David J.

Thanks for the link! The demonstration made things much clearer. The chocolate is spread much thinner and overcrystalized than I had it. The diagonal slicing motion is interesting. Unfortunately the video cuts out half way through so I couldn't see the other decorations.

Thanks for the link. That comb is much closer to what I figured I would need to do the job consistently. This is my first attempt at chocolate decorations. I figured the little curls would be the easiest thing to start with. I'm headed to the French Pastry School for a three day class with Norman Love teaching chocolate decorations and I wanted to try a couple things before hand to see where I needed help. I didn't figure it would turn out to be the first thing I tried Has anyone done curls in both dark and white chocolate and can comment on any difference in difficulty?

I had exactly such a problem last year when the humidity hit Michigan and I was making my first large batch of truffles for wedding favors. The normal chocolate I use was far too thick to dip. I was frustrated and afraid that I would miss my commitment. I was dipping in the basement with central air so the environment was fairly controlled, but still I failed batch after batch. In desperation I bought a quality standalone dehumidifier and ran it full tilt. That did the trick.

I made the "Hot Chocolate" recipe: I went to the local Metal Supermarket and had the guy cut me eight one foot sections of aluminum bar 1/4" by 1/2". I taped a set of four down to a Silpat and started mixing up the marshmallow recipe. The ingredients were much the same, but the directions were different from NightScotsMan's. In particular they instruct one to leave the heated sugar in the mixing bowl to cool a bit and then pour in the gelatin. That didn't work out for me as the cinnamon fell to the bottom and the sugar thickened and trapped it. When I was done mixing and poured it out I noticed that it was all firmed up on the bottom of the mixing bowl. Next time I'm going back to the original method. I'll mix it right away and hopefully the marshmallow will pour better. With this batch it started firming up before I could get a nice even scrape. That gave me an uneven surface which resulted in some truffles mostly ganache and others heavy on the marshmallow. The ganache batch wasn't quite enough to fill the second frame, probably due to too little marshmallow so I didn't get a perfect scrape on that either. The bars did work out well for the batch of "PJ's" I made. I used Andrew's recipe for raspberry Pate de Fruit since it works so well and I have plenty of his G-Pectin. I topped that with the peanut butter ganache. The "PJ's" are my favorite so far, followed closely by the Hot Chocolate. The multiple textures really work well. I love the crunch through the chocolate shell into the soft marshmallow and then the firmer ganache. Of all the recipes I've made, this is the one that I have personally eaten the most of. The biggest surprise for me was the difficulty I had in forming the little white chocolate poodle curls. That's all detailed in another thread so I won't repeat it here. I haven't solved it yet, but I'm going to try this one again so I'll get another shot.

Thanks for the tip. That first one is very close. There are 18 notches in 6" of comb, so that works out to 6/36 or 1/6" wide for each post and notch. It's aluminum so it could be filed down to make a thiner depth line, and it's cheap enough that it wouldn't be a big loss if it didn't work out. Now I just have to come up with $50 of other purchases to justify shipping...

Does anyone know where to get a comb with 1/8" wide square notches? The groute trowels are all 1/4" square and while that is great for cigarettes it is far too wide for these decoration curls. Ideal would be 1/8" wide and 2mm deep so a single pull through a pile of chocolate would spread perfect lines. I ran through several more trials last night and ended up with enough curls for my current batch. My success rate was only around 15-20%. A lot of the time the scraper just pushed up straight lines instead of curls, sometimes part of it would curl and others not on the same push. The V notches also left enough connecting chocolate that when it did curl I often ended up with a cigarette rather than individual curls. I can see that this is going to require more experementation and new tools before I get consistent results. I'll post a shot of my results on the Greweling thread later tonight since it's his recipie I made. Does the scraping tool itself matter? I'm using a drywall tape scraper with a fairly thin blade as opposed to a standard scraper which has a slightly thicker and stiffer blade. What blade angle works best for you?

I hovered over the chocolate trying many times from wet until I judged it too set so I don't think I missed the window. I checked the pictures in the book and I believe that my lines are far too thick. The pictures showed a pretty thin curl that is quite flat and my lines are as thick as they are wide and are anything but flat. The comb has VV cuts which produce a dome shaped line due to the depth the chocolate. I think that shape and thickness is working against curling. I also noticed his white chocolate curls weren't nearly as long and defined as those made from dark chocolate so I think that the choice of white chocolate is another factor. I will try it again tonight and spread a much thinner coat of chocolate.

