pastrygirl

6" chocolate cake for a catering today, theme: trees!

Valentines collections- gold are milk chocolate salty caramel, black are caramel mocha, red & white have amarena cherry and hazelnut.

Not the new chocolate, they are just throwing the men of the world a bone, so to speak.

Me 4? 5? If it is super cold in the kitchen I might wave a hair dryer over them, orherwise no heat.

Will it later be enrobed like an almond joy? Can you cut slivered almonds and put them together on top of the coconut to form the numeral? Slivered almonds are cut like a julienne, about 1/8" square by the length of an almond.

Creaming has nothing to do with water, longer mixing of the butter and sugar creates more air bubbles, which make a finished product lighter and fluffier. Good in cake, but if op wants a denser dough, adding less air is one way to go.

It may just be under baked since you say it is soft, though in my convection oven 30 min at 160 C should bake most cookies nice and golden. How thick is the layer in your baking pan and what is the pan made of? Working the dry ingredients for 2 minutes sounds like a very long time. Cream the butter until it is smooth, it doesn't have to be super light and fluffy for most shortbread. Then mix in the flour just until it is combined. Focus on how the dough looks and feels rather than on time, both for mixing and baking.

Discard chocolate? The horror! No need to do that, you can dump it back into the bowl. Yes, it will cool the mass a little but just keep an eye on it. You can dump it on parchment to save for later if you want, but you have to temper a lot more chocolate to get the job done if you're not 'recycling' it. 5 molds isn't many, the chocolate should stay in temper for that long unless your kitchen is really cold. A heating pad can help, or I keep a hairdryer handy so I can warm chocolate a few degrees - my kitchen has been in the 50's F lately, so I need to warm the chocolate frequently to keep it in temper. And it's not that much chocolate. 40 pieces per mould must be pretty small, so even if you are making solid pieces I doubt you need more than 2kg per batch. Workflow: seed/temper chocolate while polishing/decorating molds and making ganache. Cast shells, fill with cooled ganache once set. Do something else for a few hours until ganache is crystallized. Re-temper chocolate and cap/bottom molds. Depending on the kitchen, you may be able to find a spot perfect for keeping chocolate warm - an oven or french top with a pilot light. Then you need to find a place to keep your finished bonbons cool and away from snackers!

Your link says the man experienced chest pains in the first mile, leaving another mile and a half between him and the dozen donuts. So apparently it was the running, not any eating, that led to his demise.

Yes, Restaurant Wars made me love Shirley even more. I totally agree about the mess and the other team.

I would also suspect that since fat conducts heat better than air. But the linked recipe doesn't have butter, so I'm not sure where the OP is going with that. If you want to add butter, add butter! It will brown a bit in the roasting, and brown butter & pecans is a winning combo in my book.

Cute, and no doubt fun to watch them made but I avoid anyplace selling blue ice cream. Yes, with more surface area exposed they would melt faster on a warm day.

@Lisa Shock exactly what I was going to say - "wash" with flour first to get the excess dough off @andiesenji unfortunately some sticky things are too sticky to handle with gloves on, they stick to the gloves and pull on them, can even pull them off. I was making something recently where gloves just made it a huge pain - rum balls, I think it was.

Buttery crust and mushy inside sounds about right. You can use less water when you cook the cornmeal the first time if you like it firmer.

File under maintaining: the peanut crisp struck again and I had to replace a few wires. I made this little video for anyone who can't decipher Dedy's instructions and needs to replace a wire. Hope it helps! (And I hope this works) https://youtu.be/LT2es_3xFQQ

Thanks. Yeah. obviously it's not going to be Christmas every day (thank goodness!) or a chocolate festival. I like your idea of being conservative on revenue and fluffing expenses. I do have records from the past 2-1/2 years of business that I could pay more attention to, and I do hope to get more wholesale accounts before pursuing a brick & mortar. And I should charge more! I did raise prices a little bit before the holidays and nobody complained. My margins are decent when I sell retail but a lot harder at wholesale. I just looked at some properties yesterday, seems like there is potential but it's a neighboring city/suburb that I don't know that well. But much lower rent than in Seattle proper, might be good for a production kitchen with less focus on retail. There was a couple on the tour with me with no restaurant experience but who want to open a bakery. Part of me wanted to scream at them "don't do it! It's WAY harder work than you think it is!" but I didn't.

How good were your guesses? How does one make better guesses? That part of it is what scares me. There is so much turnover in restaurants now, of course everyone sets out to sell lots and pay their rent and be successful, but ...

So incredibly productive! The miseries of the world usually just inspire fantasies of moving to Australia or New Zealand. Y'all need any chocolatiers down there?

Hmmm, I don't know. Maybe explore recipes for Italian crumbly cake, torta sbricciolona. Fairly dry and crumbly with cornmeal and almonds. Or depending on what shape you need, how about a biscotti dough but only once baked? I'll admit, coarse and dry are usually not my goals when making cake!

Like pound cake? Or drier?

@Kerry Beal have we told you lately that you're awesome? Thanks for putting that together!

@Tri2Cook summed it up well. Many items are pre-portioned during prep time for speed and efficiency during service, even pasta. And what are they supposed to do with the other half? That said, I don't think it is offensive or inappropriate to ask as long as you are prepared to take no for an answer. Some items are pretty easy to halve or split, or the chef may have an odd size piece of fish from the end of the filet that s/he'd be happy to move. Otherwise, tapas and apps are a good strategy.

@kriz6912, can you melt and re-use the jelly? Looks like fun!

you could sever it with a saber

I'm tempted to say that bad recipes do exist, but apparently a lot of people like what we consider bad food, so maybe someone out there would be excited about mushy or bland or whatever the problem was. But yeah, sometimes you can tell when a recipe isn't going to be worth making. To me, Jacques' pear example points out more the necessity of specificity, not the uselessness of recipes. Shouldn't you specify a firm Bosc instead of trusting the cook to know to adjust when they have a ripe Bartlett?