’d taken a three day workshop on chocolate work and gotten a glimpse of the world of high-quality chocolate, so I picked that as my subject to investigate. My research led me to a fantastic book, The New Taste of Chocolate: A Cultural and Natural History of Cacao with Recipes, that not only told the history of chocolate and explained how it was processed in greater depth than I’d encountered before, but went into detail about the three different types of trees–criollo, forastero and trinitario–and the different chocolate-producing regions of the world and how those differences affected the chocolate’s flavor and quality.

The book also shows you how to properly taste chocolate, and while that’s a fairly common foodie thing to do now, back then the specialty chocolate craze was just getting started. Our favorite grocery store–the Shoreline Central Market–was stocking a lot of single-origin bars at the time, so we’d pick a couple up every time we went shopping. That’s when I fell in love with Michel Cluizel’s chocolate. The package for one of his single plantation chocolates claimed that you could taste the flavor of green olives, and when that flavor spread over my tastebuds as the chocolate melted on my tongue, I was hooked.

I started buying one of every chocolate bar that I saw, justifying it as part of my education as a future pastry chef. We had a few friends–and most of Chris’ extended family, once–join us in tastings where I’d share both my collection of chocolate and my collection of chocolate knowledge with them (if only I’d started teaching chocolate classes professionally back then…I would have been ahead of all of the ones that have popped up since!), but for the most part, I would taste one or two squares of the bar and save it. Why? Because at some point I wanted to sit down and do a real chocolate tasting. I wanted to taste them all side-by-side (this was before wine tasting taught me that your palate gets exhausted if you try to taste the subtleties of too many products in the same day), I wanted to take notes, I wanted to do it right. And any time I want to do something right…well, the odds of me actually doing it go down considerably. It’s the curse of the perfectionist: why bother doing something if you aren’t going to do it better than anyone else ever has?

So, I kept buying chocolate, and I kept collecting bars, many of them not even opened to taste my usual two squares because I was saving them for my tasting to end all tastings. In a way, it did end all tastings, because I stopped indulging in my informal little chocolate explorations, in my informal chocolate classes with my friends. And my chocolate languished, waiting to be liberated.

So, what does this have to do with cupcakes?

The answer is simple: I am liberating my chocolate.

Yes, it’s on the old side. Believe me, I got a good, hard time about that from some of the cupcakes recipients this weekend. It’s served most of a life sentence and had given up hope of parole.

But, fortunately, chocolate doesn’t exactly go bad, not in the spoiling sense of the word. Mine doesn’t look so hot, but it still tastes like expensive chocolate. A good chocolate bar stored in a cool, dark environment won’t start to lose its quality and flavor for at least a year. Over a more extended period, that bar will eventually fall out of temper, especially if it’s storage location is less than ideal. The flavor will probably lose some of its potency and complexity, like dried herbs left in the cupboard for too long. A speckled white coating might form on the chocolate, which may look like mold to the uninitiated but is really just “bloom”, formed by the cocoa butter separating out and rising to the surface. Or the chocolate may just turn dull, losing the shine that it had (hopefully) when it was in temper. If you try to break it, it won’t have the well-tempered snap that you look for, either.

To a certain point, you can put it back in temper if you know how. I know how to temper chocolate, but with chocolate as old as mine…well, there really is only one thing to do: bake with it. I did this first with the Rainbow Cookies I made last Christmas, where the wonderful flavor of Michel Cluizel’s chocolate elevated the colorful little bars to something truly on another level of deliciousness, and since then I’ve decided to dispose of the rest of the chocolate in the same way. These cupcakes made a huge dent in the collection.

I’ve been with the same writing critique group for almost four years now. One of the members has a birthday coming up, and we planned to surprise her with a celebration at our most recent meeting. I volunteered to make the cake, and I wanted to do something really special for my friend. I saw some beautiful fresh raspberries while I was out shopping, and the idea for these cupcakes was born. I was hoping they’d turn out to be as glamorous as I envisioned them, and I think, for once, they did.

So, that’s the story behind the trois ganaches. These cupcakes could easily be made with any decent dark chocolate, and in the future I’d only make two different ganaches–a raspberry one for the inside, and a plain one for the top. I’d go entirely with raspberry ganache except that it doesn’t have quite as smooth of an appearance as regular ganache, so it’s more suitable for filling cupcakes.

After all that chocolate talk, let’s start by looking at the most important part of a truly good cupcake, the cake itself. In my opinion, it’s easy to make cupcakes look pretty or cute, and a lot harder to master baking them.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you may remember that I’ve had some difficulties with baking cupcakes in the past. Since then, I’ve learned my lesson and stuck to recipes intended specifically for cupcakes from books that are all about cupcakes. To that end, I picked up a copy of Martha Stewart’s Cupcakes and this was my first attempt at one of the recipes.

I tend to trust Martha Stewart recipes, and Martha definitely didn’t fail me this time. I used the Devil’s Food Cupcakes recipe for these, and they were perfect for the purpose: not so chocolatey that they’d just seem like an extension of all the ganache I was planning to utilize, but not watered down like so many chocolate baked goods are. The texture was so soft and moist–in the recipe’s description, they attribute this to sour cream–and they were divine both warm from the oven and cooled down and decorated. (For reference, the recipe yielded 18 normal-sized cupcakes and 24 mini cupcakes. The baking time was spot on for my oven, with a five minute deduction to the time when baking the mini cupcakes.)

