what does sexy chocolate look like?

Ok, sorry I have been sooo lazy about blogging lately!  It's not like there isn't plenty of exciting stuff going on to write about, I am just sooo exhausted from it all that it has been really hard to climb the stairs to the office instead of flopping on the couch when I have a few hours off between work and school....ohh, the first world problems of my life.  Just kidding, I am still having a great time, and we are going on a much-needed vacation in exactly 5 days, so I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Oh, and I may have allowed myself to bring a glass of wine up here to motivate me - please excuse any spelling errors :)

The past couple of weeks have been a roller coaster at school AND work.  I am having major ups and downs at school -  still really excited to be learning new techniques, but this semester is BY FAR the most challenging for me yet.  I am having a hard time not getting frustrated when I can't do something right the first time.  And between tempering chocolate and making mousse after mousse, there have been a LOT of things I can't get right the first time...

Speaking of tempering chocolate, we have made bonbons in Chocolates class the last few weeks.  I am so pumped about these because this is one of those techniques I really wanted to learn at school because it is just too complicated to teach myself at home.  And tempering chocolate has always sounded complicated to me, but I never realized quite how vague the instructions would be.  For example, the title of this blog post is a direct quote from the teacher when one of us asked how we would know when the chocolate is ready.   My strengths are in black and white, math-based techniques, and this is definitely not one of them.  So far, we are learning the tabling/marbling technique of tempering (see picture below), and next we will learn the seeding approach.

I decided to take one for the team and volunteer to be the first person to go home completely covered in chocolate.  I was washing dishes with the industrial sprayer and had the bright idea to point it directly into a ladle full of chocolate...yay!  I have now learned the best method for getting chocolate out of chef whites!

The first week we did dark chocolate bonbons, and when we finally finished them (there were definitely a handful of disasters and do-overs), they were delicious!  Some of the flavors of the centers were rum, praline, coffee, caramel, peanut butter, raspberry, and lemon-mint.  I liked all of them except the lemon-mint, and the caramel and raspberry were by far my favorite. 

My dark chocolate caramel ganache bonbons

Smorgasbord of bonbons for tasting + the insides of mine

The second week was milk chocolate and white chocolate.  The milk chocolate flavors were cherry, banana, pistachio and passion fruit.  I liked the pistachio and passion fruit, HATED the banana.  Apparently "true chefs" know that the best banana to cook with is one that has completely turned black, then was peeled and frozen until it fermented into a black mush.  I don't know about you, but that is just about the least appealing thing I have ever seen, and I don't even like bananas to start with.  The white chocolate flavors were pear, coffee, lingonberry, and mango (mine). 

Please ignore the permanent crease in my hat and the cracks in my bonbons...

 Moving on from my exasperating/exhilirating adventures in chocolate....
Contemporary cakes has gotten slightly better each week.  Last week, I finished the cake I described in my last post - the mint chocolate mousse cake with the mint creme brulee insert.  It came out super short (we even double the mousse recipe, so I have no clue why this thing is 1/4 of the height it is supposed to be...), and I didn't love the flavor.  I mean, it wasn't bad, but it just tasted too much like fresh mint for me.  I love fresh mint in some things, but for a cake it is just too much like chewing on raw herbs.   Another group's Whiskey Hazelnut torte was the only one I really loved - it had these amazing layers of salted chocolate (obviously my favorite!) between the chocolate whiskey mousse, and then the beautiful and tasty candied hazelnuts for a garnish.

My cake (on the right), and some of the others

And then this week we finished the cake we started last week.  We were replicating the recipe that the teacher won Pastry Chef of the Year with in 2006, so I couldn't wait to taste it.  It had a pecan japonaise (meringue) bottom, caramel mousse, fudge cake, caramel ganache, vanilla mousse, mangos foster (mangos flambeed in amaretto with brown sugar and cinnamon), and more caramel mousse.  His original recipe also had bananas in with the mangos, but there weren't enough to go around, so my group went with just mangos.  Okay by me, since I'm not a huge banana fan, as I mentioned earlier.  Needless to say, it was delicious.  And I didn't think it could get more exciting after reading the recipe until I found out how we were going to garnish it.  We used a power sprayer, the kind you would paint a house with, and filled it with chocolate to spray the cake.  And one of my awesome friends was great enough to take a video of me spraying - see below!  It made this awesome, fuzzy chocolate finish.  Which looked amazing on my cake until I stuck my fingers in the side of it like a bowling ball and cracked the chocolate all apart.  THEN we made flowers out of white chocolate and painted them with luster dust spray.   So much fun! 

Alright, and on one last catch up note, a few things I have been making at home - Andes mint fudge for Trev's work meeting this week (although he forgot to bring it two days in a row, so we ate a little more than planned at home), and blueberry-strawberry crumble, just because blueberries were on sale at work last week AND Haagen-Dazs the week before and I just couldn't resist....