Chocolate

I have just finished a 9 month stint as a chocolatier at a awesome chocolate shop. I haven't really shown what I worked on in this blog yet, so I thought that I would briefly show some of the things I helped produce. 

This is a fleur de sel caramel - made without the use of corn syrup. Seriously delicious, and pretty satisfying to make really. 

The marzipan - simple but lovely. 

These were both slabbed and hand dipped. I did quite a lot of molded chocolates as well, butter creams and such. It was an interesting medium to work with as I had briefly done some chocolates at school, but never worked with chocolate that much. I learned nice tempering methods (ice bath!) and that you have to be in a good mood to work with chocolate, as I swear it can sense your weakness!

New Business

I'm trying, yet again to begin a small business making food. Specifically I have decided to concentrate on baking French Macarons with various seasonal fillings (cherry, apricot, peach, sour plum) as well as some not so seasonal fillings ie. dark chocolate and Fleur de sel Caramel. My idea is that I will sell them at local farmers markets (as I love love LOVE the markets) and maybe do special commissions and such. 

I am currently underway to getting my commercial kitchen (note to self - HUGE expense), but I am looking forward to working in a space that a.) has natural light, and b.) has other people obsessed with food in it. I realize that I miss school for this reason, I love food talk, I love seeing food being made and learning how other people make it/consume it, so this part of the kitchen is a massive bonus for me, as is natural light obviously!

I have a facebook page for my business: 

http://www.facebook.com/LilliPilliBaked

and a twitter account: 

http://twitter.com/ LilliPilliBaked

So if you like a lot of food talk, and some picts about being obsessed with food, please join me on my new adventure. 

I plan on traveling quite a bit until June (Massachusetts, Hawaii, Australia and Italy) but June is my real starting date for the markets, but until then I will be concentrating on recipe testing, a whole lot of paper work, applications, exploring local bakeries and planing where to visit in those various locations. 

Thank you everyone for your support!

Macarons - Valentines Day

I made a ton of macarons for Valentines Day. They reminded me of my favorite ice cream I used to get as a kid:Neapolitan. I'm sure my grandparents bought it because having three grandkids meant that we were all bound to be pleased. And we were! I loved the strawberry, and I remember Jesse (my little brother) loved the chocolate. I'm not sure about my older brother, but I suspect it worked out that he liked vanilla. 


The flavors of these macarons were: beige = fleur de sel caramel (note to self: salt burns and looks blackish and weirdly peppery, so maybe don't do that next time...), the pink were raspberry filled with homemade jam and the brown were nutella with a nutella buttercream filling. 


This was a tough project. My oven broke (again, this is the 2nd time within three months and it makes me very sad!) but as I live in an apartment we have a shared kitchen space downstairs which I commandeered and so I dragged the sheet pans down 17 floors and baked in community kitchen in the middle of the night. At least these smell delicious!


I'm also finding the packaging a massive hassle. Who knew that there isn't any packaging in the States that suits macarons specifically, so I had to make do with what I found and make sure I lined them with food safe paper. 


This was a lot of work, but I'm pretty happy with the results!