JeanneCake

OMG that FB forum is FULL of people experimenting with Valentine's designs. The last post I read was someone struggling to get the shell out of a heart shaped silicone mold (she claims they keep breaking) and people are telling her she should go to the dollar store and get these plastic hearts meant for packaging and use those as molds. Another person chimed in that they were doing round red shells and adding (🤢) red velvet instant pudding in place of the cocoa mix. For the love of God people .....! LOL I do have to admit that I was surprised we sold another 50 this week to repeat customers, who asked if we were going to keep making them through the winter.......

If you were foolish enough to consider exploring how to make a pink hot chocolate, how would you go about it? Use Ruby chocolate, ground up? A touch of powdered color in a Ghiradelli white cocoa mix? I haven't tasted the ruby chocolate to know if it's any good or not, so this could be a fool's errand.

I'm still on the raft! Final count 909 (in the last two weeks). I expect demand to fall off drastically for this and we will probably only make 20 or so a week if that. I had been planning to do different flavors for the winter months (Jan/Feb/March) but I'm not sure about that any more. I wanted to do one with colored marshmallows and a superhero one. Or a Dr Seuss one - a lot of elementary schools do a reading festival around the birthday of Theodore Geisel - at least the ones around here did when I had a child in elementary school! I cannot tell you how excited I am to know that I can sleep in tomorrow morning (no young children in our house At the moment I am feasting on lobster dip, prosecco and crackers. Eventually I will begin dinner which is a sort of seafood fra diavolo (hitting four fish instead of 7) and go to sleep!

It's worse than Cabbage Patch dolls. Next year you'll find them in the local drugstore, made by Nestle. I am working 14 hour days, coming home and updating our order sheets, sleeping 6 hours and repeating. I've run out of labels, containers (I'm actually now using clear plastic drink cups with lids because everywhere is out of the 3x3x3 clear boxes.) and I am almost out of chocolate. I stopped counting at 600. I'm so tired I can't even cry.

What does the inside of the pan look like and have you ever used crisco (applied with a brush) and floured the pan before baking? Edited to add: Have you ever baked a non-gingerbread recipe in the pan, just to see what happens?

This trend is .... wow. I'm grateful for it because it's bringing in business I might not otherwise have; everyone wants one/some and I am literally making 50-75 of them a day. And selling out. Mine are not even half as pretty as the ones in those articles Being the competitive spirit I am, you can bet that NEXT year mine will be prettier! (I've since corrected the label to be jtcakes.com instead of jtcakes) @pastrygirl, thanks the comparison to crystallization of sugar helped! @JimD thank you for your message; I took a look at it and it made a lot of sense - I will have lots of questions after Christmas! @Kerry Beal I HAVE SILK! I got Felchlin cocoa butter on Saturday, and I have silk today! 🥰

Thanks @curls for the video link! I thought I was buying polycarbonate molds from D&R a few weeks back during the black friday sale (there was no picture of the molds on the site and not ever having bought molds before, what did I know!) but they are flimsy plastic so I am not using them and hoping to return them but haven't heard back yet. I also got some plastic molds from a candy supply store before they sold out so that's what I'm using. Anyway, today I just had to do something - we cannot keep up with demand for these things. So, I melted some Felchlin ultra molding and did exactly what he describes - I fill the molds with a 2 oz ladle, and kind of dunk it in so the chocolate comes up to the rim. Then when all the molds are filled, I turn it over on a grid to let the excess drip; slide it off the grid, clean the edge and then leave it upside down on a piece of parchment while I fill the rest of the molds. then I repeat it so it's more sturdy. I only have to do it once with the tempered chocolate though; this molding stuff seems more "fragile" for want of a better word. Sealing them (at least for me!) is the easy part. I don't understand this cocoa butter issue, though. My AUI rep is very nice and more than willing to work through the issue; but they are already saying, well no one else has complained .... and personally I want to say, well how many of your other customers have an EZ Temper? And would you guys like to tell the Chocolate Doctor she is wrong? Yeah. Didn't think so. I don't know how you guys do this. I'm determined to get it but OMG .... temps, crystals, seeding. I flunked Algebra twice in high school (aced Geometry with straight As though!) and I feel like I'm back in math class! 🤣

Thanks, Kerry, I'm glad you have a chance to take a little break from the pandemic 😁 I'm getting some Felchlin cocoa butter. What i had was Orchid, and it was on sale..... I've asked for help figuring out the age and how it was stored and they are responsive. There is no one around me that has anything, and this tempering by hand is confusing (to me) and time consuming. I've gotten it right, which is encouraging but I have so many questions! I'm using a really viscous 58% and it takes an hour just to make shells for about 2 dz bombs. I have a long long road ahead as far as chocolate goes!

