pastrygirl

It is with the cans of coconut milk, Kaya and Chaokoh are two brands I've seen.

There is a 99 Ranch market at the Great Wall Mall in Kent and a few H-Marts around - Seattle, Lynnwood, Federal way, and Tacoma. Uwajimaya is also a good Asian grocery, though maybe more Japanese than Chinese. If your friend works in Downtown Seattle, she should definitely check out the International District, and little Saigon, there is Uwajimaya at one end and Viet wah at the other, along with several produce stands around 12th Ave S and S Jackson.

KennethT, wow, 2005? You're right, it was pumpkin seed. Caramelo de aceite de calabaza. That was one of the bites I didn't get a picture of. Marcel was trying to do that technique with the ring mold one one of the finales on Top Chef, but it didn't work out for him.

I agree with Tri2Cook. Sugar garnishes can be fun for the pastry chef to make and can look cool, and I do appreciate having only edible garnishes on the plate, but there is only so much pulled sugar people want to eat. If it is very thin and delicate or flavored it seems more worth eating, but a slab of isomalt or a large bow or flower is way too much plain sugar to eat at once. I think if you want to play with sugar and not feel like your time is wasted when it doesn't get eaten, you should aim to give the sugar pieces some flavor and make them small and integrated as a component in the dessert. Like a single flower petal flavored with rose, or a blown sugar cherry that actually tastes like cherry or is filled with something (coulis? ganache?), then have the servers include it in their description when they present the dish. I had a bite at el Bulli that was blown sugar filled with some kind of pistachio oil IIRC. You had to eat it in one bite. It was intense and amazing.

You could sweeten with powdered sugar. That's what I use when I make hazelnut paste. Or fondant sugar if you don't want the added corn starch.

Where are you? If you have a good Asian supermarket nearby, look for packets of coconut cream powder. They are 50 or 60 g for about a dollar in seattle. Dry powdered coconut flavor so you're not adding liquid to the meringue.

A sweet tart dough or Pate sucree will give neater edges than a flaky pie dough or Pate brisee. Other than that, overworking, too much water, and kitchen gremlins might be to blame. Darienne, I think Chris means that they bake the tart shell then use a microPlane zester to shave the edges down even with the tart ring.

Depends on altitude

Why? Because they can. Are you familiar with Americans? We like excess I don't think this concoction would be bad, but it does seem like entirely too much work!

I would guess that for most small shapes the shell is 1/4 to 1/3 of the weight of the bonbon, so for a 15g mold I'd allow 10 to 12g ganache per cavity. a few minutes later.... OK, so in the interest of science I dissected a few old bonbons that I had in the freezer. The mold used was Chocolate world #2295 which is listed as approximately 13g per piece. The total weight of 4 pieces was 50 grams. Broken apart they had total 32g filling and 18g shells. Shells were not too thick white chocolate, filling was Notter's key lime ganache, IIRC, also white chocolate. Those particular pieces averaged 64% filling to 36% shell. I hope that helps!

As Anna N mentioned above, some salted butters are saltier than others. Maybe it is an extreme example, but when I was working in Bhutan, we had limited access to locally made unsalted butter, but packaged Amul butter was easily available. Amul butter has enough salt in it to keep it shelf stable in India. It was some salty stuff and I had to warn my staff against using it in things like cake frosting. Their website says 836mg sodium per 100 g butter. Darigold salted butter says it has 100mg sodium per 14g serving, so that would be 714mg/100g butter. Land O' Lakes salted butter has 90mg per 14g serving, so even lower sodium at 642mg/100g. At home as well as at work, I buy unsalted butter - I've been in pastry so long that it is a reflex. I do add some salt to most sweet things I make, but I still appreciate having that control. So I don't think it is a myth that there is a difference, but if you have butter that you like and do not find too salty for sweet applications, by all means use it. But if you switch brands (or move to Bhutan), you may notice a difference!

I assume it is the weight of solid chocolate, but don't know for sure. You are always going to have slight variations in the amount of filling you need depending on the thickness of your shells - a difference of a gram of chocolate per cavity will add up to needing an ounce more or an ounce less of filling.

hummingbirdkiss, I don't know how long the Malay Satay Hut in the ID has been closed, but now it is O'Yeah Asian.

If cooking destroys it, then guava jam should not be a problem

In my experience, the only reason to cream the butter first would be if the butter was quite cold and you needed to beat it smooth. Cold butter can be quite persistent in staying lumpy despite a good beating with sugar. But if your butter is soft/pliable, I don't think it matters.

So, Jeanne, just to enlighten you if you ever want to get into chocolate (and want to know what kind of molds are the most aggravating), the first pic is a normal one piece mold, the top is completely flush so you can scrape all the excess chocolate off and get nice smooth, flat bottoms and edges. You fill the mold, dump it out, scrape it clean, let the shell set, fill with ganache or whatever, let that set, add chocolate to seal the bottoms and scrape the bottoms level. But with these you will always have a flat bottom. This is the two-piece egg mold, held together with rubber bands. You can see there is a gap due to the raised rim around each cavity. Here you see the raised lip and the alignment pins. I think the lip would be hard to trim off, but the pins could be done away with. With these, you have to pipe chocolate into the cavities (can't ladle in and scrape off the excess because the lips and pins get in the way), sandwich the molds together and shake them around to distribute the chocolate. There is no scraping, maybe some trimming of the seams. These molds look like they have open bottoms so they can be filled and dumped out. With these pieces the artistry is in the decorating. http://www.ebay.com/itm/Professional-Polycarbonate-3D-Chocolate-Mold-SANTA-Mould-LARGE-3sizes-MadeInUSA-/301047853282

It will also be less shiny after refrigeration. You could wave a hair dryer over it to restore the shine and soften the blaze before serving if that is important to you.

