use real butter

Recipe: almond toffee

We didn’t get around to making toffee during my pastry skills class. I just remembered Chef Shan shouting, “and if you add cream to this, you end up with toffee!” Toward the end of the ten weeks, I asked him for a toffee recipe and he said he couldn’t give the secret recipe away. Okay, I understand – confectioner’s secret. Chef Will was the same way with his toffee recipe. I watched his perfectly square blocks of gorgeous toffee while he demonstrated tempering to the professional pastry students.

I looked online, looked in books, looked online some more and settled on a recipe in Candymaking (Kendrick and Atkinson) to begin my foray into toffee today.

Recipe: lime-raspberry petits fours

Did anyone get up to see the Aurigids this morning? We actually dragged our carcasses outside at 5 am (mountain time) and caught several gorgeous meteors despite the brilliance of the moon overhead. Wonderful.

This afternoon I set about making petits fours glacés. These are what I always think of when I hear petits fours, but in fact, they are merely a subgroup. The ones we made in pastry class were chocolate, dry, and rather large. Today, I made mine lime, moist, and tiny.

Recipe: rocky road brownies

No – not the way Cartman refers to… I’m talking about literally making brownies.

Never really satisfied with that earlier experiment of fudgy versus chewy brownies, I was flipping through some old issues of Chocolatier the other day and found brownie recipes worthy of a kitchen test. In my youth (back in 1994) I subscribed to Chocolatier because I liked baking with chocolate. I found I was mostly in over my head with that magazine. I tried again in 2000 and the same thing happened. Mind you, their other publication is Pastry Art and Design, if that’s any hint. I’m glad I hung on to those issues though, because now that I have perused the recipes, the three truffle (most difficult) ratings look to be on par with the more advanced stuff I did in pastry class. I mean to say – they are now within my ability level, and that feels pretty good!