patris

No doubt I should have more closely RTFM. I will play around with it some more, but keep the caramels on the range for now.

I took the plunge and bought one a few weeks ago - I could not resist the price. It has taken the place of my old Burton unit and I have not looked back. So far I have used it primarily for eggs (specifically that wonderful fried pita and scrambled egg dish that @Anna N found) and grilled cheese sandwiches, which are so foolproof it’s dangerous. Tonight I wanted to put the probe through its paces so I decided to make a batch of @Kerry Beal’s EGCI caramel. Typically when I make it on the stovetop, the sugar/glucose hardly colors at all during the first cook (to 145c/293f), and the final product is a light-to-medium caramel color. Using the Paragon on Rapid Precise, it developed quite a bit of color in the first phase of cooking - distinctly amber with a definite toasted sugar fragrance - and was quite deep in color by the end of the second stage (121c/250f). I ended up sticking my usual probe thermometer in the pot as it cooked, and when the paragon finally reached 250 my trusty probe read 273! The final product is quite dark - several shades darker than normal. I kept a little bit outside the frame to check flavor and texture. It has quite a dark caramel flavor, not bitter but getting close. I was pleasantly surprised by the texture, which is chewy and not too stretchy and dissolves quite quickly without getting stuck in the teeth overmuch. I figured it was possible my probe was affected by the induction, so I put some water in another pan and set it to 212 on Rapid Precise, with both my probe and the Paragon probe. When the water was at a full boil my thermometer read 212, but the Paragon didn’t get above 210 even after several minutes. Not sure if that’s an acceptable variation, but I think I will stick to my stovetop for my next batch of caramel.

I am loving the Paragon (though my go-to spatula is purple) - makes the best damn grilled cheese sandwich.

Good point! I used 4500 g of dark chocolate and 3750 g of white in the peppermint bark, and 2200 g of milk chocolate for peanut butter meltaways.

The first year was the only year we did molds, and the overall logistics were quite different. I didn’t keep any record of how much chocolate we used, as far as I can tell. It does change a bit from year to year, and this year we had 3 new faces as 3 of the regulars couldn’t attend, so I don’t really have an apples to apples comparison. It does all really depend on what people want to make and how much of it - I had some folks who used less than a kilo altogether and some who used 2 or 3. If you limit people’s options - say, have everyone do one mold, barks or clusters with x pounds of chocolate, and maybe allot x pounds of chocolate per person for dipped items - that might be a good way to think about it. Presenting it as a class rather than the friends and family free-for-all like I do it gives you the structure to set limits like that.

These trees were my first attempt and I will work on them when the studio opens back up in January (it is closed from Thanksgiving until New Year’s). My technique needs loads of work if I am ever to feel good about selling, but If you’re serious about wanting them I will check back in with you when I get a better handle on them!

I don’t have exact numbers, but we used probably 5 kilos of dark, maybe 3 of milk, and between 1 and 2 kilos of caramelized white. It was Belcolade - it’s really lovely to work with.

That might be for the best - it’s Giant White Beans in Tomato Sauce from Trader Joe’s.

That is indeed the recipe I used. The corn syrup wasn’t too much work - it’s really just making some corn broth and then making that into a syrup - and it made quite a bit of it. I made 2 batches of marshmallows and will probably be able to get another 3, maybe 4, out of the syrup I have left. As for the rest of the process it’s pretty straightforward, except for the part where you boil the water with oats, strain them out, then use the water to make the syrup. The marshmallows are cut so small that one pan goes a very long way, so for me it ends up being worth the effort.

I am tackling that solo - which, as a hard core introvert, is not a bad thing!

The workshop is closed for the season! Actually, it’s just closed until next Sunday, when I will do a much more toned-down version of this for one of my sisters who couldn’t make it today, her adult daughter, my sister who was here today, and her 10-year-old granddaughter. I don’t anticipate doing nearly the level of prep for that - and sadly @Kerry Beal won’t be joining us - but I am looking forward to it nevertheless. Meantime, here are the few pictures I was able to snap during the day. The crispy marshmallows and caramelized Rice cereal were a huuuuge hit and showed up in a lot of barks and clusters, so I suspect they will become staples in my repertoire. Lots of delicious things made all around!

the gift of tighter pants.

Kerry has run off to Trader Joe’s to browse around and to pick up some freeze dried raspberries that were not on the shelf yesterday but were promised to be restocked overnight. She is lucky to be sparing herself the noise of my portable dishwasher, currently jet-engining its way through its quick-wash cycle, which takes a couple hours. In the meantime I have been indulging my compulsion for organizing and reorganizing to get ready for the elves at the stroke of noon.

I haven’t used them in anything except meltaways and barks, in which they contribute a wonderful caramelly crispiness. I do imagine if they sat out long enough or were incorporated into something with a fair bit of moisture, they would eventually lose their crisp. Nope - no peanuts this year. The Rice Krispies are so easy (unless you try to do them on a Paragon with a shitty pan, which is a story for @Kerry Beal to tell...) and so high volume that I haven”t bothered with the peanuts in some time.

Thanks! I do love them. I think I ordered them from Houzz.con, but if you search “climbing men wall art” you should find them pretty quickly. The LED lights were my addition for the holidays, though.

Thanks! They are - copied from a potter on Instagram. I have some work to do on technique and glaze choices, but I can see a forest of these in my future.

