If you’re a chocolate fiend, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the current fashion for combining chocolate with hot chile flavors. My sense is that the trend was kicked off in earnest by a jalepeño chocolate cake recipe in Pierre Hermé’s chocolate book from a few years back (in much the same way everybody is on fire for […]
READ ONEver wonder where the word chocolate comes from? I know I did for many years. It sounds faintly Mesoamerican, yet according to the experts the original word for chocolate, both the solid substance and the drink, was cacao (supposedly pronounced “kaka-WAH” if you want to get finicky about it). Many linguists believe that “chocolate”, by […]
READ ONSo if the world was abounding in mousse starting in the 18th century, why did it take so long to get to a chocolate version? One reason may be that up until the early 19th century, chocolate processing was a fairly crude science. It consisted of little more than grinding up fermented and roasted chocolate […]
READ ONLots of food journalists write about the early history of chocolate. How Mesoamericans believed it was created by the gods, how they used it in sacred ceremonies, how quickly it caught on back in Spain and all that jazz. Yet European adoption of the strange brown bean wasn’t as speedy as most of those stories […]
READ ONA reader points out that dacquoise isn’t always thin, sometimes it can be as thick as a cake layer. Very true, however there’s a limit to how much meringue I can stand in one bite. I’ve seen dacquoise and ganache pastries that look like hamburgers — with the dacquoise as the bun. Kind of a […]
READ ONIt’s hard to track the precise evolution of the molten chocolate, or “fallen” chocolate, or chocolate “lava” cake. I first tasted one probably seven or eight years ago at one of the wife’s favorite New York dining spots, Verbena in Grammercy Park. Then it was a molten chocolate savarin cake, which is to say, made […]
READ ONThis week’s pastry combines two of my favorite things: the creamy luxury of fine chocolate and the brittle snap of hard, intractable science. A near and dear friend, and one of the world’s greatest living chocolate fiends, is headed down here to Louisville for the weekend. And I know what she’ll be expecting: a delicate […]
READ ONWhat’s the best way to melt chocolate? It seems that just about every pastry maker has a different opinion about this. Some people wouldn’t think of using anything other than a double boiler, others are just as happy with a microwave. Me, I’m a microwave man, since it’s faster and it leaves fewer dishes to […]
READ ONI only made the ghosts so I can’t speak to both varieties, but they came out pretty well. The trick is to make your little rounds of cake small enough so you don’t have to put a giant heap of buttercream (or frosting) on top to make their little pointy heads. Here’s where you’ll thank […]
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