Please Stand By

I spent most of the week inside with a bad foot, so:

This Week In Chocolate — White

Ingredients

Grinding (repeat this picture for 10 hours)

Setting

Tempering

Poured into mold)

Unmolded

Tempered, with a firm snap!

This weekend, then: ten hours of running the grinder, and my first batch of white chocolate. You’d be surprised about how hard it was to find whole milk powder in Durham instead of non-fat (and non-goat, though I’ve got some goat powder for later). It is not the best white chocolate I’ve ever had, I’ll admit, but it’s pretty good nonetheless, and now that I’ve done white, dark and milk will follow as soon as I source the beans…

This Year In Chocolate

Wet grinder

If you’ve ever heard me talk about making chocolates before, I’m normally at pains to point out that I don’t make the chocolate myself; I merely melt, temper, and refashion chocolate into other forms, whether it’s molded bonbons, truffles, or bars.

And there’s nothing wrong with that - the vast majority of chocolatiers operate in this fashion, buying chocolate from companies like Valrhona or Callebaut. But I won’t deny that I’ve always wanted to go a step further and make my own chocolate at some point.

Above is a wet grinder. It’s the last big piece of equipment for the chocolate room. It has large granite rollers which are used to grind down all sorts of things into pastes; grains, nuts, and cocoa beans. Using it, I can grind roasted beans, add cocoa butter and sugar, and 48 hours of grinding later, I will have made chocolate.

So that’s the plan for 2015: full bean-to-bar chocolate production. I’m going to be working up to that process rather than simply grinding beans from the off; firstly, I’m going to make white chocolate (and perhaps a goat’s milk variant, just for fun), then I’ll purchase 100% chocolate liquour to have a go and at and milk chocolate. Finally, I’ll get hold of some cocoa beans and grind them instead of using the pre-ground liquour.

2015, then: beans go in…chocolate comes out. Fully-artisan, all the time!

2015 - The Year of Griff

Happy new year, everybody! I’m back in the US again after a good trip back home. Felt like it went by too quickly, but at least my family will be coming over to visit in April.

Some interesting news on the chocolate front to come this weekend, by the way…

Home Again

Red-nosed Casper

Yes, Casper would rather be with the reindeer than inside in the warm with me. Possibly because we made Misty wear a Santa hat yesterday.

Counting Down, Time Goes By So Slow

As it gets closer to going home, there comes a point where I start making mental countdowns in my head and lock myself away in an attempt to speed time up. Unfortunately, I started that process last weekend, and I still have another five days until I go to the airport. And I’ve been packed since Tuesday (and I’m not kidding: I have to put my Advent Calendar in the case on Friday morning, but that’s about it). So, er, to everybody I’ve essentially disappeared from in the past fortnight: sorry.

(I have just discovered that X-COM: Enemy Unknown is now out for the iPad too, so that’s not going to help one bit, really. Though at least I know what I’m doing on the plane home to the UK now!)

Next update: hopefully from Oxfordshire. Are We Festive? has cleared 100k tweets, though I’m wondering if I should add some additional keywords to the tweet filter in the next few days to see how festive things can get…

Public Service Announcement

This is mainly a warning to all those currently residing in the Colonies, but if you are travelling abroad, it could be a vital piece of information. Consider this photograph:

IT IS NOT HP.

Yes, it looks like a bottle of HP Sauce. But there’s something odd about it. The layout is wrong, the label is the wrong shade of blue, and it is labelled ‘Steak Sauce’ in an attempt to gesture that it may be used as a substitute to a product on these shores known as A1.

You may ask yourself: well, it’s still HP Sauce, isn’t it? What could possibly go wrong?

Dear Reader, I once thought the same as you, standing in the middle of a supermarket, mourning the lack of dark chocolate digestive biscuits. And I thought, ‘it has just been relabelled, surely.’ It went into my basket, and then into the fridge, until later that weekend it was pressed into service for a bacon sandwich. A typical task that HP Sauce excels at (there will be no digression into Daddies’ sauce here).

The first bite.

Instead of the sour taste of classic HP, I was hit with a sense of sweetness that made my teeth itch. The rest of the sandwich was consumed with increasing resentment as the cloying sugar taste spread across the bread and the pointless sacrifice of crisp bacon. I attempted to seal the accursed bottle up, but as the cap is half the height of the proper version and about a quarter of the weight, it ended up flying across the kitchen, leaving a trail of sweet brown ooze as it skipped along the tile.

Incensed, I looked at the ingredients, contrasting it with the empty UK bottle I was about to throw out:

UK: Tomatoes, Malt vinegar, molasses, high fructose corn syrup, spirit vinegar, sugar, dates, modified cornflour, rye flour, salt, spices, flavourings, tamarind.

US/Canada: White vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, tomato puree, molasses, dates, orange juice concentrate, spices, onion, tamarind concentrate, apple juice concentrate, garlic, ground chili peppers, caramel color (sic), mustard flour

Well, that explains things, doesn’t it.

To sum up: DO NOT TRUST THE COLONIALS. ONLY PURCHASE VERIFIABLY AUTHENTIC BROWN SAUCE.

