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It’s funny sometimes, the things that give me the impetus to move projects off of my “to do” list and drive me into the kitchen. In this case, it was Halloween. After trick-or-treating was over, our basket of treats held a few leftover Aero bars, which I had always thought my husband disliked. When I [...]

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a chocolate and confectionery workshop organized by Kerry Beal, The Chocolate Doctor, at Niagara College in Niagara-on-the-Lake. As you may know from some of my previous posts, I don’t consider myself to be an especially adept chocolatier, so I always relish the opportunity to get some practice [...]

“Do you want to make the candied orange zest garnish?” my husband asked me, about our next round of truffles, filled with an orange butter ganache. “Why not?” I replied. “The devil is in the details, and candied orange zest will make them that much nicer. Anyway, candied orange zest is easy.” And so it [...]

This weekend, my husband, knowing how I feel about working with chocolate, suggested we make a batch of chocolates in order to get more experience. The result was these Dark and Stormy truffles. The centre, from Peter Greweling’s Chocolates and Confections, is a white chocolate ganache flavoured with vanilla, ginger, lime zest and Gosling’s Black [...]

In the world of confectionery, there are two types of people: chocolate people and sugar people. Chocolate people are versed in the arcana of tempering and cocoa butter crystallization; sugar people are seers of water content and caramelization. I am a sugar person. I’ve never really grasped chocolate tempering, despite having attended a fantastic chocolate [...]

Sometimes our failures can be as fascinating as our successes are tasty. After making Hervé This’s chocolate Chantilly, I thought I thoroughly understood the process and could use it to interesting effect. Since chocolate is made up of cocoa butter, cocoa solids, sugar and lecithin, I thought I could use pure cocoa butter, fruit puree [...]

There are probably as many ways to make chocolate mousse as there are pastry chefs, but they all come down to two simple steps: make a base that contains chocolate, and lighten it with whipped cream, whipped egg whites or both. The base can be a crème anglaise, a sabayon, or even a bavaroise. The [...]

Below is a short video I shot at a chocolate-making conference I attended last spring, organized by eGullet members. It shows my husband filling shell-molded chocolates with a passion fruit caramel. They were delicious!