And then I made some confections. Kerry posted most of them, but the one thing people want the most every year is peppermint bark. Apparently mine is tasty - I have requests for a total of about 20 pounds of it so far and will likely need to make more: There is another Cambro full of peppermint bark under this one. There are also 30 dozen peanut butter meltaways, some plain and some with feuilletine mixed in, but I neglected to photograph those. in other food news, when Kerry arrived she was bearing this gorgeous pannetone (in gorgeous packaging) sent along by @Alleguede (thank you so much, Rodney!) that will certainly add a little sweetness to my holidays:

So I have had the best of intentions to photograph and post my activities over the last few days, but as always it takes @Kerry Beal to get me from thoughts to actions. It’s hard to believe this is the fourth year of this event. The first year, my mother was gravely ill and, unbeknownst to us, was in the last weeks of her life (she passed away New Year’s Eve 2016) - that weekend and the weeks leading up to it was a weird blur of stress and distress about my mother’s illness, days and nights spent in nursing home and hospital, and genuine excitement about hosting the workshop. I have never really enjoyed the holidays, but this has become something I look forward to all year. Not only do I get a little extra time to visit with Kerry, I get to give some of my nearest and dearest the chance to have a little holiday fun and get some of their gift giving done at the same time. Since that first year I have learned loads of lessons - some larger life lessons to be sure, but mostly lessons about how to make this event more special for my peeps and more sane for myself. First lesson: give myself more time to prepare! I am lucky to have a job that gives me an enormous paid time off allotment, and I always find myself with some time to burn at the end of the year. Fortunately, my bank of time this year coincided with an absence of deadlines and so I was able to take Thursday and Friday off to prepare. This enabled me to get more done, but mostly because I kept adding to my to-do list! I did manage to get a few Christmas decorations up:

Those Rice Krispies are something else - brutally moreish.

I have made it many, many times and it always needs a good whack of cocoa butter to thin it out - sometimes up to 20% - and I always end up blitzing it with an immersion blender to get it totally smooth. I make mine in vacuum sealed bags in the pressure cooker. If I don’t need it right away I dry off the bags and store them with my other chocolate and when I want to use it I put it in a melter with about 10% cocoa butter, then add more as needed as it all melts. If I need it right away I take it out of the bags and add the cocoa butter to the hot mess while it’s cooling. Both ways work equally well for me. Edited to add that I use @Chocolot“s pressure cooker method, which can be found here:

The secret is twice the butter (browned!) and half the cereal: https://smittenkitchen.com/2009/11/salted-brown-butter-crispy-treats/

We have one here and I use their app to order - every time I have ordered my pizza is ready at the exact minute promised. Always amazes me.

More adventures in office confections. We have a temporary staff person who has a severe peanut allergy, which made me realize that I use peanuts or peanut butter (and other nuts as well) in the vast majority of the chocolates I make to share with colleagues every week or two. So, although this person works on a different floor and our responsibilities mean that our paths will not likely cross often if at all, I have challenged myself to stay away from nuts in the office treats during their time with us, which will extend into mid-November. I had been thinking about combining caramel and marshmallow and wanted to play around a bit, so I made a sheet of @Kerry Beal‘s chewy caramel from EGCI and tried layering it. The first experiment is on is on the left - pumpkin spice marshmallow. I spread half the batch into a quarter sheet pan, laid on a thin sheet of caramel, and topped that with the other half of the batch. Incredibly tasty, but really difficult to work with as the layers kept sliding around, even as the chocolate was crystallizing. The photo doesn’t show it but these are some of the homeliest candies I have ever made. I decided to try again, this time with brown sugar espresso marshmallow. I divided the batch between two quarter sheet pans, and when they had firmed up a bit I used some dark chocolate to glue the caramel sheet between them. Worked a treat, though I think next time I will use a much thinner layer of chocolate. I decided to dip these up to their shoulders in dark chocolate, then dip the tops in caramelized white chocolate. We shall see how they go over with my work peeps.

I will also add that I once tried adding pulverized freeze dried raspberries to the base recipe during beating to make raspberry, and the flavor was pretty faint. The texture also suffered - they seemed a bit grainy and lacked full fluffiness. That was the only FD fruit experiment I did, though.

These aren’t fruit flavors, but I have made pumpkin spice, red hot cinnamon, peppermint, and brown sugar espresso marshmallows with great success. I posted my pumpkin spice recipe in recipegullet here. For the red hot cinnamon, I replace half the sugar in my base recipe with cinnamon imperials that I grind in my coffee grinder, and add about a half teaspoon of grocery store cinnamon extract at the end of beating. For peppermint, I just beat in a good whack - probably close to a teaspoon - of peppermint extract to the base recipe at the end. For brown sugar cinnamon, I substitute brown sugar for white sugar (honestly can’t remember whether I substitute it for half or all of it) and dark corn syrup for light corn syrup, and add about a tablespoon of espresso powder (Medaglia D’Oro is the brand I like best) to both the water/gelatin and the cooked sugar mixture. The brown sugar espresso and pumpkin spice tend to be a bit denser than vanilla or fruit flavors, but the flavor is great. I use fruit juices or purées in all my fruit flavors, though. I think I tried compounds years ago and couldn’t get the flavors intense enough for my liking. edited to add - my base recipe is 16 oz sugar, 4 oz water, 7 oz corn syrup, 1/2 tsp cream of tartar (citric acid for fruit flavors) cooked to 240f, beaten into .75 oz gelatin bloomed in 4 oz. water. Fills a 9 x 13 pan about an inch full.