About a month ago, I spent all weekend making chocolates for sale over at Fallout Durham. As a result of this, I was somewhat burnt out on the whole confectioner thing for a little while, so I took Christmas off (okay, I did make a chocolate tart while I was at home, but come on, it took all of about ten minutes to make the ganache and pour it into the pâte sucrée base I had made the day before). And then when I got back, I got sucked into the Fortnight of Fun at work which sucked up my evenings as well as my days. This weekend was going to be my return to the realm of sweets and cocoa butter emulsions.
But chocolate is a fickle mistress, and seems to resent the fact that I abandoned her for a month. I planned to make something this morning, though I wasn’t really sure what until I lifted the temperer from its heavy moorings and took account of my current chocolate stocks. To ease myself in, what could be easier than a large bar of milk chocolate mixed with orange essential oils and passed through a cream whipper to create aero bubbles?
As it turns out, the answer to that question is: a lot. I’m still at a loss to what happened: maybe the new whipper I used wasn’t full enough, or the chocolate gods decided to get their revenge, but the chocolate came out of the whipper in pretty much the same way it went in, with no trace of the two nitrous oxide cartridges I fed into it. Bah. So I ended up with a small block of orange milk chocolate. Which is not the worst thing in the world, but not exactly what I planned.
Still, I ended up spending $300 on chocolate afterwards, so maybe that sacrifice will appease the chocolate masters? I need some inspiration for next weekend, too…
Apart from that, it’s been another quiet week. Well, that’s a bit of a lie; it’s been a similar week to the previous one, where I’ve only had a few moments at the end of the day to rest before getting up and starting all over again, but hopefully that shouldn’t be the case in this coming week. Which isn’t to say that I’ll be doing anything interesting, but I won’t be working all hours!