I'm trying to create poodle curls from white chocolate for Grewlings "Hot Chocolate" truffles, and I'm having a frustrating time doing it. I spread the chocolate on a plastic cutting board and run a cake comb over it to form the individual lines. I then wait for it to set before scraping, but they just don't want to curl. I've waited for all different degrees of setting, and different angles for the scraper. The best I got was when I shaved the top of the lines off rather than cutting down to the board first, but they were far too thin to hold shape then. Is there some trick to it? I tempered in my Rev2 to be sure I had proper temper. Is it a trick of how thin you draw the lines? The cake comb pretty much set the height of the lines, but since I drew it through the wet chocolate they formed half round profiles. Should I wait for the chocolate to start setting so I get flat tops for my ribbons?

The 6Kg melters are the smallest you can cleanly flip a mold over. The 3Kg melter is round instead of rectangular and would give you the same trouble as your x3210. I've got a pair of the 6Kg Mol d'art melters and I'm quite happy with them.

It occured to me that if you are going for a Jackson Pollack design you would be better off using the same process he did rather than painstakingly creating several screens. The design will be broken up by being placed on a hundred or more individual pieces so you it won't be recognizable as the original image in any case. If you start by dipping the chocolates in the base color, then you don't have to worry about small gaps between the design in the multiple screens. You can then create a simpler transfer by splashing/dribbling/dropping colored cocoa butter in some random pattern leaving some background showing through.

This sounds like a fantastic project! I've been interested in making custom transfers myself so I've been following all the threads. With all the technique involved in doing the printing work it looks like it would benifit from being shot on video and turned out as a DVD once you get it perfected.

OK, it makes sense but now I have to try this to verify.

My experience was that you had to use an all butter ganache if you wanted to keep the crunch in the sugar. Could you elaborate on this method? I'm not clear on what you mean by "emulsify cream".

Kerry, Would you recommend making them 1" tall or would you go with two frames at 1/2" tall next time? That looks interesting and I think I'll try it soon.

I made the Gianduja Stracciatella Gelato and served it in a bowl made from David's Ice Cream Cone recipie. I used some of my bulk Callubeut dark chocolate for the stracciatella to ensure it was top quality. The cone batter was pretty thick and not that easy to spread into an even circle on the baking paper, but it was managable. Not owning a cone form I pressed the circles over an upturned bowl. This proves that you don't require a press to make cones or bowls on your own. It all worked out rather well and my wife pronouced the gelato superb.

According to David Lebovitz you can make these in the oven at 350 F between 10-15 minutes. Form the circles on a parchment lined baking sheet. While you won't get fancy looking cookies or cones this should work for those of us without a pizzelle iron. I was thinking about this a couple weeks back when I first read the book but Kerry has now sparked my interest to try it out.

I'm not sure just how large they are, check out the picture on page 112. The crystals appear larger than any I have seen before. They appear courser than sanding sugar by a fair amount.

Thanks for the compliment. I chose the best three for the picture and arranged them for best effect. Quite a few looked like a Hershey's kiss or more of a blob. You also want a nice thin dipping chocolate so you don't hide the ribs. Mine was a touch too thick. I would certainly suggest giving this a try. I'm not a big honey eater, but the balance is really good with this recipie. It's also a good way to practice your piping skills, which is why I chose it in the first place. Do you know where to get large granual white sugar?

I tried the "Buckwheat Beehives" this week: These are supposed to be piped out on 25mm disks, and my stencil was pretty close at 28mm. The directions call for a size 2 piping tip which I quickly realized was not the system my tip set used. The size two is the second smallest tip and wouldn't work at all. My first attempts used the number 7 and 12 tips. The first was too small and the second too large, so I went shopping and found a 10 which seems to be approximately the correct size. I was a bit careless with my first batch of ganache and it wasn't in temper which caused quite a bit of heartache in piping. It took a long time to set, and then it melted unevenly in my hands in the bag resulting in a slumped pile rather than anything resembling a beehive. Refrigerating it didn't help much as it was then too stiff or too soft. Finally I broke down and carefully made a half batch according to the instructions and the plasticity was perfect. The ones in the photo come from that batch. My piping skills need to be honed yet as mine don't look nearly as like a beehive as the author's do. I piped the honey with a number 2 tip and would suggest you try something closer to a 3 or 4 as it took too long to fill. I was concerned that I might be putting too much honey in each, but upon tasting I found that it wasn't as noticable as I thought it would be. The Buckwheat honey compliments the milk chocolate very nicely. I brought the batch in to work and they went pretty quickly with universal appreciation. They are supposed to be topped with large granual sugar, but the closest I could find was a natural sugar that was brown rather than bright white. Still, they turned out fairly well.