I am clearly doing something wrong - I bought a case of cocoa butter three or four weeks ago from AUI, powered up the EZ and left two containers in for 24 hours. Very lumpy so left it in another day. Still lumpy. Took them out, and forgot to put them back in for the day so the next day they went back in - still very seed-y, lump-y looking. No change after 24 hours. In desperation I melted it all out (took the CB to 93dF) put it back in to see what would happen. (I haven't changed the default temp setting, it's at 33.8) I've lost track of how long it's been in there but this is what it looked like at the end of the day yesterday. These *$&%^ chocolate bombs are killing me - I don't know how to temper chocolate to begin with and learning on a curve during a holiday season in the midst of a pandemic is probably not the best time to learn something new And I am learning that working clean when working with chocolate is simply not possible as a novice 🤣. What am I doing wrong? Should I have melted the CB to a higher temp? Or just wait longer? Edited to add: I don't really want to bother Kerry with such a trivial question because she's busy saving our lives in the pandemic so I'm hoping someone else has had this issue and can tell me what worked for them.

that makes me remember a line on several menus from various wedding venues "blah blah ... cake decorated to your perfection" 🙄 Seriously? WHO'S "perfection"??? Isn't that why there's a website dedicated to cake fails (cake wrecks) - that was somebody's "perfection" too 😄

Julia Child didn't refer to herself as a Chef; she in fact made mention of the fact that she'd never led a brigade so should not be referred to as Chef. The word that's getting to me is "artisanal" - not everything is artisanal 🤨 but I see it in regular rotation. I'm not saying there aren't artisanal producers but the term is being applied very loosely IMHO.

Yeah, where did you get the grilling bags? Those look great ....

All of our distributors (who ship to MA from NY, MD and across the country) have warned us that the carriers are "experiencing higher than usual volume" and to count on shipping delays. I'm not sure about the USPS. Better to plan for 3-5 days shipping just in case. Have you sent out test packages to see how things arrive? I think American buttercream made with all shortening is safer than a shortening/butter mix. Some of those UPS trucks are jammed to the gills with stuff so even if it's freezing out, your packages should be somewhat insulated against wild temp swings!

I succumbed to the hot chocolate bomb madness. I just ordered molds from D&R (2.75 inch), hopefully they'll be here in a week or so. I'm ordering cocoa butter from AUI this week and will make silk and then immerse myself this weekend learning. We use chocoa forte 60% as our basic, everyday ingredient chocolate and that's what I'm going to use to get the technique down. (we save the good stuff for mousse and ganache). So, the dark side beckons and I'm answering the call Please be patient with me as I navigate this new obsession.....I'm sure I'm going to be asking questions!!

@Shelby where could I find the tart recipe? I might want to try that!

There are members posting pictures (not their own) and asking how to make them because they've posted said pictures to their pages and now need advice on fulfilling orders for hundreds..

I do like your snowballs. I saw Ashley Vicos' chocolate bombs on her FB page (she's opened a confectionery shop in ATL) and she used chocolate scribbles on hers. Maybe I will just stick with marshmallows and leave well enough alone!

Would you make the half spheres in a solid plastic mold or a silicone one? I have plenty of silicone molds (the flexi sheets that have 20 or 30 forms in them) from making mousse bombes; I have never tried to mold chocolate in one. How would you keep the chocolate from cracking when you try to unmold it? And not have a flat spot on the bottom from resting on a sheet pan while it sets up?

A friend showed me a video clip of a hot cocoa bomb early this week; I'd never seen one before. And now it seems as if I'm seeing them all over social media. Is this a relatively new gimmick? It seems as if you just fill two half spheres with cocoa powder, flavoring and those tiny marshmallows then seal them .... maybe it's a thing for the upcoming winter months to keep people kids amused during a snow storm? Does anyone make them? What size are they?

I had a random thought about your ingredients - even though the brand hasn't changed, it's possible the formulation of the (sweetened condensed milk) could have been changed by the manufacturer. Perhaps it might be worth subbing a different brand of one of your ingredients to see if there's any difference? Or perhaps the pan you're making it in has new scratches/dents/dings (I once made meringue buttercream at a friend's bakery, using a pitted aluminum pan and the sugar syrup crystallized for the first time in the 5 or so years I'd been making buttercream ......)

We did a turkey breast roll one year (in addition to the roasted bird.) I'd wanted to try this recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's Melting Pot cookbook; it was rolled with proscuitto, herbs and something else. I remember it being delicious but we didn't end up repeating it for Thanksgiving; we had it a few times at Easter alongside lamb. That brings me to another food memory - the sausage bread from the Silver Palate cookbook. I used to have to make several - one for my mom, one for my best friend's husband and one for us to serve. It calls for an insane amount of herbs (chervil, thyme, rosemary, oregano, fennel, basil....) and some smoked mozzarella along with sausage. I always had to add more sausage to satisfy the masses. Maybe I'll surprise the husband and make it this year

Wow. Just, wow! ❤️

I knew I was living on borrowed time with our 24 year old fridge; it came with the (new) house and we haven't had any problems with it although my husband had been saying he thought it was sounding different. It's in a tight spot, with a useless cabinet above it and not very wide so our options were limited. Our appliance store was upfront with us in July when I ordered a new one, that it would likely be a minimum of 2 months. I also wanted a second freezer for the basement, they said freezers are selling out the day they come in. Both luckily arrived and were delivered last week. Neither of them are fancy, maybe they'd be called mid-range. I can't say I'm wild about the freezer (I'm not crazy about the way the shelves are arranged and I do not need storage on the door but so be it) but it's here and I can start to fill it. Even if there is no second wave, I'm trying not to have to venture out for Dec/Jan/Feb and make do with what I can freeze. I hate driving in the snow!

Happy Birthday @Shelby! Hope you have a GREAT day! 🥰

McVities! Thank you, I'd forgotten the name. And the supermarket that does curbside pick up stocks them (AND hobnobs too!) so thank you @AnnaN and @liuzhou - they're in my cart!