Playing with Sugar and chocolate

First the sugar was melted with water past the hard crack stage. Then the fun begins!

Pouring out the sugar on the sil pat

Getting rid of all the air bubbles with a blow torch

when forming the tray, the sugar must be held up in shape until it is completely hard otherwise it may collapse!

chef Kai making the bird's nest

The finished tray!


We also made truffles on Monday. The red ones are Oscar and my take on gourmet chocolate- spicy cayenne pepper chocolate with a port wine reduction. The almond rocca looking ones are famboise liquor. We started the process by steeping flavors in cream for about 10 minutes. We tempered bittersweet chocolate and carfully incorporated the steeped cream into the chocolate to form a ganache. We then refrigerated the ganache on half sheet trays until firm. We then gloved up and attempted to make ball shapes out of the ganache. This had to be done quickly as the ganache has a very low melting point. We then covered the truffles with coating chocolate and dusted them with cayenne pepper!

We combined both the sugar tray and the truffles that we made for a presentation tray.