I don't know where to get butter with a lower water percentage, but the loss of a few rocks to the water in the butter isn't a big problem. The amount that I lost was probably a very small percentage of the total and I included enough that there were plenty left over. So far the experiment has been a success. Some people don't notice the pastry rocks as anything other than "crunchy bits" because they chew them rather than let them melt. Others get a kick out them and I had a report that the daughter of a coworker was spooked by the popping. Everybody liked the basic white chocolate ganache but I'm going to try the fruit essence tomorrow when another coworker is going to bring in some samples for me to try.

As a matter of fact there has been a bit of progress. I used JB Weld epoxy to attach the handle to the frame, and I trimmed the back edge of the cutting table so that the wires would feed into the slots without catching. I still haven't mounted everything on a base yet, but I couldn't resist trying it out anyway. To do this I placed the cutting table on a couple of books on the coffee table to give it height and held an end of the cutting frame in each hand. I made the mistake of adding a thick foot of tempered chocolate and it set before I managed to get it cut. That meant I had to press fairly hard which stretched some of the wires, but it cut the slab anyway: I tightened the loose wires and proved that by adding the rod I achieved enough of a radius that the wire would flow easily and could be retightened. Perhaps next weekend I will attack the base. I had meant to get to it over the long Memorial Day weekend but ended up making two batches of truffles instead. While it has taken quite a while for me to get this far because I've had to design it as I go, I marvel at just how little effort or expertise it would take to duplicate.

It wouldn't necessarily melt a coating, but these bits of sugar are mixed inside the ganache. I tried to make a crunchy praline cream ganache once and found that it melted the sugar bits. I then made a butter ganache and they survived. Even with an all butter ganache I heard a few of the pastry rocks popping so I'm pretty sure that a more moist cream ganache would detonate quite a few.

Thanks for all the feedback on fruit powders. It appears that they aren't going to add the flavor without messing up the texture. A coworker just suggested fruit essence as well. Since it only requires a few drops it shouldn't increase the water content to the point of setting off all the pastry rocks. She said that they are available at the local Indian Grocery stores which would make it easy to try.

Right now I'm shooting for a two day shipping schedule, but if it turns out that I can get a configuration to last three days reliably it could shave off a couple more dollars shipping. The big difference appears to be between overnight and two days. I'm going to wire a temperature probe inside the box and tape one to the outside and run a continuous recording. I found instructions on how to wire up a pair of thermistors to the game port of a PC along with a program to record and display the results. With that setup I can determine exactly when the temperature inside the shipper rises to the point that the chocolates would be damaged. If it fails in eight or twelve hours I won't have to wait two or three days to find out and I'll have an idea how much more cooling I have to add to get it to pass. If it keeps cool I can extend the experiment to the failure point without having to open the box to check. Recording both temperatures will give me the outside temperature and the continuous differential. I could run a test on my guess of expected outside temps and also on the worst case. Does anyone have a good idea for something with the same heat retention characteristics to take the place of a pound or two of expensive chocolate? I plan on freezing the chocolates along with the gel pack to extend the shipping time so I would like something that acts like chocolate without the cost.

I have always sent chocolates overnite this time of year, but I am also interested in responses. It would also depend upon the temp in Maryland. You should probably do some trials of the thawing process at your end so you can include instructions how to bring up to room temp. Also so you will have an idea how cold or frozen they will be at the destination. Let us know what you find out. The USPS cost is in line with what most chocolatiers charge for shipping. Mark ← I've got a mind to try an experiment to determine how long a particular shipper/gel pack combination will keep chocolates from getting too warm, but there is one variable that I'm not sure of. How warm is the outside temperature? I imagine that the building would be cooler than a truck but I have no idea what either would be. Any guesses as to what I should set the outside temperature to? I was thinking of running the experiment in my garage since it's typically pretty warm.