keychris

messing about with the marbled effect at home. Not perfect but it's not bad for a first try.

a spice grinder might work, I think Kerry has mentioned one in the past for this purpose. I know when we used a stone grinder in class it still wasn't as smooth as commercial paste, but it was smoother than a blender, we only ran it for ~6hrs though.

Unless you're using some sort of grinder you will never remove that granular texture. Domestic grade food blenders can't get the particle size small enough - I don't think having the emulsifier would change that. I'm not an expert on that part of chocolate making though

Can you raise them up off the rack before glazing with a ramekin or something (or a cake ring for larger cakes)? Makes it easier to get something under it.

because why not? Three sourdough rye loaves in the oven as we speak too

This is our traditional easter cake

refrigerators are very low humidity as a general rule, iirc. eg. when you leave your block of cheese uncovered, it dries out.

They're pretty good huh They fit the CW2007 egg perfectly. I purchased mine from an Australian company, Metropak. The description is "13x8x8cm PVC box". When it arrived, it had "Made in China" stickers, so I imagine you can get them from somewhere closer to you as well! They cost $1.15 each, but with shipping and tax they ended up $1.49 (australian dollar, of course). This was the cheapest I could source.

I have a market this weekend, here's a few of the things I'm offering: eggs with eggs inside them Salted caramel - I take my caramel to a very dark colour, people really seem to enjoy that bitterness with the salt and milk chocolate. Peanut caramel praline - there's an optical illusion here, these are actually cut on a slight angle so they're a diamond shape not rectangle! Hazelnut orange praline. I have others which I didn't photograph yet - a raspberry, a lime and a cinnamon

I hope you said something like "You make it richer" first

hah, you beat me to it Gap! Using a stick blender or a food processor will give you a more stable emulsion as the fat and water particles will be more evenly dispersed. To 99% of the customers that will eat your product though, they wouldn't even notice that the ganache was a problem, they would just think it was part of what you were aiming for - I tasted a friend's rose ganache once that had grains in it, I thought they were an interesting textural component until I asked her how she did it and she's like "what grains? I didn't put anything textural in there!" So long as it still tastes good, don't worry be happy is my motto

how did you process it? by hand or machine?

by the time your test has set, your cocoa butter has cooled even further. I personally cool my cocoa butter to 31C with stirring then spray, spraying temperature by the time I actually spray is probably more like 29-30C I imagine. I rarely have issues with cocoa butter sticking to the mould, but I think that's more likely your chocolate temper, as Ruth and Kerry have said!

For those that would like to see another version of the marbled effect, you see it briefly in Antonio Bachour's instagram vid here:

Doesn't matter IMHO. I usually now do around 20g starter, 50g water, 75g flour. Next day, repeat, discard the excess (or keep for pancakes). I only increase the size when I'm going to bake with it and need more The amount of starter you use is determined by how active it is - if I do equal weights eg. 100/100/100, after 24hrs my starter is a very thin, runny liquid, usually means there's been lots of enzyme action chopping up all the starches into tiny pieces. So I use less starter, so after 24hrs it's doubled but hasn't changed consistency much from the day before.

First eggs of the season... I forgot how early Easter was this year!

I personally don't go higher than 100% hydration for my starters (ie. 100g flour / 100g water), but more commonly I work at 66.7% (150g flour / 100g water). I find anything higher than 100% is just too runny and I don't get a great flavour, but YMMV. You can definitely add the discard to any recipe in place of water and flour - I save my discard for a few days and make pancakes If you want to change your starter to a different flour, you do exactly what you describe - just be aware that different flours will absorb different amounts of water, ie whole wheat will be a different consistency to rye to white to spelt etc etc The reason you want to bring your starter back to room temperature is the same as why you use regular yeast warm - the bacteria and yeast in the starter are more active at room temperature. When you cool the dough back down, you encourage the activity of the bacteria that create the acids (they're more active at cooler temperatures) and so give it more tang, but if you start cold, your starter won't be active enough to raise your dough. HTH

thermomix is no substitute for a robot coupe, IMHO. I have a thermomix and whilst it's great, if you only need something as a food processor, I'd choose a robot coupe.

invertase works by breaking the bond in sucrose between glucose and fructose - when you caramelise sugar you change the molecular structure of the sugar and will possibly make it unrecognisable to the enzyme. However, you're not fully caramelising all the sucrose, so you may still get some effect, but it won't be as pronounced as when you use it in fondant.

My children wanted a fruit loaf. I soaked 70g each of raisins, dried apricots & glace orange in orange juice overnight and added them after the butter in the base recipe for "Poor Man's Brioche" from Bread Baker's Apprentice, added an extra 50g of flour to firm the dough up a little and voila! I also include cinnamon, cloves, ginger and mixed spice in the dough (~ 1/2tsp of each, 1tsp of cinnamon). I made a glaze from the juice left after soaking the fruit and boiling it briefly with a small amount of sugar and water, which I cooled and then brushed over the hot loaf immediately after it came out of the oven. The kids all loved it

thermomat is just a TM branded silicon baking mat, yup. and you definitely cook it in the pan

I'm not seeing much wrong there

I've never seen bleached flour in any shops here, ever! I don't look that hard though

they may use isomalt, not regular sugar.

I've sent you guys a PM