Philip Le

I am also interested in this. Also, how long, generally, doe couverture last in a pantry? I wouldn't mind paying five-hundred dollars for chocolate if I could keep it for a year without it spoiling. As for sources, I've heard of Chocosphere from E-gullet people.

It's the whisk that came as an attachment to my stick blender. Oh, I have the Kitchenaid stand mixer whisk attachment too. That's certainly large and balloon shaped. I will give that a try as well, once with cake flour and once with all-purpose, just to see which incorporates better.

Alright, so I finally got the courage to try making another cake and this is the result. The outside is still crunchy. The inside, not so much. I used six eggs, 50g butter, 100g cake flour and 50g corn starch. For the life of me I can not get the flour to fully incorporate. I sifted the flour and cornstarch together 3 times. I tried using my dinky little whisk but found that I was still deflating my batter rather quickly while trying to get the flour to incorporate into it well enough. Should I get a bigger whisk? Should I switch to all purpose flour? The recipe tells me to use all purpose and I think it may not stick together as much as cake flour. Cake flour seems to want to stick to itself even just being sifted into a bowl. Oh, and I used warm butter. Should I perhaps be using room temperature melted butter? Also, that's the entire recipe in one pan rather than in two pans, baked at 315° until a toothpick came out clean. The cake was originally domed when taken out of the oven but flattened to almost perfectly level after cooling. There is also no vanilla in this cake (I forgot!) so it tastes... off. Do you think a combination of almond extract and vanilla extract would be good or is pure vanilla the way to go? Do you think that's enough cake to split into two pans? The recipe is for two eight inch tins. The tin I am using is 8.25 inches at the bottom and flares up to 9.0 inches at the top. I buttered the sides halfway up and used buttered parchment to line the bottom. Should I lightly flour the sides? Should I butter up higher? Should I parchment the sides? The outside is crunchy and weird and I don't think I like the idea of cutting off the sides. The cake itself is pretty spongy (I'm guessing this is intentional) but there are like these little sorta hard lumps in it and I can't figure out what's causing that. Would a sugar syrup help with the texture? All in all, this cake is a huge improvement over my previous attempts but it isn't anywhere near as nice as a grocery store's spongecake. Thanks for any suggestions that may come this way.

I have heard about folding it in with a whisk; I just don't have one. (Except for an attachment for a stick blender that I've been using in a pinch, but that seems rather awkward in this situation.) I guess I should go out and buy one. By thoroughly mixing some batter into the butter, do you find that the batter deflates a lot as you mix? I tried that while the butter was warmish and I couldn't get the butter to incorporate well. If you could find the recipe that you use pretty easily, it'd be nice to compare, but if it's stashed away somewhere I can probably find more recipes online. Also, I suspected that there might have been too much flour (and butter) but I didn't want to mess with the proportions in case removing the flour made the cake too eggy or removing the butter might make the cake too crunchy. I suppose I should find a different recipe. Beating the eggs while cooling definitely seems like a good idea. I don't know why I didn't think of it. It would help the batter cool down faster as well.

I'm trying to make a spongecake and it is just awful. The cake is dense, eggy and crunchy. Is it supposed to be like this until I add the syrup? I don't think the addition of syrup would help all that much. Anyway, here is the recipe. 225g AP Flour 6 Eggs 160g Caster Sugar 75g Butter, melted Add sugar to eggs in a heatproof bowl and beat over simmering water until a ribbon consistency. Remove from heat and allow to cool for three minute. Add cool butter and sifted flour, using a large metal spoon to fold in until just combined. Split evenly into two 8" pans and bake at 350°F for fifteen to twenty minutes, checking doneness with a skewer. Cake is done when the center bounces back after slight pressure. Now, I have tried replacing the AP flour with cake flour and a combination of cake flower and cornstarch and I still get an eggy, crunchy texture. I have tried adding warm butter directly to the batter as well as cooled melted butter. I have tried adding a little batter warm butter, then combining all of the batter together but butter still weeps out of the batter. Regardless of what I do, I am deflating the batter as soon as I add butter to the it. With the flour, I can fold in fairly quickly without deflating the batter but if I do that I am left with clumps of flour in the batter that I generally fish out. If I go slower, I can incorporate the flour more thoroughly but I find I lose quite a bit more air. So, what am I doing wrong and where do I go from here? I thought this was going to be the easiest recipe out of the book because it has the fewest ingredients and steps but I have been through a dozen cakes and I still can't get it to look more like a cake and less like Vietnamese baked eggs?

