lemon curd

I've been to Sugar Arts a few times to buy bulk chocolate (Cacao Barry), cocoa butter, chocolate moulds and pastry equipment/supplies. It's been about a year since I was there last. It's generally not a place that you can just drop by - I've always made an appointment a head of time. I don't know too much about his background but he is very knowledgeable and talented in chocolate and sugar work. He has some very interesting showpieces on display in his office. I have contact information for him if you are interested.

I work with chocolate molds several days a week and assuming you are tempering properly here's a few suggestions that I hope will help. 1. Just warm the mold enough to take the cool edge off. My guess is that if it is 70 deg you may not need to warm your molds at all. The cheeks not setting could well be because the molds have been overwarmed. 2. Make sure the molds are well polished before you use them to get rid of any residual cocoa butter. This will help with making sure you don't get dull or mat patches on the final product. At work we have special polishing clothes, but at home most people use cotton balls to do this. 3. After filling the mold and tapping to get rid of air bubbles let the filled mold sit out just until the chocolate sets around the edges (we usually do this in a slightly air conditioned environment but my guess is that your fan set-up would work well for this). Then put the filled mold into the fridge until the chocolate releases from the mold. 4. I don't have experience with cracking but Jean Pierre Wybauw in Fine Chocolate Great Experience, says this can be avoided by a. making sure the chocolate is slightly solidified before placing it in cooling. b. ensure the proper cooling temperature. c. if you are using double molds, removing the clamps before the chocolate gets too solid. Good luck and I look forward to reading suggestions from others.

I bought dried sour cherries last weekend from Galloway's. The 454g package was $11.50.

I'm pretty sure that the Duby's don't have a retail location. Last time I looked at their website all their prices were in $US which I thought was rather interesting for a Canadian company.

My understanding with butter is that it has the opposite type of emulsion as the ganache (i.e. butter has fat in the continuous phase and water in the dispersed phase). This tends to 'challenge' the ganache when you add it. I believe that the temperature of the butter and when you add the butter also plays a role. If the butter is at room temperature it is less likely to cause the ganache to separate. Also if the butter is added in small amounts just after whisking the chocolate and hot cream together, the success rate also improves. I'd be interested to hear if others use this method for adding butter or have some other approach.

I've was reading through some information on ganaches last night and my understanding is that if you add hot cream to the chocolate, it melts the chocolate more slowly and gives you a better chance of getting a proper emulsification. A proper emulsification means a more stable phase of ganache where the continuous phase is a water/sugar solution (the water comes from the cream) and the dispersed phase is the fat (fat from the cream and the cocoa butter). If you melt the chocolate first, your chances of success may not be as good. Other factors increasing the chances of not getting the most stable phase include a high chocolate to cream ratio, high sugar ratio, and when butter is added. I'm still in the learning stages, but hope this helps and if someone else can add more please do! BTW I was out for dinner last night and my dessert was a chestnut rum tart with a manjari ganache/sauce. When it was served to me the ganache/sauce was split (argh!) and I wanted to figure out what was going on and thought I'd pass on what I learned.

Patrick - as usual you are #1 with how absolutely amazing your baking looks! Great job!

City Food's latest online Dine & Dash includes a write-up on Lilykate.

This thread has had me pondering over the last few days about neat places I might like to work. Most days I feel like I already have that dream job , but here's a few thoughts... 1. Pastry chef at an Okanogan winery restaurant like Mission Hill. 2. Working on wedding cakes doing unique designs and sugar work. A few weeks ago there was a section in the Vancouver Sun on wedding cakes that unfortunately I recycled. I can't remember the cake decorators featured, but this one that I found online caught my attention.

My first restaurant job was La Folie in White Rock, after finishing the culinary program at Dubrulle (sadly La Folie is no longer around). This is a second career for me after slaving it out for 16 years as an engineer. I have profound respect for those who started out young in the restaurant business and have stuck with it!

Everyone's mousse's and tarts look so great! I'm continually inspired to keep trying more recipes. Here's my Pave - I was really pleased with how it turned out. I made the pave for an informal Vancouver eGullet gathering to watch ICA Morimoto vs Feenie. I didn't have the right size pans so I made an 8x8 inch cake and kept it that size for applying the ganache/decorating. I had a bit of ganache left over but not too much. I also made a apricot/passion coulis to go with it and apricot/passion fruit pate as well. After SethG's comments on the Korova Cookies from Paris Sweet's, I think they will be my next project.