I baked them Friday night and then set about decorating them Saturday morning. First thing, I washed the raspberries and laid them out to dry on a cooling rack covered in paper towels, making sure that there was no water inside or out because the raspberries were going to be surrounded by ganache and water is a great way to invite mold into your chocolates. I made my raspberry ganache, so it would have a little time to set up to a pipeable consistency before I started filling the cupcakes. I improvised the recipe, and the formula is easy to remember: 8 oz. of dark chocolate (Valrhona in this case), 8 oz. of cream, and 8 oz. of raspberry preserves. I put the preserves straight into the cream as I heated it to simmering, mixing to combine the two, and strained it over the chocolate to keep the seeds out of the ganache.

You can make the ganache the traditional way and pour the hot cream over finely chopped chocolate, wait five minutes and then whisk it until smooth, or–if you feel confident in your ability too melt chocolate in the microwave without scorching it–you can use the cheater’s method I figured out to save my injured shoulder: melt the chocolate in the microwave, let the cream cool down a little bit from simmering before you add it, and whisk them both together right away. That allows you to leave the chocolate in bigger chunks rather than do all of that fine chopping. You just have to be careful with chocolate in the microwave: zap it for a minute, then stir, then stir after every additional thirty seconds. You want to stop while there are still a few unmelted chunks. Residual heat will melt those the rest of the way.

I set that to the side and stirred it from time to time as I prepared the cupcakes to be filled. I certainly didn’t invent this method, but I figured I might as well take photos of how I did it as I went:

First, I picked out the size of round cutter I wanted to use and measured it against the height of the cupcakes. The cupcake was taller, so that meant that I could push the cutter all the way down without worrying about punching through the bottom of the cupcake.

Next, I centered the cookie cutter on top…

…pushed it down into the cupcake evenly…

…and then pulled it out, giving the cutter a slight twist as I did so. The center of the cupcake came out whole most of the time, but when a large crumb or two did stick in the bottom of the hole I’d created, I’d flick them out with the tip of the paring knife.

Then, I carefully cut away the very top of the cupcake’s center, saving it as a little lid for the filling. The rest when into a bowl of cake crumbs, which never got very full because the cake really was too good to not eat.

Once I had the centers cut out, the raspberry ganache seemed to be thick enough to pipe, so I made up a simple ganache with 8 oz. of the Scharffen Berger chocolate I had (a combination of semisweet, dark and extra dark) and about 1 1/4 cups of cream. I poured that into a pie plate so it would cool faster as I worked with it, but it was pretty much fine for filling the cupcakes by the time I was set up and ready to go. I wanted it to be pretty fluid so that the raspberries could settle in properly.

It went something like this:

One cupcake, with its lid.

Add a small scoop full of the plain ganache.

Fill a raspberry with the Valrhona raspberry ganache, making sure not to leave any air pockets inside. (Like the water I mentioned above, air also encourages mold to grow inside of chocolates.)

Set the raspberry open-end down in the center of the other ganache.

Top the raspberry with another scoop of the plain ganache, making sure to fill the hole all the way to the top.

Press the cupcake’s lid down onto the ganache to seal it up and hide the treat waiting inside.

At that point, I put them straight into the fridge because I didn’t want to leave that raspberry surrounded by lukewarm ganache for very long. That gave me time to make the ganache frosting out of the Martha Stewart book with the Michel Cluizel chocolate and cool it in a pair of pie plates in the fridge–a trick I remember from pastry school when we were bringing ganaches and other fillings for molded chocolates down to room temperature. In retrospect, I wasn’t as fond of the ganache recipe as I was of the cupcake recipe–it dulled too easily, and set up too quickly as I was working with it, even in the summer heat, which means it might have benefited from more cream or corn syrup–but I made it work. All there was left to do was decorate the cupcakes, which is the fun part.

Like I said before, I wanted them to look glamorous, so I sprinkled them with some shiny “chocolate flakes” I picked up at Central Market a few weeks ago in the bulk section and painted the raspberries with a mixture of a few drops of Grand Marnier and a quarter teaspoon of a berry-colored luster dust I’d bought for another cupcake project and then never used.

What I was really excited about, though, was opening the raspberries up and using them flat against the top of the cupcake. I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, but I’ve never seen it before. The idea came to me when I was checking out the raspberries I bought and noticing how strong and firm they were, how they even stayed together if I opened them up along one side. I’m always looking for any fondant alternative I can find that has a better taste and texture, and fresh fruit definitely fits the bill. I think it not only looked cool but heightened the raspberry-to-chocolate ratio, which is always a good thing.

I thought they looked a little like dragon scales with the luster dust…

…but my critique group thought they looked like brains. I’ll forgive them. We’re all writing novels somewhere along the scifi/fantasy continuum, so we have conversations about various supernatural creatures currently popular in the urban fantasy market on a regular basis, zombies included.

Here’s a bunch of them all together. I have to recommend the 3 Tier Snapware Snap N Stack Cupcake, Cookie and Cake Carrier. We picked one of these up at Costco a month or two ago. I’m not sure if they still have them, but after using mine for the first time this weekend, I’m going to buy another one if they do, just in case I need to transport a lot of cupcakes to an event. What I like about this one is that it’s extremely versatile: each of the tiers has a reversible tray insert–one side is flat, and the other has rings to hold cupcakes in place. The trays have handles that also allow you to suspend them halfway up the tier, either for carrying two layers of cookies or other flat baked goods (giving you a total of six layers with all three tiers) or for serving the cupcakes in the tier so that people don’t have to reach all the way inside and risk bumping the frosting. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to scramble for shallow, flat containers to carry baked goods to parties and holiday dinners.

Finally, here’s one of the mini cupcakes I mentioned. They were too small to stuff with raspberries, and I used up the Scharffen Berger ganache on the bigger cupcakes, so I filled them entirely with the raspberry ganache. This made them a little different from the big cupcakes, sort of like a tasty little truffle surrounded by cake. I love how small they looked in comparison to the big raspberries.

