keychris

Do you have a photo or a link? I can't imagine how you apply a water-based substance like fruitjuice to a chocolate and not adversely affect the final product.

IIRC this is used in his french bread recipe? I love this recipe, and I really enjoy the texture of the bread it produces. Perhaps try increasing the hydration a little to get a more open crumb?

Eggs made for family. I really need to work on my workflow, because nine of these took me the better part of a whole day to complete! Inside the eggs: milk chocolate with honeycomb chunks.

Not quite perfect, but good enough for a 3, 6 and 8yr old However, it was 2am this morning (easter sunday) when I finished chocolate making LOL

I personally work with my cocoa butter at 31-32C (88 - 90F) and my gun at 45C before spraying. It might be one of those things that once you have it work for you, you just do it that way forever I leave my coloured cocoa butter solid in my holding cabinet, wrapped in three layers of clingwrap. When I need it, I just take it out the day before and leave it at 45C in my dehydrator overnight, then it's ready the next day to be stirred whilst cooling to 32C.

To keep them uniform: practice makes perfect. Practice that piping technique until you get it exactly right

I'm going to guess some sort of panning.

Lesson learned: Always take a test before starting to use the chocolate It's important that you understand what the test is showing you though and how to fix it - make sure you read up on exactly what the tempering process is doing to the chocolate.

Gfron offers the best advice - calibrate your thermometer. If you have access to a probe style thermometer to get the temp of the chocolate below the surface, try that too. Did you do a test of the chocolate on a spatula to confirm the temper was correct before you ran with it? Remember that tempering is a misleading name - whilst temperature is important, it's not about that - it's about the crystals that are being formed. So if you didn't have enough seed crystals in the machine, it wouldn't be in temper even if it was at the correct temperature.

Easter's a'comin'...

That quote can be taken SO out of context

Some things I'm getting ready for an upcoming market.

Pastrygirl explains me better than I do

The more movement your ganache gets, the finer the emulsion will be and the smoother the mouth feel will be. Try blitzing it with a stick blender or a food processor. This will also cause it to set firmer, iirc.

You get perfect edges as you see in the picture by using a microplane on the tart case before you fill it.

how much inorganic sugar

If you're interested in low-sugar for more fruit flavour, try investigating low methoxy pectin (iirc Pomona is one such brand) which uses calcium to set, instead of sugar. You will need to be good at sterilising, as the huge amount of sugar in most jams is what acts as a preservative. HTH

heh, yes

cooking it fast or slow makes no difference IMHO. you just need to cook it out far enough - at least until you're starting to see it foam (I'm assuming dry-caramelisation), but I usually go until the entire sugar is foaming and very dark. But I like bitter caramel!

heh, I use pantyhose

Do either of you check the temperature of the cocoa butter before you use it? When you're applying it by hand (ie, not spraying), you need to have it in temper (that's why you're shaking it, to generate beta crystals), so if you're shaking it for a minute and it's still at, say 36C, it's definitely not ready and you need to let it cool to around 32C whilst shaking some more and then applying. You can get away with not doing this when spraying because of the enormous amount of movement the cocoa butter undergoes whilst passing through the gun and out the nozzle, this cools and generates enough beta crystals to temper it (having said that, I still cool my cocoa butter to 32C before spraying)

Dark couverture is simply cocoa solids, cocoa butter and sugar (with a little vanilla and emulsifier). Milk couverture: add more sugar and milk solids. White couverture: don't add the cocoa solids, add more sugar and milk solids. so the answer to your question is yes, temper it. You can't temper compound chocolate, which has basically had all the expensive cocoa butter removed and replaced with a cheaper vegetable oil.

I am not familiar with this machine, but I will say: 1) Yes - it's probably just holding the chocolate at 45-50C 2) Leave it running, else the working temperature won't be maintained. If it's constantly moving the chocolate, be aware of over crystallisation 3) You can add small amounts of warm chocolate to tempered chocolate, but you do need to be careful to not raise the temperature too high which would melt all of your beta crystals and lose temper. HTH (at least until someone with this machine replies!) Where's Jim D, he has a Chocovision, not this model though

Perhaps you could spray them so that whilst they're just hollow, they're still pretty?

yeah, if those are solid chocolate, try putting them into the fridge for ~10 minutes straight after you put the chocolate into the mould. As for the line, make sure you tap the mould as well as you can (a bit tricky with silicone moulds) to release any air bubbles, which I guess is what those lines are.