christopher scott: chocolatier...

     i've spent the last two and a half days tempering and creaming and sugaring and flavoring and molding and freezing and remolding and refreezing and filling and remolding and refreezing then molding some more, all to come up with some couple hundred (more?) of these things. we're small scale here, so i was limited to making about six at a time, taking about 10-15 minutes per mold. yeah, i'm kinda sick of it now, but i still love it:

     the whole process, tedious as it is, is kinda centering. haha. i really love it. a key: the floral ones in the center are milk chocolate with creamy peppermint centers. the cool painted ones have a raspberry milk-chocolate ganache, the round ones are hard to tell here, but they're pretty obvious up close--peanut butter cups (with peanut butter fudge centers instead of the traditional p.b.), the square chocolate ones are supposed to be caramels, i know, but i didn't want to mess with caramel with only being able to do so few at a time and have to mess with the caramel setting up, so they're just a milk-chocolate ganache. and the big white-chocolate ones have a hazelnut dark-chocolate ganache. i made the most of the plain chocolate and peanut butter cups and the most difficult were the raspberry because i had to have the brilliant idea to have that paint-splatter design on them (white and milk chocolate). i probably made thirty of those and it took me about four hours. insane. but that was mostly because i used new molds this year and was too thick to get several molds of each shape, instead buying a few molds with all the shapes, so i could only do a few. anyway, that's over and i'm very glad to say that after all the plates were made i still have a few leftover. now if only i can stick to my plan of eating right and losing some weight over break. haha.

     it's been an odd break so far. not bad, really, but no matter how far i try to get from my problems they always seem to find me. kind of a painful reminder that the problems aren't really the sort that i can blame on someone else. i've forgotten how therapeutic cooking can be, though. i'm making lasagna for supper. sometimes it's really difficult to hope that it will get better. hmm. i'm in the mood for a movie tonight. and maybe a run. i have to get up really early tomorrow for work. i haven't been able to get up before10:30 so far this week. haha. and tomorrow i'm waking up at 5? oh my. wish me luck. i'll be around later. take care.