I’ve written about these cupcakes before, but in few enough words to hide the real story, the one I wanted to tell the moment I snapped this photo. But now that we’ve passed a magic number I’ve untied my own hands, so I want to share: the moment I looked down through the camera lens and saw that tiny, little red heart, I knew I was going to be someone’s mom, and that someone wanted to say “Hi.”

I’ve long thought that studying literature in college makes you more likely to see symbolism and structure in your own life. I’ve never decided whether those material metaphors woven into the ups and downs of daily existence truly mean something. It’s tempting to think so, especially when you have questions that no one can answer for you but time. Still, in a rational world, it’s natural to be suspicious of any signs you think you see in the world around you. Particularly when the sign in question has a bit too much in common with those images of the Virgin Mary that “miraculously appear” on a piece of toast. Back when I was working a dessert buffet as a pastry cook, all it took to burn the image of Trogdor (a cartoon dragon, for those not in the know) into the top of a giant creme brulee was a deft hand with a blow torch.

But this heart convinced me better than the actual pregnancy tests I took days later did. Those were easy to doubt, to question, but the moment I saw the heart, I knew. Sure, it helped that I’d been getting lightheaded all morning while I was up and around baking, and that what was to become a four-day straight headache had just set in. That didn’t stop me from knowing that this was a message just for me, the girl born on Valentine’s Day.

Hopefully, between the cupcake and the heart, this is a sign that we’re going to be welcoming a very sweet, very loving child into our lives. If nothing else, a lot of people have come by the site to see what I consider our first “baby photo”, even if they didn’t know what they were looking at.

So for my long absence–and my severe aversion to even the thought of those vegetarian Peeps I made–I have our future foodie-in-training to thank. He or she will be showing up around the first week of December, so I probably won’t be posting another flood of cookies and chocolates around Christmas again this year. But now that I’ve hit the second trimester and I’m feeling more like cooking, I hope to catch up on answering comments and be around more regularly.

And I mean that this time. As long as no one mentions those Peeps. I’m still having issues with them.

While we were grocery shopping last weekend, I saw that Whole Foods had red bananas at a pretty decent price, so I decided to pick up a few to continue my rum sauce experiments. I know that they take well to heat (until very recently, I actually thought they had to be cooked in order to avoid a stomach ache), and I have a fondness for unusual fruit. They’ve been sitting on the counter tempting me for the last few days, so I finally decided to try again tonight with the caramel sauce.

My rum sauces usually start out with three things: sugar, butter, rum. Tonight, I added whiskey and orange juice to the mix. Heat a large frying pan over medium-high heat and add:

2 tbsp unsalted butter
2 tbsp Sucanat (dried sugarcane juice)
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup golden rum
1/4 cup sour mash whiskey
pinch of salt

Warm this until it is all dissolved and fairly homogeneous, and add four red bananas, sliced lengthwise (I find it easiest to do this with the skins still on).  Place the bananas with the cut side down, and cook them, basting occasionally with the liquid (but not flipping them), until the sugars have slightly caramelized.  This should take 10-15 minutes, and you should see the bubble pattern of the boiling liquid change, especially around the edge of the frying pan. The bananas will be quite soft with a bit of crunch on the bottom, which should have some extra caramelization.

When they’re done, remove them from the heat to cool for a few minutes, and then serve them with a large scoop of ice cream (I’d recommend vanilla or coconut).

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.

Once you start working with sugar, all the rules change. Take today’s project, for example. In the normal practice of food photography, the components of the composition fall into two categories: food and food props. If this photo were a normal food photo, the apples would be the stars, and the bowl would be the prop, albeit a colorful and flashy one. But once I point out that I made the bowl by hand, and not out of glass, but sugar, suddenly the world goes topsy turvy. The dish is the star, and the apples demoted to mere props.

It goes beyond that, though. The hours in which you play with sugar belong to another world, a sunnier, warmer place, a place where magic walks the earth and comes to cook at your side. Colors are brighter. Pots bubble and boil with a constant snap and pop, like thick, syrupy soda on some serious steroids. Things come into real, three-dimensional being, springing as much from an inner wellspring of imagination as from the hot, malleable sugar in your hands.

My goal is to make this brand of magic a little more accessible to the common foodie. To that end, I’m starting off with the easiest techniques that take the least amount of specialized, expensive equipment. The other main advantage of this approach is that I need to relearn how to do it all, so it’s probably best if we don’t all jump in the deep end together just yet. Stick with me and we’ll get to pulled sugar and blown sugar, but don’t worry: just because we’re starting with basics doesn’t mean things are going to be boring.

The first type of sugar I want to show you is Casting Sugar. Casting sugar is used mostly to make bases and supports for showpieces, but it can also be a quick way to form custom shapes. The sugar can be poured into a variety of different forms and molds, many of which you may have tucked away in your kitchen. Anything made out of silicone works wonderfully with sugar, and metal–as long as it’s well greased–does as well. I’ve used cake rings and frames, cookie cutters, silicone muffin pans and petit four molds, aluminum foil and even granulated sugar to make different shapes with different textures. Once you learn the technique, you’ll look at everything with new eyes, wondering what would happen if you poured sugar into it.

Before we begin, a reminder: boiling and melted sugar is very, very hot! Efficiency and awareness are essential to having a good sugar work experience, uninterrupted by accidents. Have a good block of time so that you aren’t rushed, and make sure to get all of your equipment and materials in order before you start and keep them in order as you work. And be careful, please!

That said, don’t be afraid of working with sugar! That’s a common but unnecessary reaction. Be cautious, but not fearful. If you’re careful, you’ll be fine. I have yet to burn myself working with sugar (knock on wood). And I’m the girl who made her lab partner turn on the Bunsen burner every day in Chemistry because she was afraid of lighting her hair on fire.