I didn't see anything I couldn't already do with a slotted spoon or a batter funnel, but I'll admit that not everybody has a batter funnel. (They should though. It makes pancakes super fun, and it functions as a makeshift separatory funnel.)

If you want to add hearts, next time you can pipe a little melted white chocolate on top of wet ganache in a circle and then run through it in one direction [EDIT: Before the ganache has set up, of course!] with a toothpick or something to make a heart shape. The outline of a circle will give you the outline of a heart. A filled circle will give you a filled heart. Where this video starts is the part of interest; the very last circle is an idea of what I'm talking about. Of course, ganache and white chocolate are much more viscous than coulis and yogurt so you'll definitely get more shape out of your design than this chef did. [second Edit: Not that what he ended up with is any less attractive] http://international.stockfood.com/image-picture-Making-a-design-with-two-coloured-kiwi-fruit-sauce-00373728.html This is an example of the technique again, this time with outlines of a heart rather than a filled one. I also don't believe the intention was to make heart shapes, though, so it is not a precise example. If you already knew all this or if you already tried this, then I apologize for my presumptions and that it did not work out for you.

Perhaps this is the minimalist in me talking but I think you'd be just fine with just an induction hob (or perhaps one of those smaller induction cook tops.) If you do decide to use some counter space or cabinet space for either an oven or a microwave, perhaps a small combination steam/convection/microwave oven would work for you. I spy one on Amazon that uses only 3 square feet. Those are actually two appliances I have been wanting for a while now. Are you in one of those urban microspace situations? Because I have always found those homes fascinating and I would actually love to try it out one day.

I was looking on the internet and looking for ways this might not work (since I wanted to try this out before I bought a Revolation 2 and lord knows I am a party pooper) but upon further inspection I don't see why it wouldn't work. It looks like the auger can operate regardless of whether or not the heating element is on and the melters should be able to bring chocolate up to temperatures of 250F or higher. The only thing I can see not working out is that chocolate fountains are prohibitively expensive and I don't think the cheapo models are going to quite cut it. Oh, and cleanup, and dipping, looks even more difficult than with those spinning bowl tempering machines. (Just curious, are you slowly bringing the temperature up and then adding seed or are you just bringing it up so slowly that the chocolate never enters the crystal breakdown stage?) Edit: Another thing! Chocolate fountains require really liquid chocolate so you're either going to need to use really high quality couverture, add cocoa butter or deal with the chocolate sort of tumbling down the sides.

Cysteine is a semi-essential amino acid and apparently has some use in combatting acetaldehyde in rats, which does a whole host of bad things. While that doesn't directly translate into usefulness for humans, I don't see anything inherently bad in additives. I mean, is yeast, eggs, or butter really necessary for making bread? No, but it improves it without being much downside. I'm curious, what does an excess of l-cysteine do? Does it impart a peculiar taste beyond small amounts?

If you do decide to buy cocoa butter ask the supplier about what its intended use is, especially if you buy from a soap supplier, because the cocoa butter may be only cosmetic grade and not food grade. The e-bay link that mostlylana posted is for cosmetic grade cocoa butter (I inquired) and is not intended for consumption, though some cocoa butters intended for cosmetic purposes are also food grade. The cocoa butter provided by the Now company, off the top of my head, is one one such provider but the price is rather steep. I found it in the lotion aisle at one of those trendy urban supermarkets (ironically, out in the suburbs but modeled after the flagship store downtown) but you'll at least be able to find it health food stores. A few fixes I've been told to try is to either increase the working temperature of the chocolate by tenths of a degree or by adding unsweetened chocolate/chocolate liquor, which should be around 50% cocoa butter. I hear that really fluid couverture is around 40% chocolate? This will make your chocolate darker and more bitter though, so plan accordingly. If you decide to increase the working temperature, do a test batch to make sure you don't get any unsightly bloom. In the long run, though, I would find another chocolate to work with if this particular brand of chocolate isn't doing what you need it to. (Valrhona, for example, has a 70% cocoa, 42% fat content organic/free trade chocolate at a similar price point to Grenada. They are a large company though, so they can't run solely on solar-electric energy, so if that's why you support them then I got nothing.)

Perhaps butter?