If there is an advantage to insomnia, it is that waking up at 4 am means you can get a lot done before 9 or so. After indulging in two cups of coffee and more than half of the first 2-hour episode of the new season of the Great American Baking Show, I set to work on the rest of the confections. All the marshmallows are done, and will rest until I cut them up this evening or early tomorrow:
and the peanut butter crunch meltaways (about 200 grams feuilletine in about 1 kg meltaway) are behind (within?) bars to crystallize. Later they and their smooth friends will get a foot of milk chocolate and be cut for the elves to dip as they please. The chocolate for the peppermint bark is melting in those cunning little 3 kg Croquade melters - love those things.
i did run into something I hadn’t really seen before - the meltaway slab I made last night has this odd streaky look. The texture is perfect, and it seems perfectly tempered, so I don’t think it matters, but it got me thinking - I bought some cocoa butter (says it’s organic and fair trade) from a source that is new to me, and when it arrived I noticed that it was very light in color - more cream than the faint butter yellow I am used to - and it took a rather high temp (34.5ish) in the EZTemper to make silk of it. I am assuming it is indeed cocoa butter, but found the streaking curious. It’s a big slab, and I didn’t refrigerate it at all, so perhaps it was just latent heat throwing things off a bit.
I am off to do some grocery shopping and other errands, and hoping to have time for a nap after lunch to make up for lost sleep.
