Category: Techniques

Spit-Making 101

All this talk of spit and sloppy drunkenness really is making for a macho week — as advertised. But why does one actually need to make a spit to make a spit cake? Because a normal meat-roasting spit is inadequate to the job. You can’t simply skewer a piece of dough on a stick, hold it over a fire and expect it to bake into anything. It would be too massive and the outside of the dough would burn before the interior baked.

The trick to a spit cake is to expose only thin strips of dough to the flame so that it has a realistic chance of baking all the way through. Sure, you could wrap a tiny amount of dough around a stick, but how much fun would that be? A fat log-like spit allows you to create a cake of a size that’s worth eating. It isn’t difficult to make one. I’ll show you how.

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How to Cut a Cake

This is one of those tasks most people assume they already know how to perform. However after receiving some emails about slipping and/or sliding glazes during Sacher torte week, I think a tutorial on this subject is warranted. For as with most things there’s a right way to cut a cake and a wrong way. […]

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Temper, Temper

It’s easy to lose your cool trying to create a perfectly tempered batch of chocolate. I know I usually do. The thing is, professional chocolatiers have high-tech mechanical temperers that keep melted chocolate at just the right temperature for hours at a time. The rest of us have to make do with the tools we […]

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How the pros do it.

Whenever you buy chocolate, it’s tempered. Bars, chips, disks, chunks…whenever chocolate leaves the factory, it’s tempered. The only time you’ll ever bring home untempered chocolate is if it’s been baked (say, in a chocolate chip cookie) or if you happen to leave it in a hot car and it melts. In either case, the carefully […]

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