This formula is an average of several different casting sugar recipes I have in my books and notes. In general, the baker’s percentages are 100% sugar, 40 to 50% water, and 20 to 30% glucose. One book called for a great deal of tartaric acid solution to be added. We’ll discuss the use of tartaric acid in sugar at a later date, but for now I’ll just say that it doesn’t make a lot of sense to put it in casting sugar, so I went with the general consensus and left it out.

The next sugar formula I share with you will not have glucose in it, so keep an eye out for my next sugar post if you can’t get your hands on glucose any time soon. I bought mine at a local cake decorating supply shop. You can also buy small tubs of it at any craft store that sells Wilton cake decorating supplies, or you can buy better quality stuff online, which is what I plan to do in the next week or so.

Equipment

(More information about sugar work equipment)

• A kitchen scale
• A good, heavy, medium-to-large saucepan, preferably copper (I use one with a layer of copper in the bottom)
• A small, fine-meshed strainer
• A natural bristle pastry brush in a glass of warm water
• A candy thermometer, digital is better but glass also works, as long as whichever one you use is accurate

Ingredients

1 kg high quality granulated sugar
500 g cold water
250 g glucose
food coloring (powder or paste), dissolved in a very small amount water or vodka

Method

Before you begin, you want to make sure your saucepan is as clean as possible. Any impurities on the pan or in the sugar can cause sugar crystals to form–one of the two deadly enemies of sugar work, along with humidity. The best way to make sure your pan is totally clean is to scrub it with kosher salt and the juice from half of a lemon, which has the fantastic side effect of leaving you with a very shiny saucepan. Rinse very well after scrubbing.

Once your pan is spot- and speckless, combine the sugar and the cold water. Mix it together with your fingers. That way, you can feel when it’s all evenly mixed. Next, wash down any stray sugar crystals that have climbed up the side of the pan by dipping your fingers under running water and wetting down the sides of the pan. Once again, you’ll be able to feel what’s going on and be sure that you’ve gotten all of the crystals.

Start the sugar over a medium flame, and increase the heat later. Cooking sugar is tricky to do just right. I’m very out of practice, so mine isn’t turning out quite perfectly at the moment, but I’m getting better at it again already. One concern is the amount of time it takes to cook the sugar from start to finish. Too short a cooking time and you’ll end up with brittle sugar. To long a time and the sugar will melt too completely and won’t hold its shape. You want to aim for twenty minutes from start to finish, although anything from 12 to 30 minutes will work, though not ideally.

As the pan heats up, the sugar will slowly dissolve in the water, moving in shimmery, opalescent waves beneath the surface. During this time, just leave it to heat up on its own.

When the sugar first starts to boil, the bubbles will be small, quick, and snappy.

At this point, turn off the heat (or take the pan off of the heat if you don’t have a gas range) and skim any foam or impurities off of the top of the sugar. I was surprised that mine wasn’t too bad at all. A good thing, except it didn’t make for a very instructional photo.

Add the glucose and turn up the heat, higher this time.

This is the point at which you have to really start worrying about crystal formation. You have two options for washing down the sides of the pan, now that’s it’s much too hot to do it with your fingers. The most common technique is to use a pastry brush dipped in water.

Another option is to cover the pan with a lid, but leave it cracked open so that the steam flows up the sides and washes down the crystals without your help. I read somewhere, though, that you have to be careful with this method because it can slow down the cooking process by trapping steam in and keeping the temperature from rising as soon as it normally would, so keep your eye on your cooking time.

I like to do both: wipe down the pan with the brush, then cover it with the lid while I wait to hear it hit soft ball stage. One of the huge benefits of practicing sugar work on a regular basis is learning to tell what stage the sugar is at by sight and sound, a useful skill if you ever make things like caramel, chocolate mousse and Swiss meringue. Below soft ball, the tiny bubbles are fast and have that snappy popping sound I described before. At soft ball, they become increasingly slow and large, and the bubbling loses the “snappiness”. Once I hear the shift, I take the lid off and wash down the sides of the pan with the brush again.

You’ll want to start monitoring the temperature now. Our ultimate destination is 315°F, and after the slow climb to the 240°F range, the temperature will now rise much faster. This is when it’s nice to have a digital thermometer with a temperature alarm set for five degrees below your target temperature, but for some reason I don’t really mind watching boiling pots as long as it’s sugar that’s boiling in them. More important is to have an accurate thermometer, because differences of just two or three degrees can cause more trouble than you’d think.

The bubbles will gradually get slower and larger, but your main gauge of where you are in the process at this point will be your thermometer. Now it’s time to think about how you want to color your sugar. If you want to make it all one color, you can add the coloring about ten or fifteen degrees before the sugar is done and shake the pan to incorporate it. Otherwise, you can add the coloring at the end if you want different shades or a marbled effect. One piece of advice that I (re)learned through experience today: if you want to divide the sugar up to make it a few different colors, don’t pour it into cold pans or containers. Mine cooled off far too quickly, which made coloring and pouring it a real pain and sabotaged some of the plans I had.

First, as a sort of warm up, I did a couple simple shapes using large copper Easter cookie cutters I’d oiled with canola oil and set down on a Silpat laid over a marble cutting board.

This chick turned out not to be the best choice. See how narrow the connection between its body and its foot is?

Now see how little sugar I was able to get through the gap into the foot. If I had been pouring from pan with a little pour spout, I might have been able to guide the sugar in there better.

Aluminum foil is one of my favorite ways to give cast sugar some life and texture. Any pattern you give to the foil will form on the underside of the sugar. Make sure to use it shiny-side up for the best, smoothest patterns. If you oil the foil, it comes away easily once the sugar has cooled, but if the sugar is meant to be the base of a showpiece or something similar, you can also leave the foil on, reflecting even more light back through the sugar. This is a great technique for making blue-green marbled sugar look like water, as I did in my dolphin showpiece.

