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lapin d'or

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Everything posted by lapin d'or

  1. Do you know what discounts for larger quantites that your suppliers will give you? The place I buy chocolate from would not discount at all until I purchased way above what I buy now. I suppose there are some economies on time when making greater numbers but not so easy to quantify ahead. I've noticed packaging can get much cheaper in bulk. Could you select just some of your items that are cheaper to produce, in time if not ingredients, and give them a lower price on that basis.
  2. lapin d'or

    Fall fruit salad

    If you have a juicer or can but good apple juice what about just serving a nice glass of hot spiced apple juice
  3. I often look at the Ballymaloe Cookery School website for the newsletters that contain good recipes, some of which are now listed out recipes link
  4. Lior if I am looking at the right picture I don't think thay had an acetate sheet on the top of the chocolate 'wafer'. I think there is too much texture on the surface for that. They must have been able to spread it very thin and fast. I think I would add extra cocoa butter to get a very fluid chocolate. I wonder if they took some sort of 1mm deep frame and squidged it across with a ruler. It looks nice.
  5. Hi Lior, you may well be sorted now but there is a confectionery packaging firm in Belgium that supply glassine and custom printed labels. this is the link to their main cataloge for 2008 bsd belgium I think the glassine sheets are on about page 65. You may find it as cheap to ship from the US; when I convert euros to GB pounds some of the items are expensive compared to a UK supplier but they have a nice range of things I cannot find in the UK. cheers
  6. Thank you for your help tony I am piecing this together slowly - I am wondering if the barrel was a lime cordial. cheers edited for error
  7. Can I second the request for the buttercream ingredients. I am not too happy with the couple I have tried so far. In answer to your question Rena invertase is the enzyme that you add to fondant so it turns liquid after moulding/dipping. Not the same ingredient as invert sugar. many thanks
  8. Gosh some of the things listed above like arctic roll were very much early 70's food for my family. I was at University in Bristol in the early 1980s and at that time vegetarian food was very popular, wholewheat pastry in all the bakeries and many books being published with titles like load of lentils and beanfeast. Sarah Brown's name comes to mind. The Italian Pizza restaurants were also hugely popular. Cheesecake might be a contender but again perhaps a bit more late 70's. Could this be when sticky toffee pudding appeared everywhere? Carrot cake and was a 1980's discovery for me. The early Curry Club cookbooks were published in the 1980s so I guess people were starting to cook curry at home around then too. Keith Floyd seemed to be on the box a lot; not sure I can pick out anything in particular. I am pretty sure the fascination with french food was fading a bit by then.
  9. I have just been on a course at Callebaut in the UK and we made a blackberry pate de fruit. I managed to get some lumps in it which was none too clever but it did taste really good (lumpy bits aside).
  10. Callebaut have training facilities at their Banbury site, UK which I am going to for the first time in a couple of weeks. They seem to put on a few two day courses at a professional level. I am doing the English Taste course which will cover caramel, fudge, fondant chocolates and it looks very interesting. I cannot remember the full programme for this year but there is a course in London too. The course administrator is Julie Buckland tel 01295 224755
  11. This link to valrhona should get you to the grid where you can put your mouse over the application you are interested in and they highlight their suitable chocolates. This valrhona product pdf also has useful info on page 6 about suitability of their chocolates If you try this link and scroll down you should find the pdf from Callebaut re ice-cream callebaut downloads I hope that helps a bit. I find the Callebaut website full of useful info but not easy to find and you sometimes have to look at a few different pdf files to get all the info you want as they separate by products ranges quite a lot.
  12. David I make cherry bon bons with this moldart mould: dome mould I am using a dried sour cherry that has been rehydrated in cherry vodka and even the quite large cherries fit with enough space to cap off with a reasonbly thick base. That said your cherries may be quite a bit bigger than the ones I use but I like this mould a lot and I often wrap the finished chocolates in red foil. I fill the cavity with a thinned fondant using the cherry vodka to dilute it. So this is thicker than a liqueur chocolate but still quite alcoholic. Hope that is of help
  13. The cocoa butter may not be the problem but different 70% chocolates can have quite different amounts of cocoa butter depending on how much the manufacturer has added to the cocoa liquor. This is a quote from the Callebaut web site: " Callebaut offers a special selection of dark and white chocolates that contain less cocoa butter and plenty of taste. • Their lower fat content makes them ideal for flavouring ice cream: it avoids a hard, grainy texture. So ideal for soft and smooth chocolate ice cream!" On the 'chocolate uses' tables they tell you which of their chocolates are most suitable for making ice-cream. The valrhona web site also notes which of their bars are suitable for ice-cream. This may help if you can easily find any of the bars that are 'suitable'
