SpiderFarmer

So, in prep for Halloween, I’ve been trying to figure out how to make the little figures that are going to go with the haunted house cake I’m going to bake.

I could use fondant, but it dries really hard, and it doesn’t taste all that great…where as chocolate…well, everything tastes better with chocolate.

I know how to make modeling chocolate with real chocolate, but I was wondering if it was possible to make it with the candy melt disks. Mostly because I have a ton of them, and they come in a wide variety of colors, so that’s a step already eliminated. As it turns out; it works pretty well.

Modeling Chocolate from Candy Melts:

• 7 ounces (200 grams) Candy Melts
• 3 tablespoons light corn syrup

1. Melt the candy in a large pyrex measuring cup in the microwave, 1 minute /half power, then 2 more bursts of 30 secs at half power, stirring at the end of each heating cycle.
2. Grease your measuring spoon with veggie oil or shortening, so the corn syrup will easily slide off.
3. Stir the candy until smooth and lump free, then add the corn syrup. The candy will start to seize almost instantly, but keep stirring until you’ve incorporated all the syrup. You’ll end up with a big blob of warm candy. It’ll have the texture of a tootsie roll. (Well, a warm tootsie roll.)
4. Put your blob in a freezer safe resealable bag and pop it in the fridge. Once your dough is cold, you can take it out, cut off a piece that you want to work with, and knead it until it’s a workable mass.

It’ll be really hard when you first take it out of the fridge. If you have time to let it warm up a bit, it will be easier to work. You can mold it like it were fondant or marzipan. Here’s some pictures at google on the groovy stuff people are doing with modeling chocolate. Wrapped well, you can store this stuff in the fridge for darn near forever.

If you’d rather use real chocolate; here are the ratios for doing that: (keep in mind that for melting chocolate, you may have better results using a double boiler, bain marie, or chocolate pot…although I’ve done it successfully in the microwave; the idea of nuking chocolate tends to make chocolatiers get the vapors.)

Dark Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1/4 cup (60 ml) light corn syrup

Semi-Sweet Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) semi-sweet chocolate, chopped
3 1/2 – 4 tablespoons light corn syrup

White Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) white chocolate, chopped
1 1/2 – 2 tablespoons light corn syrup

Milk Chocolate Modeling Paste:
7 ounces (200 grams) Milk Chocolate
2 1/2 – 3 tablespoons light corn syrup.

Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This book is a phantasmagoria of brilliant fantasy, philosophy and steampunkery. Miéville paints with some of the most carefully crafted language and semantics I’ve ever seen. His word choices are extraordinary…psoriatic instead of flaking, cossetted instead of enclosed…his prose is poetry.

Acknowledged by the author, and obvious to anyone who has ever been exposed to that classic of fantasy fiction, is Perdido Street Station’s debt to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast. Both Miéville’s New Crobuzon and Peake’s Gormenghast inhabit the texts that spawned them like living creatures: they are not only settings, they are characters. Both works also show a predilection for baroque — and oddly evocative — names. Perdido Street Station is no mere imitation, though; it is a work of relentless inventiveness.

New Crobuzon and Perdido Street Station defy easy categorization. They are the mesmerizingly complex creations of China Miéville’s intricate imagination. They are seductive and perverse, beautiful and menacing.

I found the end troubling, and have had trouble reconciling it with the characters I’d built in my head. My friend who was rereading it at the same time, saw the end as something more hopeful than I did; whereas I found it nihilistic and disheartening. But that is the wonder in Miéville’s work, that two people can read the same words and come away with such radically different impressions.

View all my reviews >>

Working on vegetarian recipes in anticipation of a visit from one of my dearest friends.

I think I’m going to try Montrachet/basil tarts with fresh figs and zucchini pasta with broiled tomatoes from the garden.  I was going to make a zucchini tart, but I think it’s just too busy to put all that stuff in the little teeny tart cups I’m going to make.

I’m going to use phyllo dough; each sheet cut into 6, then layered in three sheets in muffin tins as the base for the tarts, rather than pie crust.  Phyllo has such a nice texture, that I think it will add something to the recipe.

Update:  Phyllo dough…it’s such a pain in the ass once you try cutting it.  It really is.  It’s fine for stuff like baklava or spanakopita, where you’re using big pieces, but good god, what a pain when you’re trying to do little bits.  For me; way more work than it’s worth.

Next time, I’ll just whip out a quick pie crust recipe. Pie crusts are simple, quick and painless, and everyone loves a good flaky pie crust.  The tort recipe I tried was good, but more quiche than tort.  So, the drawing board on these recipes remains open.

Currently reading China Miéville and PG Wodehouse. Two authors who have nothing in common other than their ability to engage the reader. But Wodehouse makes a nice change when China breaks my brain. No review for Perdido Street Station (which is free on the Kindle right now) yet, I’ve only just gotten to Part 4. But here’s my take on My Man Jeeves.

My Man Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse

Project Gutenberg is my fave place for OOP and public domain books. I adore Wodehouse, and who can forget our beloved gentleman’s personal gentleman, Jeeves, who ever comes to the rescue when the hapless Bertie Wooster falls into trouble. Pithy buffoonery, moronic misunderstandings, gaffes, and aristocratic slapstick. It reads considerably more satirically now than it probably did in the heydays of 1919…but it hasn’t lost a bit of its humor.

View all my reviews >>

Working on a new technical writing site…it’s taking much longer than expected.  Also…twitter is sapping my need to update the blog…instant gratification, doncha know.  Feel free to follow me on Twitter, and let me know who you are, so I can follow you back.