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!

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.

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

Tonight, Battlestar Galactica’s final episode airs. While the quality hasn’t always been consistent, the miniseries pilot and the first season of the show (running into the first few episodes of the second season) had an excellent plot arc and some of the finest writing, acting and production I’ve ever seen on the small screen. Even my least favorite episodes have had their own flashes of brilliance. I’m very sad to see it go, but I can understand wanting to end the show intentionally instead of risking being canceled or just having the creative juices fizzle out.

I suggested to a couple of our friends that we should get together for a viewing party. That got me thinking that I’d like to make something special to commemorate the occasion. The inspiration that came to me was the mandala that Starbuck paints over and over again throughout both her life and the seasons of the show. She’s my favorite character, and this mandala has a lot of significance to the questions about who (and what) she is. Hopefully those remaining questions will be answered in the finale.

The mandala is one of the most artistic images in the show, and one of the ones that has the most impact. Humanity is struggling to survive in a fleet of spaceships that are falling apart. Much of the world of the show is grim and dark and grimy. There is little art, little color other than the bright, blood red lights associated with the Cylons. In contrast, Starbuck’s mandala jumps off the screen with its bold, primitive shape and its bright primary colors.

I didn’t have to think very hard as to what I wanted to do. I wanted to make the mandala out of pulled sugar, and from there I thought rainbow cupcakes could mirror the colors in the sugar decorations, echoing Starbuck’s repeated painting of the symbol on the show and generally looking cool.

The vanilla cupcake recipe I used came from The Whimsical Bakehouse, a fun cake decorating book that I’ve looked at many times but never cooked from. I liked the recipe, especially since it has an easy mixing method that’s different from what I’ve come across in the past. My one complaint is it calls for far too little vanilla. I suspected that was the case, but I’ve had so many problems baking cupcakes lately that I wanted to follow the recipe exactly to be sure they’d turn out. And they did, so I’m happy–very happy!–but next time I’ll at least double up on the vanilla.

The frosting was the one thing I couldn’t decide on until I started making it. It’s lemon meringue flavored. I just made my Swiss meringue recipe and added both orange and lemon extracts to compensate for the mild flavor of the cupcakes. (I learned that orange extract ups the flavor of lemon extract from the Martha Stewart recipe that eventually became the basis for my wedding cake.) I convinced myself that the frosting fit the theme because the mandala foreshadowed a big explosion, and the meringue got torched. A tenuous connection, but enough to go on.

This was the first time I’d played with pulled sugar in years, so I was pretty rusty. The mandalas are very thick–oh, wait, I meant them to be like that. So…they…could be…BSG lollipops. Two sweet treats in one! Right. Well, now that I have all of my equipment located, dusted off and wiped down, I hope to get back into the habit, because it’s one of my favorite things to do, and I used to be able to do it pretty well.

To any other BSG fans out there: what visual images from the show do you remember most vividly? Could you turn them into something edible? If you don’t watch the show, what dish or dessert could you be inspired to make by your favorite TV show?

Other Sugar Work Posts at Pie of the Tiger:
Sugar Work Lesson 1: Casting Sugar
Cadbury Creme Brul’egg
Sugar Work Equipment
Sugar Work (Pastry School Flashbacks)

Michael at Herbivoracious posted a write up of the dinner he put on at Cafe Flora this past Tuesday evening, which Baker Bee and I were lucky enough to attend.

The menu was based on Spanish flavors with a modern twist, and included things like savory churros with morel “hot chocolate” (pictured below, as well as my purse-sized digital camera could do) and apple-celery sorbet, both of which were unlike anything I’ve ever had and incredibly good. I was excited to hear that the baby turnip in the fideos (pictured above) came from the Whistling Train Farm, from whom we used to get a CSA share until we moved too far out of their delivery range.

 

He has a great run down of the inspiration behind each dish and links to recipes, so I urge you to check it out and be inspired yourself. I know that I’m going to try making the boyikos in the very near future (hopefully Sunday, to share with The Toasty Chef and Mr. T).

Not only was the food delicious, but the company was just as enjoyable, and we had fun meeting and talking to Michael and his wife, Dawn and Eric from The Wright Angle (don’t miss their resturant reviews, travel stories and beautiful photography–they’ve actually been to El Bulli), and everyone else at our end of the table. It was a real leap for me to invite myself along to a dinner where I didn’t know anyone, but I’m very, very glad I did.