Cake rings–two or three inch bottomless metal rings used in professional bakeshops–are really useful for pouring perfectly round shapes, whether straight onto a Silpat or oiled marble, or onto oiled aluminum foil like I’m doing here. Unfortunately, I don’t own any cake rings myself (something I’ve wanted to fix for years), but I do have a nine-inch springform pan. I used it without it’s bottom, well-oiled both opened and closed in case some of the sugar leaked through at the place where the ring opens and closes, and turned upside down because the sides were straighter at the top than the bottom, where the base notches in. If you don’t have a springform pan, you can just pour a round shape free form and call it an artisan bowl.

Before the sugar was done cooking, I had my aluminum foil crumpled, straightened out and brushed down thoroughly with oil, and my springform ring oiled, closed and pressed down into the foil, which I then folded up around the outside. I colored some of the sugar yellow and some red, then poured them both into the center of the ring and let the sugar spread out to the edges. Using two colors gives the sugar even more life and movement.

Next, I let the sugar cool until it held its shape, but I was still able to easily bend and form it.

I released the springform pan and carefully pried it away from the edge of the sugar in the few places that were still trying to hold onto it, more from heat than from a lack of enough oil.

I took the shape, foil and all, and set it on top of a shallow soup bowl with a wide rim (you’ll be able to see it better a few photos down).

Then I used my fingers to press the center down into the shape of the bowl, being careful not to press too hard too fast or burn my fingers.

Once the sugar was more or less cool and holding its shape on its own, I turned the bowl upside down and set the sugar bowl upside down on top of it. Then I peeled back the foil slowly.

I was very careful to oil my foil well (I’ve neglected to do that well enough in the past), but I still had a few places where the foil stuck on the first pass.

Fortunately, all of those little pieces came off easily for me. (It may have helped that my sugar wasn’t entirely cooled yet.) If yours don’t, you can try to get them off by chipping away at them with a paring knife.

Because my sugar bowl was still a little warm, I turned it and the real bowl back right side up and let it cool supported until it got to room temperature.

So, there you have it: a fully-functional serving bowl made entirely out of sugar. You just wouldn’t want to put anything wet in it. Unless, of course, you wanted to freak your guests out with a melting, dissolving bowl on the buffet table. In which case, send me photos!

Seriously, though, you don’t even have to stick to fruit bowls. You can make all sorts of cool serving bowls and plates and even cake pedestals from sugar. I’ll hopefully be showing you some other options along those lines in the near future.

Here’s the bottom of the bowl, so you can see the texture–

Wait…

What is that person doing???

Oh no, stop stop stop!!!!

Aaahhhh! Who on earth would do such a thing? I spent a couple hours making that bowl! And I was going to take more photos! And…

Huh, I think that’s my hand holding the murder weapon, actually.

Why would I commit such a senseless act of violence against my beloved sugar bowl? Because this is actually another sugar technique, and I’ve sacrificed my little creation in the name of education. (You didn’t know you were going to get to learn even more today, did you?) In Sucre d’art, l’envers du décor (Sugarworks, Behind the Scenes) by Stéphane Glacier, it’s called Sparkling Sugar. The method is much the same as what we’ve just done, only you can let the sugar cool flat before breaking it. Once the sugar is totally cool, give it one good tap with something heavy like a sturdy pair of kitchen shears. Try to crack it in just one stroke to avoid shattering it into little unattractive bits. The sugar can then be used to give depth and dimension to showpieces, hiding supports or just filling out empty areas in the composition. You can hit the pieces with the flame of a blow torch to make them even more translucent and shiny.

But now that my bowl is gone, where am I going to keep those apples? I can’t just leave them on the counter or the cutting board. They’ve already experienced the opulence of living in a handmade sugar bowl!

Well, maybe if I take some scraps and melt them down in a Pyrex measuring cup in the microwave…thirty seconds at a time until the sugar is pourable again…use some granulated sugar as a dam to keep the base thick, I can put this here…

…and this here…

…and these here…

…and then hold everything in place until things cool down…

…and now my apples can have their very own “showpiece” to hang out on. Hey, it’s a more stylish address than the cutting board!

And that’s the final sugar lesson I want to leave you with for today: if you work with sugar, play with it. Things are going to go wrong. Pieces will break, shapes won’t turn out how you were imagining them, colors will mix into shades you never dreamed of. But the true art of it all is rolling with the punches. At each and every moment, think about what you can do with what you have, and if you’re creative about it, you might even like the end product than what you set out to make.

If you do try this out, take pictures and show me! I’d love to link to anything inspired by these lessons.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work Equipment
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations

I’m one of those people who everyone should be jealous of because I have the good fortune to have in-laws that I really, truly love having in my life. My mother-in-law in particular is an enthusiastic supporter of the blog and sent a request for a blog-worthy contribution for Easter through the contact form on the website. I was very excited about that because it was the first message I got that way! Her request got me thinking about Easter and what I could make. I wanted to do something different, and because I can’t resist a food pun once I’ve thought of it, the Cadbury Creme Brul’egg was born.

I bought both normal and mini Cadbury Creme Eggs at the store on Saturday. I also spotted these chicken-footed egg cups at Whole Foods and picked them up because they were oven safe and went with the eggy theme so well. Each of the egg cups got one mini egg, and I experimented with one large egg in two of the four ounce ramekins and three mini ones in the other two.

The absolute best creme brulee recipe I’ve found comes from Sherry Yard’s The Secrets of Baking, so I pulled out my copy of the book and scaled the recipe down by a third to fit the combined volume of the ramekins and egg cups. Cream, sugar and a vanilla bean rose to a simmer together, and then steeped for 15 minutes. Rather than whisking the cream into the egg yolks by hand at that point, I always pour the hot cream in while running the whip attachment on my Kitchen Aid at a very low speed. Try to avoid whipping any more air into the eggs than necessary, because the air will show up as unattractive bubbles on top of the custard.