Yes. You can make ganache with water. The texture will be more chewy and less melty without the extra fat. Also, use a little less milk than you would cream. Or if you are simply out of cream and need to substitute, you could use milk and butter.

Of course, who doesn't love getting new molds to play with? But new molds are not in the budget right now and since I dropped the ball on returning these, I have a stubborn sense that I should get some use out of them. Hollow figures are fine for bigger or more interesting shapes, but these are the size of a small chicken egg. Decorating with color or even wrapping in pretty foils would help. EdwardJ, I don't have a bandsaw handy, but I'm happy to hear polycarbonate can be trimmed and sanded without ill effect. thanks!

Hmm. Yeah, Kerry the lip around each cavity would leave a lot of excess chocolate on the top of the mold. I guess I should at least give filling the whole eggs a shot. I'd like to make something akin to a Cadbury cream egg, but not disgusting. Just plain hollow eggs seem not very special. The alignment nubs are about 3/8" tall and would need a chisel or hacksaw or something. I don't know if polycarbonate would shatter or break cleanly. I could have returned them last year but never got around to it, so I'll have to play around with them and find a way to put them to use.

I have two pairs of clear polycarbonate 3-d egg molds that I bought last year. These: http://www.jbprince.com/chocolate-and-sugarwork/egg-12-cavitiesities-1-piece.asp I tried them once as whole eggs, and they worked fine but it seems like a pain to have to puncture then reseal them in order to fill them (which I have not actually tried, it just seems like it would be awkward and ugly). I am considering trying to hack off the nubs that align the halves so I can use them as half egg molds and be able to scrape across the top of the mold, filling and closing as usual. There is also a lip around each egg, but I think if I removed the two pins I could manage the lip. Thoughts or experience? Thanks!

Buy a bag of Valrhona crispy pearls I have kept agar caviar up to a week. It does weep a little bit and is solid throughout unlike those made with calcium chloride and sodium alginate. Here is a ratio I've used before: Cocoa Caviar cocoa 25 g sugar 65 g agar agar 1 tsp water 200 g canola oil as needed Chill 1" canola oil in a shallow pan at least 30 minutes before beginning. Combine cocoa, sugar, and agar agar powder in a small saucepan. Whisk in water. Bring to a simmer, whisking. Simmer briefly and remove from heat. Let cool slightly, then drip through a squeeze bottle into the chilled oil. Strain the caviar and rinse under cool water. Keep chilled.

What keychris said. It would only be wrong if you claimed to have made it from the bean. Even though there are alot of small bean-to-bar makers these days, I'd guess that most chocolatiers use someone else's chocolate. I use Felchlin and Valrhona, and I tell people when they ask. I do, however, feel a compulsion to change it somehow aside from simply re-molding it. All of my solid bars have a filling or inclusion, either a gianduja type filling that I make, or candied fresh orange zest, or roasted almonds and salt. I also make truffles and bonbons, but even with the simpler bars I feel like I have to put my mark on it somehow. I plan to experiment with making at least a little bit of my own chocolate and do one bar that is plain bean-to-bar. Noka stirred up some controversy a few years ago when they refused to say whose chocolate they used. They were simply re-molding couverture and selling it at insane prices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C5%8DKA_Chocolate http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/352789?commentId=2113097#2113097

It does not look too dark to me, looks GBD* *golden brown and delicious

Most of the books I am going to list are not particularly new, so may be hard to find, but may also be available used at a good price. Looking through my bookshelf, these are the books that have been most useful and inspiring to me in my restaurant pastry chef career of the past 15 years: Los Postres de El Bulli, Adria - in Spanish and impossible to find, but gorgeous photos and interesting ideas if you do find it. His newer one, Natura, is also beautiful and even more modernist. Grand Finales: The Art of the plated Dessert, Boyle & Moriarty The Notebooks of Michel Bras: Desserts, Bras - more for inspiration than recipes The Last Course, Fleming - this one can be very hard to find Desserts by Pierre Herme, Herme and Greenspan Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Herme, Greenspan Dessert Fourplay, Iuzzini - actually not a favorite but more recent and some interesting ideas Sweet Seasons, Leach - plated restaurant desserts organized by season Elements of Dessert, Migoya - another new one, modernist and gorgeous New Classic Desserts, MacLauchlan - I don't have this anymore, managed to lose two copies, and its 1994 so it may seem dated, but at the time it was one of my first introductions to plated desserts and I loved it. And you can get it for five bucks on Amazon! The Sweet Spot, Ong - some interesting Asian twists Book of Tarts, Rubin Charlie Trotters Desserts, Trotter - a little older - 1998 - but gorgeous and very inspiring to me when i was just getting started in restaurants. David Lebovitz and Emily Luchetti are also pretty reliable dessert authors, but tend to be more fancified homestyle than multi-component plated desserts. Bachour Simply Beautiful by Antonio Bachour might be a good one as well. I have not seen the book, but I follow him on Instagram and he does indeed make beautiful things.