A week and a half ago, Baker Bee and I threw our first flavor tripping party. It wasn’t our first experience with miracle fruit, but most of our guests were flavor tripping virgins. This was awesome, because in this case your first time is probably going to be the best, and if there’s anything more fun than flavor tripping yourself, it’s watching someone else’s eyes go big as they bite into a lemon wedge…and then seeing them immediately reach for another.

Miracle fruit is a little red berry from Africa, originally eaten by the local populace to make their food taste better, but now also a staple in the diets of urban foodies and inquisitive geeks elsewhere in the world. The berry itself doesn’t taste like much–or so I’ve heard, as I’ve never had a fresh one–but the results are, well, miraculous, thanks to a chemical in the berry called–get this–”miraculin”. When scientists start calling things miracles, you know you’re dealing with something truly special.

What the miraculin does is bind with your taste buds in such a way that sour foods taste sweet. Oh, they still taste sour, too, and you’ll feel your mouth ache from the acid after about a half hour of dashing back and forth to the fridge and pantry to find everything sour you own. But the sourer the food or drink is, the sweeter it becomes. Not only that, but the sweetness lets other flavors speak up that you’ve never noticed in the foods before. It’s pretty amazing, trippy, even–hence the they popularity of the term “flavor trip” for a miracle fruit tasting.

Sooner or later, you are going to try this. At least, you should. Not because all the other foodies are doing it, but because it’s one of those food experiences that will stick with you for the rest of your life. My memories of my first time are bright, vivid with color as well as taste. It’s like turning into a child again for a half hour or so…a child presented with a table full of unfamiliar foods that all turn out to taste like candy. You will be shocked. You will be surprised. Even knowing that it’s going to be an amazing experience, you’ll still be blown away by the first bite.

It’s best, though, to be prepared for your first flavor trip, so I’ll offer some advice and relate some of our findings so you can make the most of it.

Flavor Tripping 101

1. Acquire Your Miracle Fruit
The berries themselves are extremely perishable. You can find them for sale online sometimes, but they’re expensive and have to be used immediately. Luckily, miracle fruit also comes in a handy tablet form. The ones we get come ten to a blister pack, and unopened they have a shelf life of about a few months.

Be warned that at around a dollar a pop, even the tablets may seem a little expensive. But when you consider the price difference between Two Buck Chuck and a fine ice wine (we’ll come to this soon) or the price of admission to a movie these days, you get a lot of fun and flavor for that dollar. You can find some recommended suppliers here at My Flavor Trip.

2. Acquire Your Test Subjects
Never trip alone is a piece of advice that works here, too. What’s the fun of flipping out over the taste of a lime if you don’t have anyone to share it with? A party like the one we held last week is fun, but the first time we tried miracle fruit it was with two close friends who we share a lot of culinary adventures with, and I think a group of four to six people has its own advantages. With fewer people, you’re able to hear what everyone thinks of everything. With a large group you get a party atmosphere, hearing impressions here and there and getting lots of opinions on a few of the items.

Either way you decide to go, once you have your miracle fruit in hand, pick a time and place and invite your guests. If you’re having a lot of people over, you might want to ask people to kick in a dollar or two for the tablets and so on, or you can do what we did and ask everyone to bring something to try. You can even provide a list of suggested foods and drinks and have people pick from that.

Which brings us to…

3. Acquire Sourness in Many Forms

If all you have is a lemon and a bottle of vinegar, don’t put the tablet in your mouth just yet. After your first taste, you’re going to want to try as many things as possible, and if you aren’t well supplied you’ll end up trying some very strange things. So here is a list of things we’ve tried, with the caveat that everyone’s taste buds are different, and you might love something we didn’t care for or hate something we liked. There are a number of lists already on the internet of things to try with brief descriptions of what they might taste like, but in the interest of not being redundant I’m going to provide as much info as I can, including suggestions on how much to buy and how to serve it. Remember, some things you might not think of as sour actually have acid in them, which is all the miracle fruit needs to do its thing.

Fruit

Bananas: These were surprisingly good. The miracle fruit definitely brings out their sweet, creamy nature. I thought they tasted like banana Runts, and I wasn’t the only one to say that. You’ll only need one, unless you’re having a lot of people over. Slice it up and put it near the toothpicks.

Granny Smith Apples: Definitely sweeter, pleasantly (but not miraculously) so. One apple should be enough for everyone to try, even at a large party. Slice into small wedges just before you get started, or prevent it from browning with lemon juice or citric acid, which probably would amp up the sweetness here.

