[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

In an effort to get the cherries in kirsch out of the house, I'm running with the Black Forest Gâteau thing.

 

 

All of the elements are the same as the bûche from last weekend, but it's tweaked to make it a bit lighter.  I'll see if I've succeeded tonight 🤔

[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

1 minute ago, weinoo said:

I find that any longer and they ferment.

 

That's the sweet spot.  Also, if you want to boost the banana flavour a bit, add a splash of Jack Daniel's

[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

A big birthday party this weekend, so it had to be a bûche.

 

Dark Forest Bûche

 

 

Chocolate digestive and upmarket Lindt candy crunch

Blackcurrant curd

Dark chocolate sponge

Cherries in brandy

Mascarpone and vanilla chantilly

Dark chocolate mousse

Glaze

Chocolate, cherries

 

My first Black Forest, and many things learned:

 

a) Buy the cherries at the last minute, or I will eat them all.

b) Cling film leaves an unintentionally cool wood effect on the cake.

c) I cannot cut straight to save my life.

d) You can pipe glaze onto cakes.

e) You don't notice how bad Paris streets are until you're trying to keep a cake away from your white shirt in the back of a taxi.

 

But not bad

 

Edited for coherence.

[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

18 hours ago, kayb said:

Wise woman.

Two to eat, two to cook with.

 

 

So are these just caramels?  According to Wikipedia, they're actually Jamaican.

 

And now I'm down the Wiki-candy rabbit hole...

[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

It's squash season, so as usual I made a cake.

 

I wanted to play around with milk chocolate a bit.  I've come to realise that I much prefer it to dark, and it works better with more delicate flavours.

 

Chocolate, orange and squash cake

 

 

Milk chocolate orange biscuit base

Génoise sponge soaked with orange juice and chacha

Orange and butternut marmelade

Orange and butternut curd

Milk chocolate mousse

Glaze

More marmelade

Candied clementine

 

Really good, but the glaze went too thin and the mousse barely held together...  I need to stop trusting Francisco Migoya's recipes.  But still, one of my better cakes

 

[Potato Puree, Mashed Potatoes, Pommes]

4 hours ago, gfweb said:

 

That was my point.

 

A whisk, to me, is a pain to use for potatoes unless they are really loose.

 

Ah.  You may need more butter then   I find if you use cold butter, it lightens up well and doesn't go runny, even when you reach 50/50 levels.

[Potato Puree, Mashed Potatoes, Pommes]

7 hours ago, gfweb said:

 

 And if whipped as opposed to riced or mashed..they ought not have a slimy sheen ...which takes a finer hand with a food processor than I have. 

 

Why don't you use a whisk?  You could probably just chuck it in a Kitchenaid and leave it to whip.

 

I've never had good results from a blender or food processor.

[Crostini/Bruschetta Ideas Needed Please]

8 hours ago, gfweb said:

Found a photo of the boursin/cranberry chutney/tenderloin things.

I've come to see the cranberry as messy looking and now put it under the beef

 

Serve it warm.

One of the biggest revelations of recent times is warm or hot boursin.  Try it on French fries.

[Full English in a slow cooker? What will they think of next?]

22 hours ago, gfweb said:

If you expect overcooked sausage then this would be just right, I guess.

 

And they don't show the mandatory cold toast.

 

Oy.

 

Or the black pudding hockey pucks, fried bread and tea.

 

But look on the bright side.  There's still space for a kipper.

[My gravlax has a fishy smell. Any advice about the cause? Can it be corrected?]

Three days sounds like a lot though - that might explain the dryness.  I do two, then rinse and dry, and leave for another day in the fridge to rest.  It seems to improve the texture.

 

But otherwise, yeah, I'd listen to @gfweb and @Okanagancook.  Get rid of the dark meat.

[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

On 9/30/2018 at 2:22 PM, Rajala said:

Pistachio / cherry tart

 

 

Nice piping finish  

[How do I make Candied melon?]

It's the flesh of the melon, cut into thin slices.  Essentially: blanch in cold water brought to a boil, then shock in cold water.  Make a syrup and pour over, leave for a day.  Reboil the syrup, pour it back over.  Keep doing this for a week.

 

Sounds like far too much effort for my taste - almost as bad as making marrons glacées.  

 

You could easily substitute any other mild-flavoured, vaguely firm-fleshed and yellow or orange coloured candied fruit (pear, pineapple, guava or papaya would be fine)- among all the other ingredients, you'll never taste it anyway.  I'm a fan of calissons, and this is the first I've noticed there's any melon in there.

[The Quintessential eG Kitchen Tips/Trucs]

Thanks for resuscitating this thread

 

I've started warming plates in the microwave.  It doesn't seem to damage them and is quicker than the oven.

[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

We found a pick-your-own place nearby and ended up with a load of rhubarb and apples.  It's still too warm for crumbles, so I made a cake...

 

...which ended up tasting and eating a lot like a crumble

 

Rhubarb and apple cake

 

 

Speculoos and ginger crunch

Set rhubarb compote

Pain d'épices

Apple tatin

Muscovado chantilly

Glaze

Candied pear

 

 

The apple tatin is my favourite part.

