#118 - Happy New Year!

Cuckoo for coco puffs
I had my first coco puff a few nights ago.  They're from Liliha Bakery which is known for several things, this being one of them.  (My friends wanted to know how I had grown up here and never had one of these.)  My favorite part was the pudding inside - it's one of the few things I have always liked.  Unfortunately the climate here (and possibly the moisture in the filling) means that the pastry was not crispy like it is when you have a croquembouche.  Trying to figure out how to make some at home is part of the fun when you eat something and you think of things people like (or don't like, as the case may be).

In which certain traditions are upheld
I'm not sure when a tradition becomes a tradition - is it the number of years or the number of occasions in which a certain thing is done?  Or do I go with the lawyer answer of "it depends..."?

In this case, it has been a tradition (both by reference to the number of years and the number of occurrences) that I stop by my friend SM's house on New Year's Eve if we are both home for the holidays.

It is a newer tradition that he makes truffles as his contribution to the festivities.  And because he loves chocolate and I just love to talk about cooking and the fun things you can do with food, of course we always talk about food in between our catch ups over what has happened with each other's lives over the intervening year.

Last year, still relatively fresh out of cooking school, I happened to mention something about tempering chocolate and we shook on it.  Well we followed through this year but because I forgot my truffle moulds in Sydney (aw shucks) we decided to do something a little different.  That is, I had my first coco puff from Liliha Bakery only 3 nights ago - something local people know about but which I had not had until now because I refused to eat desserts or sugary things until just a couple of years ago.

Coco puffs were something with which I was relatively unfamiliar and it took a little while to settle on the filling.  Pudding might have been a better idea but we thought we'd go with ganache because SM was going to make some anyway.

A walk down memory lane
In addition to not having my truffle moulds, I couldn't remember what equipment I had left here and what now resides in Sydney so there was some digging through my bags/closet and the kitchen.

Equipment and recipe in hand, it was time to make choux pastry.  So...a couple of years makes a very big difference because I couldn't remember how long I used to cook out the panade (the dough ball).  Then I had to add an extra egg to get the right consistency because I had cooked the panade a little too long.  And then the piping...uneven and...let's just say that you find out how much you need to practice when you start doing things again, even things which used to be second nature.

We used mystery flour - that is, it was in the fridge in the ziplock bag and I was really hoping it wasn't self-rising flour.  We baked the choux pastry in batches, experimenting with the timing because we guessimated / approximated the temperature setting.  (190 - 200 C for 20 - 25 minutes translated to about 380F for 20 - 22 minutes).  The optimum time for us seemed to be 21 minutes...

Then the truffles...there was one made with the cream infused with genmai cha and another which had plain cream but parmesan mixed through it after it the ganache cooled, for the sweet/salty combo that SM likes.  I'm not usually a huge fan of the sweet/salty but I have to say this was pretty good.  The genmai cha infused truffle was rolled in kinako powder (from soy beans) and the other truffles were dipped in tempered chocolate.

Do what you're afraid to do (again) - aka cooking nerd speak / skip to Nerdy Portion Over (below)
One of the things they used to tell us is that you have a couple of degrees' leeway to bring the chocolate back up to temperature after you melt it and cool it.  The thing is, we always used Callebaut at LCB (it's what I have in my kitchen) but SM bought Valrohna because that's what he could find.  A very good chocolate but I remember the chefs telling us you have to be very precise when you work with it because it has a smaller range of temperatures for it to stay in temper.

Until I took my Patisserie finals, I felt pretty confident about tempering chocolate, once I got the hang of it.  On the day of the final, I remember the kitchen was freezing and my chocolate got too cold, too fast and I had bad truffles.  I hadn't tempered chocolate since and all of a sudden I was going to temper chocolate - with a brand that was too expensive to mess up (especially since I hadn't bought it!) - talk about performance anxiety.

Luckily, I seem to have this perverse quirk of personality where the more stressed another person gets (SM was upset he couldn't find the right butter) the calmer I get.  He thought he messed up his chocolate for the ganache - he didn't (we split it into two separate bowls for the different flavors).

Look Mom, No hands!  (The tea infused truffles)
We had a little bit of a thing because he didn't want to roll the ganache for truffles (his hands melt it) and my melon baller was too small.  So I quenelled the ganache then he rolled it around in the kinako powder and patted it into the shape he wanted with spoons.

Assembly required (The truffles with cheese)
This one did require us to get our hands dirty.  Well, chocolate-y, anyway.

The ganache had set quite hard so we had to dig it out to roll it, but then since the chocolate had passed the test (small amount on knife blade or parchment paper, it should cloud over relatively quickly and set) we had to dip the truffles.  I did not think this through - I think next time we should skip the wire rack - you get feet on the truffles but you don't lose the bottom of the shell when it gets stuck to the rack.  Oh well, you learn (or re-learn) and mistakes help consolidate the lesson.  Of course I told people to keep it refrigerated because of the cream, and to eat it within a couple of days (because the shell wasn't intact).

Nerdy portion over
So the final results of our efforts:  a plate of truffles and a plate of "coco puffs" with ganache instead of chocolate pudding filling and no "chantilly" which is some sort of frosting they put on the coco puffs.  You can see the inside of our coco puffs below...

Not perfect, but actually quite a successful experiment.

So until next time (and for the rest of this new year) - Happy New Year and may all your experiments and forays into the unknown / slightly intimidating be as happy as our was yesterday.