Test Cherry #1

 
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Test Cherry: Day One
Originally uploaded by the other tiger

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

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

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

Chocolate-Covered Cherries, Part 1

 
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Printable Recipe

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

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

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

Snow Day Spaghetti

 
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In Seattle, snow is as rare as rain is common. Possibly more so, seeing as our reputation as a rainy city is partially true and partially a fable told and retold to Californians in an effort to keep them from moving to the area (judging from the traffic–and the fact that I’m married to a former Californian–it hasn’t worked as well as we hoped). When we do get snow, the streets are merely wet by evening, icy by midnight, and the snow by the roadside is melted by the next afternoon. We get even less here, sheltered in a narrow band between the backside of a hill and Lake Washington. As a child, I remember it snowing two or three times a year, with at least one snow day thrown in, but the climate has changed since then, and we generally only see one sticking snowfall a year, or two at the most.

Someone should tell all of that to the seven inches that’s set up camp in my yard, and the ice packed onto every roadway. It’s overstayed its welcome.

Oh, it was a fun guest on Thursday when it all fell in a matter of hours. The whole day took on the feel of a real snow day, complete with powdery snowman snow, another rarity in our region. Our snowballs usually crumble or pack down to nothing but lethal ice. Baker Bee was off work and baking Portuguese sweet bread from The Bread Baker’s Apprentice (which makes the best toast and French toast I’ve ever had, especially when topped with my dad’s apple butter–we went through a whole jar on two loaves), and a couple of snowed-in friends stopped off in the middle of a walk for rest and a nice Carbonated drink. I continued reaquainting myself with tools and supplies from pastry school and cake decorating. Opening the tubs that had been gathering dust in the spare bedroom for far too long now was enough like tearing into Christmas presents to infuse the day with a festive spirit. It was the first snow day I’ve had as an adult that really felt like a snow day. Continue reading →