[How do they make tart shells so perfect?]

5 hours ago, AAQuesada said:

Can you do Pate Brisee in the same manner? or do you prefer cold butter. Just curious,  but I like these technical details. I notice that Laiskonis uses a small amount of baking powder in his pate sablee which I don't recall seeing elsewhere as well. 

 

I imagine you could, but I don't really use it.

 

4 hours ago, DeanTheBaker said:

@AAQuesada @jmacnaughtan
Is this recipe the one you guys are talking about?

 

Yeah, that's the one.  I knew it was there somewhere

 

ETA: I think @JohnT uses this one too.

[How do they make tart shells so perfect?]

On 9/4/2018 at 11:18 PM, AAQuesada said:

 I have your recipe saved, that is a really interesting technique. Was curious where you learned it?  In anycase it's def on my to try list. 

 

Thanks.  I learned it when I was an apprentice at Pignol in Brignais, near Lyon.

[Salon du Chocolat Paris 2018]

19 hours ago, Rajala said:

A month's. 😮 

 

Edit: Wow, this looks amazing. Sorry for hijacking the thread, but would you guys recommend someone to go visit this? 

 

 

Yeah, it's a lot of fun.  Lots of people, but vast quantities of chocolate and demonstrations.  If possible, don't go on the weekend.

[Salon du Chocolat Paris 2018]

18 hours ago, Kerry Beal said:

And I guess that's the other thing - what should you be sampling?

 

Good question.  But the more different things you have to sample, the longer people will stay and the greater the chance they'll buy.  That's my thinking, anyway, based on the last couple of shows.

 

17 hours ago, curls said:

@jmacnaughtan do you know I what the expected benefits are for the exhibitors?  Increase in sales, name recognition, etc.?

 

Mostly sales, I think - if chocolatiers are selling a month's worth of stock in a weekend, it's pretty good

 

I don't know about name recognition, but a lot of foreign chocolatiers are there, presumably to get their foot in the door of the French market or get picked up by one of the luxury department stores.  For the bigger names, I think it's more of a marketing thing.

[Salon du Chocolat Paris 2018]

I've heard back from a friend who used to do the Salon du Chocolat in Lyon with a fairly big chocolatier, and they would bring a month's worth of stock for the Salon.

 

I think this would be a good rule of thumb for the Paris version - maybe even more, judging by the popularity of the show.  You'll be amazed at how many free samples get eaten.

[Salon du Chocolat Paris 2018]

Hi, and welcome to eGullet @SuperawesomeSnowflake

 

At the moment, I can't give you any real figures for the volumes you'll need; however, if last year is anything to go by, you can't bring too much.  It's more a retail space than a B2B event, so make sure you have plenty of sweets for tasting and enough stock to get you through - especially as the last two days are the Saturday and Sunday, when it will be busiest.

 

I'll post back once I've spoken to a few people, and if and when I can give you a better answer.

 

James

[How do they make tart shells so perfect?]

You don't really need baking beads or trimming after baking - a lot just comes down to technique and resting.

 

Here's what I do:

 

- Roll out a good pastry (I think I posted my pâte sucrée recipe somewhere) to about 2mm

- Cut out a circle about 2cm larger than your tart ring

- Lay it over and press it in.  Make sure you get the pastry right into the corner, otherwise it will slip down when you bake it.

- Put it in the fridge for at least half an hour.

- Just before baking, trim the edges with a knife at an angle, to give it a bevel.

- Once baked, if there is any lifting underneath, just raise the pastry a little to let the steam escape and press it down to flatten it while it's still malleable.

- Wait for it to cool completely before touching it again.

 

I've never really seen the need for baking beads, or (thank God) cutting strips of pastry and assembling them.

[Yuzu crémeux - boil or not?]

For the gelatin, that'll be the weight in powder or sheets - it comes to 1.49% of the total recipe weight.  Both forms are essentially identical, and you generally want it to be somewhere between 0.5 and 1.5% of the weight, depending on other thickeners, consistency, etc.

 

It should be fine to bring it to the boil.  Just do as @pastrygirl recommends and strain it out.  I'd recommend hitting it with a stick blender as well when you incorporate the butter.

[Spraying glaze on frozen mousse]

Ah, ok.  It makes more sense now I've seen the cut - I thought it was just three stacked blocks of mousse that could be glazed separately and then stacked.

 

It's the opposite, in fact - you generally glaze mousses to stop them from drying out.

 

So what is your cake?  I can guess that there are a couple of pistachio components, but that's about it...

[Spraying glaze on frozen mousse]

7 hours ago, Rajala said:

This is the final result! It went really well.

 

Looks great!

 

So, why did you need to spray the glaze?

[Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – )]

First fraisier of the year

 

I've managed to simplify it, too.  Only takes an hour or so now.

 

Fraisier

 

 

Madeleine sponge

Lemon and ginger white chocolate chantilly

Gariguette strawberries

Candied citron, etc.

 

This is the first one I've done without a pastry-cream based cream - it's now lighter, if a little sweeter.  The ginger works really well with the strawberries, too.  Who knew?