Week 9: Tempered chocolate

Chocolate + me = love
(and mild self loathing)

Hi everyone!

I’m a slack ass. I broke my personal rule of posting every Sunday, reinforcing the fact that my self-discipline levels are about as high as a school stoner. I literally have no excuse; my chosen recipe only requires one basic ingredient! It’s everybody’s best friend and worst enemy: chocolate. This week I decided to temper the gorgeous stuff, because it’s always a big deal when anyone does it on MasterChef.

Sidenote: I baked and iced cupcakes too, because tempered chocolate on its own is pretty useless.

Tempering chocolate

I followed The Guardian’s guide to tempering chocolate. Basically, you melt chocolate, then add some more room temperature chocolate. It was pretty much as simple as it sounds. The only hitch was that it took me at least 4 minutes to realise that I’d turned on the wrong stove ring. Also there was the issue of the few unmelted chunks left in my tempered chocolate, which I cleverly solved by eating them.

Moulding decorations

Now for the fun bit. I watched a YouTube video of some European man who made up for his lack of personality with his excellent chocolate crafting skills. He used acetate sheets to mold his chocolate, and I panicked a little, because all I had was uselessly flimsy cling wrap. Alas, I was blessed with a very rare moment of genius, and improvised by chopping up my mother’s plastic Marbig folder.

Curls: bane of my existence,
devil on earth

Firstly he shaped some sort of ornate hoop, so I did too. Then he ran a funky rake like contraption down the chocolate, which I did not do too, because I didn’t have one. I used a chopstick instead, which did the job, albeit shakily and without finesse. But my hoop didn’t crack, so that’s a win in my book.

Next were chocolate curls, which were a nightmare and a half. For setting purposes, I had to curl my chocolate covered acetate around the interior of a cup. That was frustrating and fiddly and chocolate dribbled everywhere. And it all came to nothing, because tragedy struck. My set chocolate curl cracked upon removal. I blame the damn chopstick.

Lattice: love of my life, beat of
my heart

Into the piping bag my (now cooling) chocolate went. I drizzled out a couple of lattices. They were beautiful.

Lastly were the chocolate decorations. I’m a pretty good drawer, so I was excited and prepared to ace this. And do you know what fate decided to throw at me? Fate had the absolute nerve to slap me in the face with hardened chocolate. I only got to pipe one measly heart, and then I was left with a piping bag filled with set, unusable chocolate. Oh well, at least my one heart was very pretty.

Ta da!

Ranking rubric

Taste: 8/10- they were chocolate cupcakes. So they were yummy, but nothing ground breaking.

Presentation/resemblance to dish: 8/10- They were very cute cupcakes

Time: 2/10- three hours all up, we all know I’m a snail

Kitchen Mess: 1/10- I was scraping hardened chocolate off the kitchen bench for at least 10 minutes

Have a great week and see you Sunday (I promise this time)!

Cheers,

Rosa