TNChocolatier

Ice cream bases are a very technical endeavor. There are many different factors to take into account in order to have a balanced formula. One of these is free water. If you have too much free water in your base, it will form ice crystals when frozen, and not be smooth to the palate. To stop this from happening you need to reduce the amount of free water in your recipe. I use an ice cream stabilizer which "gellifies" a percentage of your free water in order to keep it from forming crystals. The percentage used differs with every recipe. Let me find the guidelines that I use, and I will try and post them in the next few days. It will also help extend the amount of time before your ice cream melts after serving.

My 2 cents worth(just opinions): When I choose a chocolate for a center, it has almost everything to do with the flavor profile, and nothing to do with the cocoa percentages, though higher percentages do tend to have a stronger flavor. For dark chocolate centers I start with a 58% and work my way up. To me the chocolate has to taste good on its own, but also make a nice canvas for the flavors it will be paired with. I find that a fruitier chocolate isn't usually the best choice for fruit based ganaches. As a chocolate with spice notes isn't usually the best for a spice flavored ganache. For my tastes it overemphasizes one aspect of the ganache instead of contributing to the overall complexity. For dipping in dark, I almost always use a 50/50 mixture of Cacao Barry 64% and 75%.

I have had a subscription to this magazine for the last 5 years. Though I do see it at the local B & N. That is in smallish town TN, so it should be available at most B & N stores. On this subject, they have just merged their 3 magazines (Pastry Art & Design, Chocolatier, and Frozen Desserts) into one larger magazine. I just received the inaugural issue and it is nice to have all the info in one place for one price. I think the magazine is a great read for professionals or serious amateurs. If you get only one good recipe out of each issue, it is more than worth it.

Some of them are custom and some are stock from PCB in France. They have the best transfer sheets in my opinion.

We are selling bon bons, and other confections. Our website is www.earthandskyconfections.com. It is a little out of date, as we put it up before we ever started selling anything. It has been about a year since we put it up, and we have expanded our product line considerably since then. It gives the general idea of what we do, and how we do it.

← Hi Truffle Guy, I can give you my two cents on this. My wife and I employ this technique in decorating some of our molded chocolates. It uses a lot of cocoa butter compared to airbrushing or painting, and is not the cleanest of techniques. Though mess can be minimized by placing molds in rows, right up against each other, or covering your table with plastic wrap. First you need to find yourself a nice flexible small whisk. Second you melt your cocoa butter color (PCB, or Chef Rubber) in a container that is large enough to dip your whisk into. Make sure it doesn't get too hot or it will stick to the molds. Then pretend that you are Jackson Pollock and fling the cocoa butter into the molds by "whipping" the whisk. It is a little hard to explain, but it is like trying to get all the water off of a whisk. Just whip it and it will throw off lines of cocoa butter. You can also "splatter" the molds by tapping most of the cocoa butter back into the container and then utilize the same motion. This will give you more spots than lines. Of course for either one, all the molds will be different. Some will have the perfect lines you are looking for, and some will not be exactly what you are looking for. Christopher Elbow and Norman Love just picked the chocolate that they felt turned out best and had that one photographed. Hope that helps!

Sorry it took me so long to write back. We are opening a retail store and have been really busy. This definitely is a bastardization of the term Fondant. It refers to the liquidy or sometimes just very soft center of what most of us would call a "Lava" or "Molten" cake. It almost always refers to a chocolate cake, though I have seen some "interesting" takes on other flavors. These are by no means Fondant in the classic sense. Sorry about the last explanation, I wasn't sure what you had meant when you were asking about Fondant. To best do this, I actually add a truffle in the center of an individual chocolate cake, as opposed to underbaking the cake as many do. Both are tasty, but one is much safer for those with weakened immune systems. Not to mention that you never have to worry about baking the cake too long, and the center getting firm.

There are generally two types of fondant. There is fondant filling and there is rolled fondant. A fondant is really just supersaturated sucrose. A syrup is cooked to a certain temp., allowed to cool, and then beaten so that the sucrose recrystallizes into very small particles. It really is the same thing as when sometimes a caramel begins to crystallize, only the crystals are much much smaller. This can be made with a pourable consistency, or a firmer consistency. Many commercial rolled fondants contain gum tragacanth (sp?) which gives it better elasticity for rolling out.

If you don't mind, I have always wondered if there is a certain water/solid/fat ratio that chocolatiers follow in order to ensure that they have a perfect emulsification. Thanks, I appreciate it.

This is my first post so we will see how it works. From what I understand truffles started as hand formed ganache made to look like a "real truffle" aka the tuber. This has since metamorphised into any round "rustic" chocolate, enrobed or not. Truffle shells which are usually machine made are a way of allowing you to get the a round shape while using very liquidy fillings that would otherwise be impossible to roll, or to make all your chocolates uniform (ie Vosges or Candinas). Bon-bon is a European word that to me has come to mean any "higher end" chocolate (molded, enrobed...) other than truffles. It is used interchangeably with praline (no accent), which I believe originated in Belgium and neighboring areas. I think that they are called pralines (no accent) in Belgium because Classic Belgian "Bon-Bons" are made with Praline (with accent), the caramelized hazelnut (or other nut) paste, and thus became known solely as pralines (no accent mark). Just my two cents.