Chocolate 1

Let's just say I have a much stronger appreciation for those who work with chocolate. Not only is the process of making chocolate from cocoa pod to bar incredibly complex, but getting it to do anything that you want it to is a pain in the ass. This was our first chocolate unit, and it almost ruined how I feel about chocolate. If you showed me a Snicker's bar after class, I would want to vomit all over it instead of saying "Snack time!" like I usually do. Luckily for me, I could never get really and truly sick of chocolate.

In our first class, we received an introduction to how chocolate is made and tempered. Chocolate making requires the beans to be harvested, fermented, dried, roasted, cracked, ground, mixed, refined, conched, tempered, and molded. Alterations to that process, as well as the way it is sourced, alters and the taste and mouth feel of the chocolate. We tasted a lot of chocolate in order to figure out all of those subtleties.

We then learned how to temper it. Correctly tempered chocolate allows it to stay solid at room temperature, and contains the 5 S's : smooth mouth feel, shiny, snap, sets, shrinks. In order to temper, it requires time, temperature and agitation in order to fight off the bad crystals (4 of the 6) from setting and ruining the good crystal structure. One must heat it up to 122 f, cool it while constantly agitating down to 81, and then reheat and hold it at 86-90. If any of those points are missed, or if you do not maintain that awful holding temperature, then you have to start all over again. You can NEVER get any water into it throughout this process.

Most of you know me. Most of you know that I am neither neat nor patient. You can imagine my frustration at this part. We also didn't get to MAKE a lot of shit. I really like making shit, not spending an hour tempering and re-tempering chocolate, getting water into it, starting over again, making a mess, cleaning it up, re-tempering, getting chocolate on my face, etc.

This is what we did get to make. First, a dried fruit and nut chocolate cake with chocolate glaze and chocolate leaves. I loved the flavor of this cake.

A chocolate box to hold our truffles. I forgot to take pictures of the truffles, but they were a chocolate orange truffle (I HATE chocolate and orange mixed together. HATE IT. I will forever reference those god awful chocolate oranges from back in the day that were DISGUSTING, to the point that I could never even imagine tasting these, which were supposedly really tasty). I was actually proud of my chocolate box. While I originally wanted my sides to be smooth, I ended up painting over them to create kind of a woody texture because they got really messy. My design was a little corny, but whatever, I made a box out of chocolate!

Queen of Sheba cake. I always think of the Julia Child video of her making this cake. It was a nice and dense chocolate-almond cake. We decorated it with chocolate tiles we made using a transfer sheet. I went a little out there with my chocolate tile placement, but whatever, it's school.

And now, for the grand finale. For our final chocolate project, we had to create a chocolate candy stand that was at least 6" high and contained a bowl to hold our chocolate candies. It had to be made entirely of chocolate and we had 1.5 classes to complete it. We had to choose a theme based on the first letter of our first name.

I chose Jupiter (jazz, jellybean, and junkyard were not interesting to me), so I decided to make a stand called "Jupiter and its Moons". I know you dorks are going to say that Jupiter actually has a shitload of moons, but I decided to do the main 4. It was incredibly stupid of me to think that I could put a heavy object (Jupiter) on top of a 6" skinny pole, relying on just perfectly tempered chocolate to pull it off. Only at the end did Chef Jae say "Julia, it was very risky making this", not when I showed him the diagram. Truthfully, I wanted to make something easy, I hated working with this shit.

I had multiple fails while making this, to the point where I began calling it Poopiter. I had fun decorating, though. I loved my solar system base, and making Jupiter look like Jupiter- it had a red storm and everything. It survived the trip from my work table to the chef's table, but on its way to the display table, Jupiter fell over and acted like a bowling ball, knocking down all of the moons in its path. I thought it was the perfect finale