  14. I believe you are supposed to use a very low cocoa butter chocolate for making ice-cream. The graininess could be the cooca butter splitting out as the ice-cream freezes. Do you know if your chocolate has much added cocoa butter?
  15. Emmalish if your room temperature is about 18-20C then I do not think the melter's heater will click in until you set the temp dial to above that temp? Mine only clicks when the dial is set higher than the melter's current temperature. When the melter is working above room temperature it clicks in very briefly every so often to maintain the higher temp but even when holding 30C in a room at 20C it does not come on to heat for very long at a time. That is my experience anyway!
  16. Tammy the info on the Boiron web site gives 15g of citric acid to 1 litre of fruit puree for peach pate de friut and you add the citric acid right at the end. I have not made this so no experience but they have a good pdf file you can download of proportions for lots of different fruits. www.boironfreres.com
  17. The fruit decorating the top of the passionfruit cake is a cape gooseberry. Many thanks for posting about your trip it has been a really good read the photos have given me many ideas on presenting food. So much to take in.
  18. For the biscuits how about a shortbread finger cookie. This is a really nice plain biscuit that keeps well if stored in an airtight tin. There are lots of recipes but here is one from a uk website : shortbread
  19. Could you do a chocolate tarte where the ganache filling is made with dark chocolate and coconut milk? Chocolate sorbet and strawberries if the weather is hot maybe.
  20. It seems to be back up to £19:80 now or is there a paperback version I cannot find?
  21. Are these your only choices? I have not found any of the non origin Callebaut chocolate to be top tasting. How much can you afford and are you buying from wholesalers? I have used the Callebaut 6040 which was just ok from a flavour perspectuive but I did not find it easy to work with, especially not for moulding. Have a look at the Callebaut website - they do flavour profile diagrams of their couvertures and give info on what type of use they are best for. There are also good online demos on different techniques that I have found helpful. callebaut site
  22. If my understanding is right gm seed crops are all copyright/licenced use only and so anyone growing food from them is by definition dependent on the companies & countries that designed and copyrighted the seeds. This alone is a serious problem because if the only crops you can live off are the ones from these guys they have you over a barrell. Away from gm but still with the fears of science and the food chain many uk home gardeners are right now discovering that no one can be trusted. They are currently seeing their home grown crops die before their eyes as hormonal herbicide that were sprayed on fields that were then cut to make hay or silage that fed horses or cattle that then became manure on their gardens are still active and destroying a whole range of plant species. The chemical firm can blame the farmers for misuse but in reality if an accident/oversight can happen it will so why is this stuff being licenced so freely in the first place. Gut feelings are sometimes the only guide you have in life and mine are still saying the agricultural industry is in no shape to tackle a world food crisis. edited to correct pesticide to herbicide
  23. I have never felt happy with GM technology and the companies that are involved, but I have not researched this so my views are really just personal. What does bother me is the constant emphasis on 'we must have more food' and assuming that science is the only answer. A significant proportion of the British public are overweight and for most of us that comes from over eating. There is only a food crisis if there is not enough food to go around to meet genuine need. There is also a vast amount of food wastage which is apparently adding to our waste disposal crisis. So whilst the government may be happy for us to grow highly adulterated crops we are not permitted the basic economy of feeding our dinner leftovers to our pigs. I would like to see Gordon encouraging his nation to grow more of their own food, keep chickens, whatever it takes to become more sustainable and less dependent on international agricultural barons. I guess I just hate people interfering with my food.
  24. The security stick / dongle has to be plugged into your pc for you to run the software. They can be used to ensure that only one person is using the software at any time. So even if you are allowed to put the software on more than one machine ie both your desk top and your laptop, only the pc with the dongle plugged in can actually run it. Lior, did you see the transfer sample both on the sheet before application and actually on applied to chocolate?
  25. I've never made this type of dessert but when I googled for similar recipes they all have you whip the evaporated milk (chilled in the freezer first) alone and then add in the lemon, sugar and fruit jelly. Maybe this makes the difference. One referred to whipping the evaporated milk to soft peaks and then whipping in the cool but not set jello.
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