choux

Probably because white chocolate has a lot more sugar than dark chocolate and it is the sugar that absorbs the water.

The Greek place at Lonsdale Quay. George's, I think. Warm toasty pita with lamb or beef, lettuce, tomato, onion and the best tziziki anywhere. Spicy sauce in there too. Oh God I'm drooling. As an aftereffect, if you have a Pepsi with it, you get the absolute best tasting burps!!!

Try just packagenakazawa.com. Their prices include the plastic trays and a tissue paper insert.

Famous foods on Kingsway definitely has graham flour.

I've used Pierre Herme's recipe many times. I don't find it any more difficult to have the butter on the outside and the results are great.

If it's just for practice, why not just use the outside of a turned over cake pan? Washable and re-usable.

I usually dump the butter into the mixer in big chunks and let the mixer do the work. As long as the butter is pretty soft it's worked OK for me so far!

I was going to say that you didn't do anything wrong, too. When I make an egg white buttercream, I just walk away when I add the butter. It looks so nasty and curdled. but if you whip the hell out of it, it will come together. Buttercream does not like to be watched.

I've never tempered colored cocoa butter and it always works just fine. I've certainly heated it way beyond 86* in my microwave with no ill effects. The only temperature related problem I've had is when the cocoa butter starts to get too cool and hardens up. Don't be afraid.

I love using Mycryo. For dark chocolate, it works so well. With milk chocolate, Ive noticed that sometimes the Mycryo clumps up and I get balls of cocoa butter in the chocolate. Any ideas??

Hope you got in to Big Smoke BBQ before it closed on Saturday. I only went once, and was not really that impressed. Good poutine, but I think he was stretched thin because his menu was so huge.

A great way to check if your choco chip dough will be easily scoopable is to poke at it and it should not stick to your finger. If it does, it's too soft and you should add a bit more flour, until it doesn't stick.

Sour cream coffee cake is high on the list. Mocha whipped cream is so easy and yummy. I've always had good luck with her genoises, especially the variation of subbing hazelnut oil for the butter in a chocolate genoise.

Pierre Herme's puff recipe uses the butter mix on the outside. It's in his chocolate book and it works really well. You mix the butter with a bit of flour and the flour mix has a bit of butter. It's not hard to make at all.

Before you order from DR, check the shipping rates. They wanted to charge over $30 to send 2 molds across Canada.

I have been using www.packagenakazawa.com. The boxes are really simple and classy. They come with plastic blisters and tissue papers. They are a little hard to figure out how to fold though. I got a shipment of boxes with no instructions on how to put the scored peices of cardboard together. It took a couple of hours, but now I can fold them with my eyes shut!

I think the reason for the difference in the 2 tarts is the peaches. Some are really juicy and some are less so. Even though you spoones them uot and left juices behind, they could have released more in the oven. Fruit is pretty variable, and you never really get the same thing twice. I usually use a bit of cornstarch as a thickener. I'll have to try cookies, gingersnaps sound pretty good!

Microwave for sure! They tend to float in a hot water bath, and you don't want to get water into them. My microwave has a turntable and I lay them on their sides and let them roll around a bit.(my microwave isn't level so it works great) But a couple minutes for 1 bottle will work and I've done up to 4 in about 4 minutes. Keep checking and shaking them. Let us know how it goes!!

Wow, I'm surprised so many people don't have a preference on canned tomatoes. I've tried many brands and always come back to the same one. It actually tastes like tomatoes and has a thick red juice rather than some insipid watery stuff. While it is not actually more expensive than the regular store brands, I have to go far out of my way to get them and I won't use any other brand. I usually buy a case at a time. The single thing that I couldn't skimp on would be toilet paper. I hate that thin and scratchy stuff! Soft and fluffy for me!!

The Wigan Peir in Squamish is pretty good. Nice light batter. The fries aren't anything to write home about though, just a delivery vehicle for tartar sauce. It's behind the Best Western and Chevron station.

Another thing I thought of , when I clean the brush by running hot water through it, then just spray it with nothing but air sucking in to dry it off. I had been worried that the airbrush cuased pressure to build up in the jar, and taking the jar off without releasing the pressure from the can would cause a boom. This fear was allayed when I didn't screw the jar on properly and it fell off during spraying and nothing happened. So cleaning by feeding hot water through is pretty easy.

There isn't really that much overspray. It sort of clouds up in a mist, but I haven't had trouble with a mess. I leave the colour that gets on the rim of the mould there. When you fill with chocolate and then scrape off the excess, it comes off. I've had no trouble with putting the scraped colour in my bowl of tempered chocolate. It just mixes in and disperses so there are no streaks. When I have tried to use a bench scraper to get rid of the colour on the rim before there is chocolate in it, it tends to curl up and fall in the cavities and then you need to pick it out. PITA. Please try the PCB colours. They are wonderful. I ordered some stuff from the PCB website last Friday and got it on Thursday!! From France!! (can you tell I'm impressed with the speed of shipping?) To clean my Badger 250, I usually get a cup of hot water and dip the intake into it and spray into the sink. Works great. I have a few cups, but you can wash them and use them right away as long as they are dry. Airbrushing is fun. Don't panic.

Ming Wo has a lot of colours, gel and powder. Another place to try for cake decorating stuff is the Scoop'n'Save in Surrey on the King George Hwy. Weird name, but they have a lot of cool stuff. Lots of shiny powders. Edited to say: the Ming Wo in Capilano Mall is the one I usually go to, they do have a good array of cake stuff.

On a somewhat food-related note: If you get gum in your hair, rub in some peanut butter to get it out. Then find something to get the peanut butter out of your hair. Seriously, PB really does work on a lot of sticky, gummy stuff.

Whole Foods carries Scharffen Berger and Valrhona. The prices are not bad, cheaper than the Gourmet Warehouse.