I ended up doing two projects for Valentines. The first was some heart shaped chocolates and the second was JSkilling's decorated heart cookies. I'm a little disappointed with my decorating skills on the cookies - I used powdered meringue and found it a bit challenging to get the right consistency and really do a professional decorating job. After trying these I also have even more admiration for JSkilling's decorating skills! Here's some pictures:

Patrick S - as usual your baking looks amazing and your pictures are so clear and crisp that I just want to take a spoon and reach in for a taste! I've never made Sticky Toffee pudding so I look forward to reading everyone's thoughts!

I made my cocoa cake for the Pave today. I ended up baking it in an double height 8x8 inch square pan (two loaves in one sort of...) which certainly increased the baking time but seem to work well. It is now in the freezer and I'll be putting it together in two weeks. In the meantime, I was wondering if any one who has sampled the Pave has suggestions regarding what would go with it.. some kind of ice cream...a passion/apricot coulis.... or it is better simply served by itself?

I just finished baking the heart shaped cookies using JSkilling's recipe and I'm very pleased with the results. The flavour is better than the typical 'decorator' cookie and the parchment paper technique also worked really well (less flour mess). I plan to freeze the baked cookies and then will decorate them next weekend.

Thanks for the tip. I figured the toothpick route was the technique but wasn't sure if you did the dots first or the base. I'm also planning to do the icing with meringue powder which is a product I've never used before - hopefully all will work out OK.

JSkilling - Thanks so much for posting your recipe! I wasn't quite brave enough to ask (so thanks to sarah o for asking also). I thought your decorated heart and snowflake cookies were absolutely gorgeous! You've kindly provided me with a Valentine project. After reading all the posts, I thought I'd try diluting the royal icing to flooding consistency with the corn syrup and putting them under a lamp to help with the shine. Thanks again!

Art Culinare's fall issue 2004 has a 12 page section on savory chocolate.

Gary your two expensive wishes are the same as mine. I'd also love to have a tempering machine and guitar cutter. On the less expensive list are cake rings.

It took me a while to send off my 5.3L LC Round Oven and request a warranty replacement due to the crazing. I'm happy to announce that my new LC (5.3L) arrived yesterday by Purolator. I received a reply within 24 hours on my initial email query about where to send my LC for replacement (in Canada). It then took a little under three weeks from when I mailed my LC until a new arrived from South Carolina. I'm one very satisfied customer!

I totally agree about the stiff dough. My friend and I made 4 batches of the sable before the Christmas holiday as part of our holiday cookie box. Between the two of us, we bursted one very sturdy pastry bag and ended up with two very sore forearms. We added orange zest to the dough and garnished with candied orange peel. I liked the texture of the cookie and the piped cookie makes for very nice visual attraction. However, I would need some convincing before making this recipe again. ← So is everyone saying that the disposable bags are likely to burst and I need to get a canvas bag to do these? I really like the visual appeal and want to try them at some point. ← I piped the sables with a Wilton decorating bag with success (another option to canvas bags). Everyone's baking looks so good - it keeps on inspiring me to do more recipes from this book!

I made the Viennese Chocolate Sables yesterday. The recipe warns that the dough is stiff to pipe which is certainly true! Mine ended up just a little bigger than the recommended size of 2" x 1 1/4" but I got less than half of the recipe yield of 65 cookies. The Pave is still on my ToDo list but I will wait till mid February and bake it for some eGullet friends (likely when Rob Feenie of Vancouver fame is on Iron Chef America). Patrick S has motivated me to try the mousse in the interim. Great job on the mousse and the picture taking Patrick S!

I used writing chocolate at cooking school, but haven't made much use of it since. The kind we used is made in Switzerland by a company called Felchilin and is called Scrivosa. It contains "sugar, cocoa powder, hardened peanut oil, emulsifier, and vanillin". You melt it to 40 deg C/ 104 deg F and as with chocolate you have to be careful that you don't get any water in it when you are melting it. The only benefit I found was that it was slightly easier to pipe due to its consistency (but this may be only true when you first start out). For the second part of our course we switched to tempering chocolate for writing and once you got used to the different consistency, I can't really see the benefit of using special writing chocolate (especially one that has peanut oil in it). A 2 lbs 12 oz container cost $28.10 CDN (two years ago).

I just bought Dorie's 'Paris Sweets' book. One of the recipes is Korova Cookies (Pierre Herme origin) which are described as sable-like with bittersweet chocolate bits, sliced from logs and then baked. Could this perhaps be one of the recipes you described?

There's two sable recipes in the 'Chocolate Desserts' book, Viennese Chocolate sables and Hazelnut Chocolate sables. SethG (24 Nov) and kthull (6 Dec) and albiston (6 Dec) have pictures of the hazelnut sables they made in this thread. albiston (6 Dec) also has a picture posted of the Vienesse sables.