Thank goodness for returning home next week so I can stock up on supplies. Including digestives.

Are We Festive?

Are We Festive?

The idea came from me thinking how I was going to wind my sister up this year. I like amping up my FESTIVENESS every year, and I’ve only got worse since I left the UK. Now, I’ll be back in BIcester in a few weeks, and I have a few extra surprises to come, but I thought I would construct something that would show Bonnie that the world is quite festive and she should let go of her inner grinch. And a website would be just the thing!

Behind the scenes, it’s pretty simple. I’m hooking into the Twitter Streaming API, tracking every mention of ‘Christmas’ and sending a few bits of information from the tweet into a Kafka cluster. After that, I have a few scripts that run the tweets through a sentiment analyzer, classify them according to date, and produce daily and total sentiment averages. Everything then gets sent to Redis to be pulled out by a simple Sinatra server for the webpage.

Said webpage is a smattering of D3.js to create the two gauges displaying the averages, along with a simple polling function to update the page with the latest information. Plus snowflakes!

It didn’t take too long to put together, which is good, as I’ve found myself pretty busy these past few weeks. Everything got assembled as Docker images, which meant developing and uploading to AWS was a breeze (no fun surprises between development and production!). Sadly, I didn’t have enough time for all my original plans, so I had to drop my idea of having a world map and populating it with regional data, allowing us to see the most festive country as Advent unfolds. But that, along with a re-write of the processing logic in either Storm or Samza, could be a project for next year!

Meanwhile, Bonnie’s response after being sent to the website:

You need help.

She might be right.

Oh no, not the puppy!

No blog last week, but I can highly recommend John Wick when it finally reaches your local cinema. The age-old story of ex-hitman loses wife and puppy and then goes on a mad killing spree, interspersed with members of The Wire and Lovejoy. Because who doesn’t like Lovejoy? We laughed out loud at the sheer ridiculousness many times. You’re probably going to have more fun with this rather than Interstellar, that’s all I’m saying.

As for this week, it was Thanksgiving! Which means I have to repost this, especially since Krugman was lax this year and just kept on talking about economics:

Having got that out of the way, I had a great time; this year I headed down to South Carolina to spend the holiday with Tammy, Robert, and all their family (well, children and parents anyhow!). I helped cook my first turkey, used a proper blowtorch to make s’mores (hurrah for the Searzall!), and even though I left half of my equipment (and ice-cream!) sitting on the counter in Durham, I think we had a good time. I also made a dessert with carrageenan that didn’t cause revulsion and terror! (actually, the deconstructed pumpkin pie turned out pretty well, despite leaving the Vita-Mix at home - the maple flaky crust was pretty tasty, and the pumpkin domes held up well…)

Oh, and I saw Turbo. Strangely, it probably had stronger characterization than John Wick, though was less fun overall due to fewer bouts of random violence. And no Ian McShane. Maybe Turbo 2: Turbo Harder, Faster, Stronger! will have a spot for a larger, swearing, British snail. Maybe.

It was good not spending the holiday alone, and great to be with friends, but being around a close family did make me miss mine a little. Happily, it’s less than three weeks until I fly home to the UK! There, I will buy ALL THE MALTEASERS SPREAD that exists. Oh yes.

Tomorrow, you might even get another blog entry. You’re spoiled! Yes you are!

You Cruel, Heartless Bastards

Look at these people. Enjoying themselves, throwing away all that tea.

so cruel, so cruel

All I can hope is that it was Lipton. AND ONE DAY WE WILL COME FOR OUR BACK TAXES, COLONIALS.

Anyway, this might be my last week coming up to Boston, and it’s certainly my last visit of 2014, so I thought I would stay an extra day and get to wander around the city during the day-time (which I last did in February). 15 miles of walking later, my feet are regretting that decision. Still, I wandered around the tourist haunts that I last saw over a decade ago - Quincy Market, the Freedom Trail, various bits of MIT and Harvard, lots of different parts of the T (this time, I think I got a full set of colours!), along with a bizarre visit to Pret A Manger in downtown.

(it’s a bit pared-down from a UK Pret, and the Christmas Sandwich has suffered the twin heresy of being renamed the Holiday Lunch and having all the Proper British Stuffing replaced with American cornbread stuffing and turkey ‘gravy’. On the other hand, they do sell bacon mac ’n’ cheese)

Somewhere around mile 8 or 9, after wandering around an interesting five-level vintage market where the building shook constantly from the building outside (smashing several glass shelves as I was walking along!), my feet decided that they were not entirely happy with the day’s planned activities, especially seeing that I was still several miles away from where I was staying. Eventually, I made it back to the T, and had a quiet evening around Harvard Square and an Indian restaurant in Somerville.

Today, I’m back in Waltham, and for some reason, I’ve been given a suite! Not one, but two TVs! Couches, glass bricks dividing it into two rooms, and all sorts of fancy things. It’s a bit wasted on me this week, but hey, if anybody wants a party in Waltham, I appear to have a venue!