Once the cream and egg are mixed together, I strained the mixture into a large measuring cup and poured it carefully up to the rim of each egg cup and ramekin.

You probably will end up with a few bubbles on the surface of the custard, even if you carefully whisk by hand. Any ridges of custard on the surface will brown when you are melting the sugar on top before serving, so the best thing to do is to get your blow torch out early and carefully pop the bubbles with a quick brush of a low flame across the top. Be extremely careful to avoid any places where the chocolate is peeking up above the surface. Chocolate scorches at a very low temperature and can’t handle the heat of the torch.

See how the bubbles disappear nicely?

At this point, I filled the baking dish holding the ramekins with boiling water, about two-thirds of the way up their sides, covered the top tightly with foil to keep the tops from overcooking and put the whole thing in a 300 degree oven for 40 minutes. When they came out, I discovered that it may not have been the best idea to mix the egg cups and the ramekins in the same dish. The egg cups are taller, so they tented the foil above the rims of the ramekins and allowed condensation to form above and then pool on the tops of the larger custards. Luckily, the damage was not too bad, but in the future I’d use two smaller baking dishes.

Once the custards are set–they still wiggle, but they wiggle as one mass–I took the baking dish out of the oven. This is a dangerous moment, with a heavy load of boiling water sloshing about, so I always remind myself of something my chef once told me when I was pulling a full sheet pan of boiling water out of an eye-level oven: water can be mopped up, but skin can’t be unburned. You can always remove the ramekins from the pan while it’s still in the oven (use silicone baking mitts and, once again, be careful) and then move the water when it’s cool. When the ramekins are cool enough to handle, I put them on a baking rack until they get down to room temperature, then stash them away in the fridge to chill for at least two hours before serving.

While I was waiting for the ramekins to do their thing in the fridge, I melted the last bit of yellow sugar from the Battlestar Galactica cupcakes in the microwave and used it to make a couple of cast sugar chicks. This is one of the first sugar tutorials I plan to do, but the basic technique is, well, basic: oil a cookie cutter, set it on top of a Silpat and pour just enough molten sugar in to fill in the shape. I had to slide the cookie cutter around a bit to get sugar into the beaks and tails, but otherwise it was as easy as that. I added a bit of sugar at the bottom of each one to stick down into the creme brulee, and then swirled what was left of the melted sugar around to make some more random decorations.

The key to a good, even caramelized creme brulee top is a good, even layer of sugar. When I’m doing small ones, I like to use this tea strainer to dust my sugar over the top. (For large, multi-person creme brulees, I spread the sugar around with a small offset spatula.) If you’re feeling especially OCD, it also helps to tilt the ramekin around to be sure no custard is peeking through, waiting to get singed. For a neater appearance, wipe the sugar off of the rim with a paper towel before burning the top.

My strategy for brulee-ing my cremes is to keep the flame low and keep it moving. I like to get the whole surface partially melted before I start trying for color. Once I get a little caramel action going, I sprinkle another light layer of sugar over it all and then proceed until everything’s nice and golden.

This first way of finishing the presentation was Chris’ idea. He thought it would be cool to “crack” a Cadbury Creme Egg over the top and brulee the sugary “white” and “yolk”. The filling caramelized pretty nicely, but I found it hard to avoid scorching the chocolate shell. I cut away the blackened bits I could see, but Chris–who wanted to eat the one he’d inspired–still got a burnt piece of chocolate. Maybe if I’d been a little more careful it would have worked.

Here’s another one of the large ones with one of those random sugar decorations I mentioned earlier. I pressed it down into the custard immediately after torching the top and held it in place for a moment while the newly caramelized sugar cooled around it. I was impressed at how well the sugar decorations stayed upright.

Here’s one of the egg cups with a sugar chick and a mini egg. I liked the splash of color that serving one of the candies in its wrapper added.

So, you ask, how did they taste?

Well, they were extraordinarily rich. Creme brulee and creme eggs kinda added up to guilty pleasure overload. I almost always put something in my creme brulee, but I realized that what I usually add are things like berries, which cut the sweetness and the heavy creaminess of the custard. The creme egg, on the other hand, intensified that. But they weren’t bad, either. If you love Cadbury Creme Eggs and have nothing against sugar, this might be just the Easter treat for you. I noticed that the ones with just the one large egg were more successful than the ones with all the little eggs in them.

If I were to make these again, I might try replacing the sugar in the recipe with melting a few creme eggs straight into the cream at the beginning, and then “cracking” one on top when I served it. However, I think I’ll be looking for a different dessert to bring over on Easter. Ooo…what about Peeps Suzette?!

Hmm…maybe I’d better stay away from punny foods for awhile.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Sugar Work Equipment
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations

Keep in mind that you don’t need all of this stuff to get started in the wonderful world of sugar! I’m planning on showing as many things as I can think of that require little or no specialized equipment besides a candy thermometer. Most of this equipment is only necessary for pulled and blown sugar. While those are sort of the main attractions of sugar work for many people, they aren’t the only thing you can do with it.

Here is more or less how I’ve been setting my equipment up in this kitchen. Fortunately, I have a nice tall space in the center of our long counter where the side-by-side “vintage” oven and range used to be. (I don’t miss them at all!) Center stage is my sugar warming box. Mine is homemade by the chef I learned to do sugar from. Compare it to a commercially-produced version. Professional sugar equipment is expensive. For the most part, I recommend you make or improvise any of it that you can. Part of the fun of doing sugar or chocolate work is taking creative trips to the hardware store! I managed to find a blog post written by someone who made his own sugar warming box.