Kiwi: This turned too sweet for us. We’ve heard the same thing about pineapple.

Starfruit: I’ve never understood the point of starfruit, other than its striking look, because every one I’ve ever had has been extraordinarily bland. So I got one to see if miracle fruit made it taste edible to me. It did taste much better…but I can’t say I necessarily liked the flavor that was brought out. Still, they had a noticeable transformation and looked pretty in slices on the platter, so you might want to get one. I seem to remember all of it getting eaten.

Strawberries: Along with lemons and limes, these are a must-have in my opinion. Find the least ripe berries you can–look for white around the hulls–and they’ll taste like they were baked to the point of over-ripeness in the summer sun. Get at least two strawberries per person.

Watermelon: The miracle fruit improved the flavor, but not dramatically. Our watermelon was out of season to begin with and still tasted out of season with the miracle fruit. We had a tiny watermelon, and it was twice as much as we needed for our big group.

Citrus

These are the reliable stars of any flavor trip. In general, the best way to serve them is in wedges. When we first thought about having the party, I envisioned serving them as supremes or even sliced into cubes, but I realized that the surprise factor of the flavor would be directing in proportion to how visually apparent it was that a lemon was a lemon. The peel on the wedges also acts as an easy thing for people to pick the fruit up by, making them finger-food friendly.

Plan to slice each fruit into 12 to 16 wedges or so, depending on the size, and allot one and a half to two wedges per a guest if you’re serving a large variety of different foods, or two to three or more if you have a shorter list. You will at least want a lemon and lime, if nothing else.

Blood Oranges: These were the big hit at our party. The extra jolt of sweetness balances out the slightly more bitter and sour flavor these beauties usually have in comparison to regular oranges, and that extra sourness and bitterness also gives them a lot of flavor once the sweetness is added.

Grapefruit: Yummy, yummy candy. You can still taste the grapefruit, but most people who hate grapefruit will suddenly love it.

Lemons: These get very, very sweet and you’ll want to eat more than one, most likely. Think lemon drops! In fact, I did think Lemon Drop one night and mixed lemon juice and vodka together, and it was delicious but too sweet. I think either more vodka (careful there) or some club soda would dilute it nicely next time.

Limes: Just like lemons, only better. Okay, okay, that’s just a personal preference for lime flavor, but really they’re just as good.

Oranges: Candy. Not a necessary thing to have, as some oranges can be awfully sweet to begin with, but they might be good as a benchmark food.

Seville Oranges: Sweet…but wow, still bitter and sour! Worth trying if you can pick one up. These are the oranges that marmalade is made from.

Dairy

I didn’t see anything about this on the internet when we were searching for info a few months ago, so I consider this a prime piece of advice: wait to try dairy (or anything with fat in it) until you’ve tried everything else. Our theory is that the fat kills the trip by coating your taste buds in fat. On the bright side, if for some reason one of your guests really doesn’t like the miracle fruit and wants it to stop now (why this would be, I don’t know…everyone loves it in my experience), you can hand them a tub of sour cream.

Because of this fact, and the fact that we weren’t impressed with most of the dairy we tried, we haven’t really experimented much in this area with the miracle fruit, but I can tell you about the things we have tried.

Chevre or Cream Cheese: Both of these are touted on some lists to taste like cheesecake. To us, they didn’t. I don’t remember if I tasted the chevre myself, but the cream cheese just tasted like cream cheese without the tang, i.e. bland and not very good at all.

Sour Cream: This, however, does taste like cheesecake. Try dipping an under-ripe strawberry in it! You can cut down on the dairy effect by using lowfat sour cream. I recommend not doing what we obviously did from the picture at the head of this post and take the time to put the sour cream out of the tub and into a bowl if a lot of people are going to be breathing on it. (Fortunately, we were near the end of that tub anyway.)

Other Cheeses: I vaguely recall trying the blue cheese we had out at the party, and I think it tasted pretty good. But I can’t quite remember.

Beverages:

You don’t need to plan on a full bottle of each beer or whatever for each person. Just get one or two bottles of each thing you want to try and provide small glasses for people to sample them in. Those glasses will be handy when people start raiding your cupboard for vinegar.

Beer: Baker Bee says that the IPA he tried tasted like caramel soda…well, bitter caramel soda.

Two Buck Chuck (Charles Shaw Chardonnay): The miracle fruit makes this cheaper than cheap bottle from Trader Joe’s taste like a $40 ice wine. No joke.

