After 4,9kg of chocolate last weekend, I felt like I never wanted to see chocolate again. Never ever would I make a single more praline. Never again will I temperate chocolate.
Well... It's a week later and I really wanted to make a lime-filling and salted caramel. Is this how women feel when they decide to get a second child?
And also... I did not follow the rules, so lets see how my experiment last night went.
No cream in the ganasch. The recipe calls for cream, but I don't have milk products at home only vegetable based substitute (environmental reasons). So instead of cream I used Oatley "imat" which isn't even a cream substitute, but a substitute for low fat cream used in cooking. Think it went badly? Well, actually not too bad at all. Taste was fine, I really think that Oat-cream doesn't taste anything when you start mixing it with other things. However the filling didn't really want to thicken up the way normal ganasch thickens, but that's most likely because I mixed in a lot of lime in my filling which thins out the filling. Should probably have added some starch to it, something to remember for next time.
Having a runny filling made it of course a little bit more difficult to put lids on the praline. Put there's a trick I've seen on Youtube, where you spread out the chocolate on a cooking sheet and then put it on top of the pralines.
Who needs to be precise when temperating chocolate? I was hoping to find a cooking thermometer at ICA that shows decimals/fractions, but had no such luck. Was instead stuck to use my timer-steak-thermometer-combo device from IKEA, that doesn't show decimals which could be a bit difficult when you're looking for a temperature between 31,1-31,9. But I gave it a try, what's the worse thing that could happen? Probably that you end up getting the chocolate a little bit too cold which made it difficult to work with, but it was still in temper (glossy and snappy). The lids didn't end up looking too pretty, but heck, that's okay for me
200g of chocolate. That's was all I used, for a recipe that called for 255g+30g. How did that affect the result? Well I didn't get any chokladbräck obliviously but I also didn't have enough chocolate to fill up the whole mold. Solved that with a a spoon and scooping over chocolate from filled shapes to some that needed more. It went really well except that my chocolate was a bit too cold so some of the shapes got stuck with chunks of chocolate in them. But that's okay, I just didn't put any filling in them and the chocolate can still be reused. Even though I only used 200g of chocolate I did end up with some leftovers.
No big bowls? Tipping out the chocolate when making shells is a messy business. Perhaps even more messy when you don't have a big enough plastic bowl to tip it all out in. Instead I used a reusable teflon baking sheet. And it was very effective. Once the chocolate had cold down on the sheet I could easily get it off as it didn't stick to the sheet, and it also felt nice not throwing tons of paper away, yay for the environment.
All and all I'd say that it went very well yesterday and I'm ready for making some salted caramel tonight, already cooked the filling (so much work cooking a can of sweetened condensed milk for two hours...).