The acrylic box stores in two parts: the sides connect to the back with with acrylic hinges, and the top has pieces that run along either side of each of the side pieces to keep it in place. I take the extra step of using clear packing tape to make sure nothing is going to move in the middle of my work. The top of the box has a slot running from back to front which the narrow plug of the cord from the heat lamp fits through.

Here it is with the heat lamp on. It’s very bright and very hot, and you work right up in front of it. I always feel like I’ve been lying out in the sun for an hour after I’m done! The bulb hangs above a warming platform, which in this case is a Silpat nailed over a wooden frame. As the bulb heats the space below it, the warming box keeps the heat in, and the platform traps heat beneath it, helping to warm the sugar from both above and below.

The heat lamp is adjustable thanks to a small clamp that I attach to the cord above the top of the box. It’s very important to be able to not only keep the sugar warm, but to be able to adjust the amount of heat you’re bathing it in by lowering and raising the lamp.

Here I’ve lowered the lamp all the way to remelt some leftovers from the last time I played around with sugar. You have to be careful because it will melt all the way if you leave the lamp down there too long.

Because we have granite counter tops, I don’t want to work with anything so hot directly on top of them. I use a large wooden cutting board from Ikea to shield the counters beneath the warming box. It has a downward lip in front and an upward lip in the back, which are great for keeping everything where it’s supposed to be. I also have a butcher block and a marble slab beneath the Silpats I have set up on either side to pour hot sugar onto or work with pieces that are in progress.

Here’s some of the other equipment I use: a good pair of kitchen shears with all-metal blades; a sugar pump (more on that in a moment); disposable plastic condiment cups for mixing food color with water to add to the sugar; a small, very fine strainer for skimming impurities off of cooking sugar; a paring knife for shaping blown sugar; a natural bristle pastry brush to wash down the sides of the pot while cooking the sugar to avoid crystallization and a candy thermometer (I would much prefer to use a digital candy thermometer, but I haven’t been able to find any of the three I own since the kitchen remodel).

In the back of the photo, you can see an overflowing box of food service-grade gloves. These are nitrile gloves, which we’re trying out because that’s all that Costco had, but I’m going to go back to latex because the nitrile seems more brittle and prone to break than latex during contact with the hot sugar. Also, I have a number of silicone molds, which are great for using up extra sugar by pouring it into them and letting the sugar cool in that shape.

The sugar pump is the one thing that I splurged on and got the very best. Matfer’s sugar pump is the best one I know of, and that’s what I got as a Christmas or birthday present back when I was really into learning the craft. Matfer also makes an “economy” sugar pump, as does Paderno World Cuisine. I felt the more expensive one was worth it, but if I had to chose between having a sugar pump or not having a sugar pump, I’d go economy, but I’d make sure to get a one with a metal tip on the end if I could for the sake of being able to easily attach sugar to it.

The good news is that you can do blown sugar without a sugar pump at all. All you need is a foot of very thin copper pipe, like this, except it’s a lot cheaper if you just buy your copper pipe at the hardware store. It takes a little lung power to do it, but I did make all of the bubbles for the top of the wedding cake in my last post with just a copper pipe.

Another indispensable tool for any foodie’s kitchen is a blow torch. Don’t spend money on the wimpy little “culinary” or creme brulee torches. Get yourself down to the hardware store and get yourself a big-ass plumbing torch. I have both the skinnier, taller variety and the shorter, squatter one you see here. The reason the stout one is particularly good for sugar because it’s more stable when lit and left sitting on the counter while you work with both hands on a sugar flower. Blow torches are used all the time with sugar, for attaching pieces to each other, attaching sugar to a sugar pump, or bringing out a translucent surface on a piece of cast sugar, among many other things.

You will need a good, medium-sized sauce pan, preferably with a nice, heavy bottom, copper if you have it or can afford it. A kitchen scale is needed to measure out the proper quantities of sugar, water and (sometimes) glucose. A few Silpats are always useful, and I love having an extra large Silpat, not only for having plenty of room for the hot sugar to spread out on, but also for kneading and rolling out dough, sifting flour, etc. If you want to do blown sugar, a free-standing pet hair dryer is great for cooling your blown pieces under. If you don’t cool them quickly and evenly, they will deform thanks to gravity.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations

First, a comparison. This was the first showpiece I ever made:

And this is the one I made nine months later for my graduation portfolio review and reception:

The sugar technique on my cupcakes last week, as cute as I think they turned out, falls slightly closer to the first showpiece than the last on my ability spectrum, so I have some ground to make up.

In my defense, that first showpiece was not designed by me in any way, shape, or form, but the execution was all me (except for the ribbons, which look pretty good but were made by the instructor). Maybe it was a good thing that I really didn’t like the design or the colors, because at the time it took my mind off of how frustrated I was that I couldn’t make the sugar do what I wanted it to.

This was back during my first quarter of pastry school. Our chef instructor for that term offered three-day showpiece workshops out of his home, and I was really excited to take the chocolate one. He was also offering a sugar work workshop. I wasn’t sure that I was that interested in it, but Chris and I decided that I shouldn’t miss the opportunity to learn the skill, so I signed up for both the sugar and chocolate classes.

The sugar workshop came first. I went into it really looking forward to the next workshop when I’d get to work with chocolate, but sugar…well, either you love working with it or you don’t, and from what I’ve seen, your first impression is the one that sticks. If you’re going to bond with the sugar, it’s love at first sight. Or first pull, in this case. I think you have to have a certain type of personality, or maybe just naturally cold hands.

