Chocolate? yes please!

Today was the day we were starting our rotations and would be put in to our groups. I already knew who would be in my group so I wasn't nervous. I was really looking forward to it. I love my group we work really well together.  I walked down ready to go in to the kitchen and I see them standing in the decor room or the "chocolate room!" - oh.my.god.YES! To me working in the chocolate room is like wining the lottery in pastry school.

 We got our recipes and the first thing we would be doing is making Modelling chocolate. I honestly didn't know you could make it - I thought you just bought it. It wasn't all that difficult and in the end we just put it in a bag and put it in the fridge because it needs to sit over night anyways. We had to use glucose which is fun! And sticky as all hell. First time using that goo. Won't be the last.

 Then we moved on to recipe number two - French Truffles! Now the way I make..well use to make.. truffles at home is obviously very wrong. Making the ganache was easy, then we had to cool it down until it got to an almost fudgie consistency, then we had to pipe it in to little balls. Now mine turned out pretty well, some looked like pieces of poo. Most of ours looked like pieces of poo, delicious, delicious chocolate poo. We all had a good laugh while we were attempting this task.
When Chef came in to see how we were doing he came over to me and said "nice...well that one looks like what my neighbours dog left on my lawn this morning" lol. I wasn't offended - it was true. Now french truffles get rolled in chocolate twice. not dipped, rolled. So what we had to do first was temper our chocolate BY HAND! So we had to melt down 500g of couverture chocolate (higher cocoa butter content so it melts quick and much more runny then normal chocolate) then came the time to temper. We each had a beautiful marble slab that was nice and cool to work on (did I mention the chocolate room is air conditioned? heaven!) . You poured out most of your chocolate, leaving 10% in the bowl and you spread it out with your spatula, then use your putty knife to bring it back in on its self. I think we were told when the chocolate gets to 30 degrees you need to add it back to the bowl of chocolate and mix it in to stop it from cooling more. Chef didn't want us to use our thermometer, he wants us to learn to feel chocolate and temperature with our fingers. And never having done this I didn't  really know what I was feeling for, even after watching his example. So needless to say I had to do it twice lol. I was happily moving my chocolate around on the board and then it started to get hard then before i knew it I had a big hard clump of chocolate. It was easy to fix, back to the double boiler, melt it down again and try to temper it again. Second time was a success. Thank goodness. I really wanted my chocolate tempered properly I wanted a nice snap when you bit in to it.  Then came the fun part! rolling the truffles. We put a little bit of the tempered chocolate in the palm of your hand and just roll it until its covered. We had to do this twice, but on the second time we had to roll them in cocoa powder, then put them in a tamis (drum sieve) to get the excess cocoa powder off. I love the look of them, very rustic. Beautiful.

 We then cleaned up and had to make Cornets? .. I call them Cones of hell. We have to cut triangles then roll them in to little cones for doing small detail work. Little bastards. I made a few poor ones which was fine enough, I just wanted to pipe some chocolate. Chef showed us a few examples of some classic french piping. One I could do no problem, but the other one. Cripes. It looks simple and when I'm looking at it I know what I have to do..It makes sense. I just couldn't do it. I was making little retarded looking trees. Not very fancy. Chef came over to help me and do another example on my paper and I practiced more around his. When he came back to check on me he said (pointing to the one he did and not realizing it) "oh! That one is really nice!" "yeah..that's the one you did.." "oh. haha well it's lovely!" hilarious.

 We had lots of laughs in that room today. From my classmate spilling the cocoa everywhere and chef coming in and stopping and laughing "well. Had some trouble with the cocoa did we? I'm going to pretend I don't see this" hahaha.
 I tried to act gangster - can't pull it off. To chef telling us a story about monkey ass. He always uses the phrase "smooth as a monkeys ass" and someone said "I've never seen or touched a monkeys ass." So he told us about the time he and his wife went to the drive through safari in Toronto and a monkey with a little bare bum sat in the middle of his windshield. It ended up leaving their window with a nice greasy monkey ass print. That wouldn't wash off! haha.

 This is just too much fun. Even when I get frustrated, Its still fun. I might never leave school. On graduation they are going to have to pry my little fingers off that school. I'm not leaving. Ever.

 This is my second attempt at blogging today. The first time I fell asleep right on the desk lol. So I'm glad I made it through it this time around!

...I'm really craving some chocolate. hmm.

Enjoy some pictures of my first day in the chocolate room!

Piped Ganache

All done piping! See my poo shaped ones?! lol

All done rolling. Good work team! 

French truffles. Yes, they are suppose to look like that. 

So rustic and beautiful. 

Learning to temper chocolate. 

My first attempt at piping skills. Can you find the two chef did?

lol I need some practice.