pastrygirl

If you want to keep the chunks, maybe just add more of the pineapple puree so you're adding enough liquid and see what happens. 240g? Also, is your puree raw? If so, that may be part of why it takes so long to cook. Try bringing your chunky puree to a boil to start breaking down all the cells and releasing all the juices instead of waiting for that to happen in the caramel. I haven't cooked with pineapple in a while, but I vaguely recall caramelizing the fresh fruit for a dessert in the past. Despite how fibrous pineapple seems, it is quite juicy and cooks down a lot once you add heat and sugar.

Do you strain your puree or is it pretty thick? Commercial fruit purees are pretty runny, and will have a higher water content. If you have a lot more fiber/pulp in yours, it could be throwing off the proportion of water. Though with cooking to a temp that shouldn't matter so much, but excess plant mass might contribute to the scorching. I dunno, wild guess - maybe try it with canned pineapple juice, or reduced pineapple juice? Or strain your puree through a chinoise if you don't already. Perfect puree has a caramelized pineapple, which is sort of weird IIRC. I haven't used other brands of pineapple. purees

That's not much to go on. Is it a Middle Eastern custard that this FIL makes? Does this friend know much about desserts, such as the difference between creme brulee and creme caramel? And you have your baked custards, your stirred custards, and things like zabaglione/sabayon that could be considered either custard or mousse. So I doubt we can recreate the FIL's delightful dish without more information, but yes, you can do various things to make custards in general lighter. Use less dairy fat and more whole eggs and fewer yolks, or whip air into it in some form - either by making zabaglione or by folding in whipped cream or meringue/whipped egg whites. The folding in would be to pastry cream or creme anglaise, and possibly further stabilized - examples are chiboust and bavarian cream. Panna cotta can also be very light depending on how much fat and gelatin are in the recipe.

What do you use for pineapple puree? Something like a Boiron or Perfect puree, or do you make your own? And you're doing the Pineapple recipe on p126 of Fine chocolates 2? It's counter-intuitive to me that more liquid would make a caramel more likely to separate, but my intuition has been wrong before

I don't make a standard lemon bar either. I top mine with lemon curd cooked stove-top and set with the help of white chocolate and gelatin.

I would think the coconut would soak up most of the liquid from the eggs. What if you let the topping mix sit and absorb for a while (30 min?) before baking? If you leave out the baking powder, maybe they'll be denser and hold together better. Or just bake them longer so the eggs are fully set. My guesses for this morning... Good luck!

celery root, parsnips, artichoke hearts, eggplant, jicama, avocado... I don't know how active the low carb-ers are here on eG, but some other food boards have a lot of activity on the subject, which might be helpful in dealing with no wheat, rice, or potatoes. good luck!

Tartlets for a catering tonight. Dark chocolate hazelnut ganache with candied hazelnuts, cherry-blueberry with streusel, milk chocolate salty caramel ganache with salty caramel cream, and mom's raspberries with vanilla bean chantilly. Also few lemon with fresh mango that didn't get captured. The dough for the berry tartlets puffed a little much, so they're not as pretty and clean - TGWC ... Thank god for whipped cream!

OK, so what CAN you have? Luckily you are in a big city where you can find just about anything! cashews, sunflower seeds, macadamia nuts, quinoa, teff, spelt, amaranth, millet, corn, tapioca, yam/sweet potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, zucchini, celery, radishes, leeks/onions, mushrooms, asparagus, peas, green beans, fennel, cucumber, goat & sheep milk products, meat, most seafood, most fruit...

I think I fixed it well enough to not feel bad about selling 8 dozen pieces to a bride tomorrow. Yesterday's ganache was still squishy so I melted and slightly cooled it then mixed it into a new batch of the formula that I know works. Of course the agitation of scraping it off the silpat into a bowl was enough to firm it up nicely. Oh chocolate ... so delicious, yet such a pain in the butt! Now I'll go back to pretending I know what I'm doing. Carry on!

Do you ever end up with ganache that reminds you of extra-heavy mayo? I was winging it today, testing batches that set up ok but grainy, then weirldy flexible. The 60% i usually use is 39% cocoa butter, but in this batch I used 72%, which is 45% fat. I also made some other changes but was trying to keep a similar ratio of liquid to chocolate. The 72% ganache is far thicker than the 60% ever is - it probably needs more cream or a splash of booze, right? Arg, I should know this! I got annoyed and left the slab out to do whatever it will overnight - cross your fingers that it is either use-able or save-able tomorrow!

@Bentley so you're doing soft caramels (fresh dairy products) p212, raspberry variation?

Is there a reason to add the cream and fruit in two steps? I'd be inclined to heat the other half of the cream and the fruit together and add them all at once. Hmm, I should try some fruity caramels..,

I find smells particularly hard to ignore, and some do make me feel queasy, which interrupts the eating experience. Like when I bought a used car from a dealer and they detailed it with something that smelled exactly like urinal cake - cheap industrial cleaner perfumey smell. I was really upset. It's been a year and the smell is mostly gone, though I do get a whiff every now and then when the car has been closed up for a few days. There are some flowers that turn my stomach, I can't handle those really fragrant lilies or more than a whiff of gardenia. As for dining patrons, there have only been a few times when I was seriously put off by another's perfume or cologne. I think I skipped dessert or took the rest of my food to go.

What happened is, sugar is a fickle mistress! I'd give repairing it a shot, add a little water and heat it back to bubbling then carefully blend with an immersion blender and cook to temp.

How can you avoid a scent in the air? Or are there no scents you dislike so you are never bothered?

I was surprised recently to see black garlic at Trader Joe's. I guess it's more mainstream than I had thought!

I don't see why they wouldn't be technically edible, but would they be any good? How fleshy or hard are the seeds? Maybe if nothing else you could sprout the seeds.

We do have good pizza in Seattle or at least reasonably "authentic" if you get the craving. I don't know about east coast pizza, but via Tribunali, pizzeria 22, and I think a few others are VPN certified. Lots of Asian cuisines to choose from, some with more upscale options such as lionhead, monsoon, seven beef, ba bar, joule, kraken congee. We also have a couple of branches of Din Tai Fung - I don't know how they compare to Shanghai, but I certainly do enjoy the juicy pork buns (soup dumplings).

The video I linked to above looked ok on my phone but not my laptop, here's another using the raplette

@Jim D. check out the bottom video, that's a lot of ganache!

I try to work quickly and not mess with it too much. I put my frames on silpats on top of parchment - the parchment is so I can grab the silpat and gently shake the frame to help level it. I will have to try @Chocolot's zigzag method, I am intrigued!

http://bedding.lovetoknow.com/table-linens/chart-standard-tablecloth-sizes This chart says 8-12 inches.

Very ... Rustic

How big are the nib pieces? Do they get cut or pushed aside?