Whatever it was, I had it. I loved the way it moved, from a hot, fast pour to the slow stretches that folded layers of reflective sheen beneath its colorful surface. I loved the heat on my face, the slight sunburn I’d walk away with at the end of the day. I was frustrated with trying to pull petals for the simple flowers on that first showpiece, but on the second day, while making roses for our second showpiece of the workshop, it clicked.

This piece combines a number of different techniques. The peach on the left is blown sugar that was then painted and dusted with cornstarch to simulate peach fuzz, the pear is pressed sugar formed and dried in a silicone mold, and the log, leaves and roses are pulled sugar. The base is cast sugar that was poured into a depression in a container of regular granulated sugar to achieve the crystalline outer surface.

By this time, I was really enjoying myself. The next showpiece we did was a giant flower:

The petals are pastillage (which is vaguely like rolled fondant, but dries extremely hard), the stamens are tiny strings of pulled sugar that were trimmed and fused together, the base is a round of pressed sugar, the stem is sugar molded in a clear vinyl pipe that was cut away to remove it. It’s held up by more pieces of cast sugar that we made at the same time as the base for the previous piece. I’m not as much of a fan of working with pastillage as I am of sugar–it’s a pain to work with because it dries out so quickly–but I liked the way it looked on this piece.

This was the final piece we made that weekend, a blown sugar swan. (Ignore its beak…I couldn’t make it not look wonky.) That time, I made the ribbons myself.

The chef had equipment available to purchase. I was hooked, so a sugar station (an acrylic enclosure that suspends an adjustable heat lamp over a silicone mat pulled tight around a wooden frame like a painter’s canvas) came home with me. I started playing around with some of the techniques at home.

This is a little piece I made at home for my mother-in-law’s Mother’s Day present. She still has it behind the glass in her china cabinet, and I’m shocked at how well it’s held up over the years.

Learning how to work with sugar at the beginning of my pastry school experience was often useful to me in class, especially on this first cake I did for the wedding cake unit during our third quarter. I made the sugar bubbles on top and brought them in, since I didn’t want to lug all of my equipment to school. I wish I’d had time to make enough bubbles to decorate the lower tiers of the cake, especially considering I couldn’t get the icing color to match the sugar color thanks to the yellow undertone. That’s what you get when you want real butter in your buttercream.

During our last quarter in pastry school, we finally learned how to do some basic sugar work as part of the coursework. Fortunately, I was already ahead of the game thanks to the sugar workshop. This is the prettiest apple I’ve ever made. And this photo was taken about a minute before I dropped it. As a pastry cook or cake decorator, you have to get used to watching your hard work and artistry be destroyed and devoured in minutes. Sugar takes that to a completely different level, especially when it suddenly shatters into a million pieces for no apparent reason.

While everyone else was learning how to do sugar for the first time and trying to blow blobs of sugar into the fruit we were supposed to make, I finished early and messed around with extra sugar.

Still just messing around with scraps.

Later that quarter, we began to prepare for Portfolio, which was technically our big final project/portfolio review but mostly just a crowded pre-graduation reception for our friends and family. I spent months and months on my chocolate showpiece (another story for another time) and made what I thought was a very pretty little two-tiered cake, but what I got hundreds of compliments on was my sugar showpiece that I banged out over the course of three nights right before Portfolio.

For this showpiece, I was following directions from Sucre d’art, l’envers du décor (Sugarworks, Behind the Scenes) by Stéphane Glacier. This is a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in sugar decorations and showpieces. I have a few other professional books on the subject, but they’re all on the older, outdated side. This book shows gorgeous, modern, vivid, sleek work. Having made one of the showpieces from it, I can vouch for the directions (and their translation into English) being clear enough to follow. Even without all the information, the photos in the book were worth the price to me.

So, here is the first dolphin I used on the showpiece. (I’m aware that anatomically it’s not quite a dolphin, as Chris pointed out to me long ago. I was following directions, and that’s what it’s called in the book.) I made six dolphins in total, and this one won the beauty contest. I liked it’s personality, and it had the nicest curve to its body of all of them.

I thought the dolphins would be much more difficult to make than they were. The dolphin’s mouth, for example, is part of the blown sugar piece rather than just stuck on later. The line across where his eyes would be had to be marked in with a paring knife to control the shape as it expanded and cooled. But as I was working on them, the techniques really didn’t seem that hard at all, which means I don’t think I’d pushed myself far enough before that point. Or after that, since this was the last time I did anything substantial with sugar until last week.

Here I am airbrushing the color onto the dolphin. This is one of the few pictures I have of myself from pastry school, mostly because I thought this part was so cool that I needed to have a photo of it and planned ahead.

And here is the whole thing, finished and ready to be moved into place for the big day. Notice the curve of the dolphin’s body, the way it seems to ride the wave…

A moment after I took this photo, I picked the showpiece up and moved it to the next table over. As I set it down, very carefully, the dolphin shattered.

I nearly cried.

Fortunately, I had other dolphins, but none of them were anywhere close to the first one.

I want to pan down for a moment and focus on something other than the dolphin, because the crashing waves were very fun to make and very cool to look at. See the thin pieces of sugar, how they have bubbles in them? They’re made by shaking hot sugar down a piece of silicone paper (a piece of parchment paper that’s covered in silicone). Very easy to do, but very effective. There are also huge chunks of broken poured sugar holding the whole thing up and giving it a watery sort of depth. You can’t see it in this picture, but if you look up above at the top left of the big circle, you’ll notice that the colors even swirled in the same direction as the wave was supposed to be moving. I was quite proud of that.

At least the second dolphin looked pretty playful, as if he was leaping and twisting, about to dive back under the waves. In the end, I liked him too, even if he wasn’t the original. He did manage to stay intact through Portfolio, which is more than I can say for the first one.

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work Equipment
Battlestar Galactica Cupcakes with Sugar Decorations