chocolate string cage?? ty

yup.sure can.

A professional pastry chef would not use chocolate chips for that purpose, nor would one put them in the microwave.

:eek:

I'm not a mod, but I would be more happy to help you if these types of questions were in the Baking General forum. Chefs are still glad to help there, but in these professional forums I suspect you're not getting tons of help as it's a little grating to read post after post of "piddling" with "filo" for the first time and clarifying margarine, etc in a forum that is supposed to be for professional pastry chefs...

to tell the truth, you're "piddling" me off :lol: ;)

now now, stir it up, keep your "temper"... :lol: (that is a chocolate joke, non pastry chef types).

hi

hi all .. just joined the forum ... learned alot already .. especially interested in bubble sugar decor, if making with normal granulated sugar, not isomalt, can the sugar be baked in the oven between 2 parchment sheets brushed with alcohol? will it work? if so, what temp oven should it be?
thanks for all help in advance..

I wish that was me JAMMIN. lol thats david gilmour.
if you want a delailed instruction on how to do something, get yourself a dvd. I got one on sugarwork and I refer to it often.Professional Culinary Training DVDs : CIAProchef.com


this one should help you.but the dvd would be better for learning.
Howstuffworks "Chocolate Garnishes"

I thought this WAS the general baking forum, and not the professional pastry chef forum.
?

Siduri,
I moved the thread to general.

Probably one of the easiest ways is to use already tempered chocolate...those little discs you can buy in a bag, especially if you are going for looks more than taste. They taste fine for my purposes, but I do know a couple of people who would turn their noses up if they knew it wasn't fine tempered chocolate. Anyway, you can melt them in a microwave, put it in a baggie, cut a small hole in the corner and drizzle away...I have a cake that I use this lattice for. I measure parchment paper in a long strip, long enough to go around the cake with a couple of inches overlap, put marks on the back in pencil so I know the width of the lattice I want to make, drizzle the chocolate and when it gets hard wrap the entire thing around the cake and leave it until you serve or present. Take the paper off at that point. It's pretty easy. The main reason you don't want to use chocolate chips, by the way, is if you don't temper the chocolate properly, the chocolate will become soft and melt or collapse at room temp. That's why pre-tempered chocolate is a lifesaver for decorations like this.

If you melt the chocolate it wont be tempered anymore.tempering involves heating to 110, then lowering the temp slowly to between 89-86 degreesto make your chocolate shine and to give a nice snap.also it will help to keep it from clouding (the grey streaks that form of chocolate not tempered.
Tempering Chocolate - Allrecipes

Actually, no. IF (underline the word IF) you melt at a temp no higher than 32 C (forget what that is Fahrenhiet) it won't go out of temper. You can get away with this with short blasts in the Microwave, or , my favorite: Overnight in a Garland oven with nothing but the pilot light. Kind of neat, really. In the morning you take the bowl out and the shape of the chunk and the crest/stamp are still on the couveture, but once you jostle or move the bowl, the whole thing melts and collapses into a liquid pool.

Another way without dicking around with tempering is to use a frozen base. Wrap a bunch of metal ladles or bowls in cling film, stick in the freezer. Melt your couveture, doesn't really matter how high, as long as you don't burn it. Drizzle your couveture on the frozen bowl. As soon as the melted couveture hits the frozen base it gets "shocked" into producing Beta 6 crystals. Decorations/garnishes done this way stay hard, retain thier "snap" but have a matte rather than a glossy appearances--perfectly acceptable for decorations. I have a hunk of marble that I keep in the freezer for this purpose. Drizzle melted , untempered couveture on the slab and immediatley pick up the strand--it remains plastic for about 10 second- and wrap around whatever you have or shape however you want, and it will harden in this shape.

Whatever you do, stay away from "Baking" chocolate chips. Nasty tasting stuff, and a real bitc* to melt too, as it has been formulated to stay hard even with baking for those wonder full "home-made-just baked goodness" chocolate chip cookies....

32.0 degrees C is 87.6 F

not true, foodpump is on the right reason, the reason to not use chocolate chips, is they are made to hold a chip shape when you bake your cookies at 350F, not for melting purposes.

Sadie, your cake sounds great though, and very beautiful and impressive especially for a home cook! Whomever has you cooking for them is very lucky:chef:

Of course you are right, stir it up, they are supposed to hold their shape when baked, but if you do heat them enough to melt them to a liquid state and then try to use them for decorations, they won't hold up...that's what I was trying to get to. Most of us who started at home have tried this at least once (some of the more stubborn of us have tried several times before we got smart and researched a little, not that I'm stubborn at all, just ask my husband!!)
Thanks for the compliment! It is a favorite among friends...sadly my family is not much into desserts...my husband and daughter really just prefer fruit, and my son will eat one piece of something and that's it. My daughter's friends, however, have recently discovered the "working fridge" in the basement where all baking tests go to die, least they end up on my hips, and now I have teenagers around fairly constantly...at least food isn't going to waste (or my waist!) anymore!

If you get any Wilton method instruction book, they generally have how-tos on some of the piped designs. If you're just going for decoration, and not the world's greatest chocolate, just get a disposable piping bag, heat some candy melts in the microwave according to package directions, and pipe the design on some wax paper. Try looking up "chocolate lace" and see what you find. There should be some instructions and some templates you can trace with the chocolate on your wax paper.

Cheers!

Sarah