Easter: The Bad

Yea, so this post is late. I spent the month of May working a lot. I do that sometimes. And then I left CERN for a week to do (almost) nothing physics-related for a week. It was awesome.

I could also argue that this baking episode kind of, sort of deserves to be forgotten, and I can't even find the picture I wanted to top this post with. But I will shoulder on anyway. Despite the insanity, I still found a little time to cook.

Way back in Easter-time, I decided I wanted to make myself a special cake. I had the year previously bought a nid de Pacques and quite enjoyed it, and I wanted to make something a little fancier. My intention was to make a small jelly roll cake, and then decorate sections with chocolate frosting and candy to look like eggs. The cake was to be a genoise sponge, and the frosting was to be chocolate ganache.

The genoise is a French sponge cake that gets its rise from heated and beaten eggs, and I chose it because it can handle the cutting and rolling I was planning without falling to pieces. Chocolate ganache is probably the best trick I ever learned for cake decorating. It's a mixture of chocolate and cream, heated until all melted and blended, and can be used for everything from poured over a cake for a smooth, shiny candy-like finish or beaten to be spread and piped like frosting or chilled and used to make truffles. The common ratio I use is 1 oz chocolate to 1 oz cream, or 1 ml cream to 1 g chocolate, but you can add more chocolate to produce a stiffer result. You can also add butter or oil to produce a different sort of finish. The ratios can be pretty forgiving.

However, ganache does require working with chocolate in it's least forgiving form--melted. Because melted chocolate likes to seize (turn grainy, gritty, slightly burnt) if it objects to how it's heated, or if some cold liquid gets in.

So it happens that while I was melting my chocolate, I accidentally splashed some water into my chocolate, and suddenly it wasn't melting so nicely any more. I hurriedly dumped out the water as I could, but the ganache was already afflicted with a thickening, gritty patch. 300 grams of good chocolate wasted.


No.

Like I said, ganache can be used to make truffles, and if it doesn't taste bad, ganache that's started to seize can be used that way. When it's cool, no one will notice the texture variations (or be really sneaky and add nuts to the ganache to hide it). So I did. I dumped my ganache into a container to cool while my temper did the same. Later, I broke the hardened ganache into chunks, rolled those into balls, and covered them in ground hazelnuts. I then fed them to my colleagues to gracefully dispose of my mistake.

Oh, may my colleagues never know how much of what I feed them is either an experiment or a saved mistake.