Young’s Double Chocolate Stout: This was one of the very first things I tried with miracle fruit, and I still get excited about it: it tastes like a chocolate milk-flavored soda. You can often find it at Trader Joe’s. Make sure to get the carbonated bottled version, not the canned nitro one, because the carbonic acid adds more sour for the miracle fruit to convert to sweet.

And don’t forget mixed drinks, like the Lemon Drop I talked about above made with just lemon juice and vodka!

Other

Chocolate: This didn’t work for us. We tried unsweetened chocolate, but there wasn’t enough acid for it to do anything. Also, the fat content had the same dulling effect I warned about with dairy above, and probably was responsible for ending our first flavor trip.

Dill Pickles: They tasted like sweet pickles, which would be good if you like sweet pickles. Not so much if you don’t.

Hot Sauce: I’ve read online that Tabasco sauce tastes like hot doughnut glaze. I would really like to be able to confirm this because how cool would that be, but we keep forgetting to try it! However, we have tried some other hot sauces, and they definitely get sweet.

Vinegar: You should try this…once. And possibly not swallow. It tastes sweet in your mouth, but your throat knows it’s vinegar when it goes down. Just get a few bottles out from the start because invariably someone (most likely male) will have to try it.

Salsa: I tried the pico de gallo we had out with the non-miracle fruit food, and the miracle fruit made it taste like a mango salsa without the mango flavor. It was pretty good, but I suspect the chip I ate it on may have started the downward curve of the miracle fruit’s effects, like I described with dairy.

Sushi: I haven’t tried this myself, but there was sushi at the party because one of our friends had read online that the miracle fruit brings out the natural sweetness of the fish. Baker Bee, who tried both tuna and salmon, says that it tasted like sweet sushi, and that it didn’t taste bad, but sushi is better savory. The fish itself tasted better, but the rest of the sushi didn’t.

4. How to Do the Actual Tasting

Give everyone a tablet, and instruct them to swirl it around in their mouth for at least a minute before swallowing. It has a sweet, candy-like flavor, so don’t worry about it tasting bad. Baker Bee likes to chew his up and then swish it around his mouth, while I tend to think that moving the whole tablet around on my tongue does a better job of coating my tastebuds. Both ways seem to work equally well, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be stubborn about sticking to mine.

Once the minute has past…dig in! It usually lasts about 30 minutes for us, depending on what we eat when, so the clock is ticking.

5. Record Your Observations at My Flavor Trip

We enjoyed our first miracle fruit tasting so much that Baker Bee decided to set up this site for people to share their experiences and exchange information about what different foods taste like. It doesn’t look like much yet, but it has both a wiki and a forum, and we’d really like to see it take off. So if you do have a miracle fruit tasting, please come back and go post on the site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swiss Meringue
(printable version)

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

Procedure

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

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

These were hugely popular with everyone who received them. How could they not be, looking that adorably festive on a cookie tray? Everyone wanted to know what they were, and thanks to Yard’s engaging storytelling in her second book, I had details to give them on their Italian origins.

They’re very pretty, of course, but they taste much more sophisticated than you might expect. It helped that I used a couple of aging bars of very dark Michel Cluizel (my absolute favorite chocolatier in the world) chocolate in the glaze, but the cake’s sweetness and almond flavor are very light and subtle. It was only when I tasted one that I realized there was no almond flavoring in the recipe, only almond paste and almond flour, and I think from the photo in the book I was expecting something with the concentrated flavor of the extract.

The only other modification I did to the recipe was to add apricot brandy to the simple syrup I soaked the cake layers with. In my opinion, that was an Incredibly Good Call, and I would even add a little more next time. The whole effect of the “cookie” was good, but the almond cake needed something extra to stand up well against the chocolate glaze. That could’ve been the due to the chocolate I used, but I wouldn’t want to use anything less potent in the future.

I’ll definitely make these again–I’ll probably have to, considering how much everyone liked them. Next year, though, I’ll cut them in smaller pieces. Mine were pretty small, but I found these were best one bite at a time, and more than once I noticed people wanting to split one.

My best friend loves unicorns, and when I was going through my cookie cutters, I found a unicorn one. After my success with the Dala horses, I wanted to try one in a similar style. There’s another photo of him here.

(It seems like an odd connection, and it was to me in the making of it, but I just remembered that the unicorn was a symbol for Christ in the Middle Ages, so it’s not as incongruous as I thought.)

The more ornaments I decorated, the more they started to look like hot air balloons. I think that will be one of my next cookie cutter shapes.

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

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


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

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

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

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

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