Cream Puffs: In Which Alice Medrich Continues Her Reign as Chocolate Goddess

As I've mentioned before, Alice Medrich's Bittersweet is my personal chocolate bible.

I recently bought another book of hers, Chocolate Holidays: Unforgettable Desserts for Every Season, which is the paperback form of A Year Spent in Chocolate. I'll save a full review for after I've tried a couple more recipes, but I will say that if "Chocolate cream puffs with spun sugar" is any indication, my faith in Ms Medrich is well-placed.

I've never made cream puffs or puff pastry of any sort before. The only time I've seen them attempted was when a friend in college, who was born in France, tried to make some from an original French cookbook and failed miserably. I hope she's since found a recipe as easy and detailed as this one! As usual, the dense recipe text leaves nothing to chance, and my puffs puffed up in lovely fashion.

The chocolate custard filling was exactly what I expect from a Medrich recipe. It did an amazing job of highlighting the flavor of the chocolate I used (my standby Ghirardelli 60% chips) rather than overwhelming it in egg flavor. It was also surprisingly rich for having no cream or butter in the recipe - in fact, I used a mix of skim and 2% milk rather than whole! I think you could easily make it with all-skim and be perfectly happy with the results.

Happily, my camera is working again (it's been broken since Christmas, hence the lack of photos in recent entries). Here is a shot of the filled puffs, with custard oozing out of their little holes:



I was making these to bring to school to pass out, so I skipped the caramel glaze and spun sugar meant to turn the puffs into a croquembouche and dipped the tops in a simple ganache. Although made with the same chocolate, the ganache and the custard had distinctly different flavors, which was a nice contrast. Here are the final, dipped puffs:



Overall, these were a huge success! And if you thought people were impressed by homemade cheesecake (which they always are), wait til you hand them a cream puff!

Guittard Couverture Part 3: Marginal Success!

We made one more attempt at tempering the Guittard tonight. It was a cooler night and the stove/oven hadn't been used in a few hours, so the kitchen was even cooler. Success! We dipped some ganache lumps we'd had in the fridge for a couple days, and they set up very quickly!

One thing I've learned: I'm not a fan of putting ganache in the fridge to set up quickly, which we did when our original experiments with this chocolate were failing. It just isn't as stable as ganache that has set up at room temperature over a few hours - as soon as you get it out of the fridge, it starts melting. So that the truffles we dipped tonight wound up having very mushy centers. :(

As for the chocolate itself: It's got a very fruity flavor, but for supposedly having more cocoa butter than average it's not terribly creamy. At about 90 degrees it is very fluid and easy to dip in, which is a plus. However, we both agreed that we actually like the flavor of the Ghirardelli 60% chips better, and the slightly lower viscosity of this just isn't enough to justify paying over 3x the price for general use. Maybe for something extra-special - it does make a nice thin shell for the truffles.

Bonus: We used the leftover melted chocolate in the sudoku mold! I will post pics this weekend.

Callebaut truffles

A recent project we've been working on is making truffles using a mold, rather than just dipping the centers in chocolate as we usually do. Last weekend was our first attempt, using ganache that had been cut into circles about 1/4 inch tall, and using various methods to surround these with chocolate in the mold - dipping then placing in the mold and filling it the rest of the way with chocolate; putting chocolate, then center, then chocolate in the mold. None were ideal, and the shell-to-center ratio was high.

So this weekend we decided to try a new method: Coat the mold in a thin layer of chocolate, let it set up, then pipe in soft, unset ganache. We use Ghirardelli 60% chips constantly; they're easily the best value in terms of quality per dollar that we've found ($3/11.5 oz at Target). This time we decided to try something better, just to see how it went, so we got some bulk 70% Callebaut from Whole Foods.

The verdict: Thumbs up on the new truffle-molding technique. Worked like a charm, the ganache set up nicely inside the truffles and the shell was thin and crispy. We still need to work on making the bottoms of the truffles smooth, but the rest is shiny and pretty!

Thumbs waggly, however, on the Callebaut. It is a better-tasting chocolate than the Ghirardelli, but not necessarily twice as good (it costs about twice as much, $8/lb). It was also harder to work with, which I wasn't expecting. It was very goopy at the low temperatures required for tempered chocolate. I'd read that chips are to be avoided because they're formulated not to melt well (as you want them to hold up when baking), but the Ghirardelli 60% chips definitely melted better than this bulk chocolate.

I noticed that WF has Callebaut semisweet chips on sale for $4/lb, so maybe we'll try those sometime soon.