Tag Archives: dessert

Our Week in NYC

December 2, 2017 by

We’re almost at the end of our nine-day pop up in New York City, and…WOW. We are just so humbled.

Day in and day out, our tiny little corner café in Chelsea has been flooded with such warmth and enthusiasm, and we can barely keep the s’mores in stock! Chef Lisa and her team have doubled down in their little commissary kitchen, rolling out impossible numbers of cookies and tarts and brownies and more. We’ve made more hot chocolate this week than we thought we ever could, and we’ve been teaching chocolate making classes to the best and most welcoming crowds.

We have a few more classes and book events before we hit the road back to California on December 3rd, so come see us before then! The full list of events is here.

Thank you New York. We really do love you.

(And we hope we’ll be back!)

Follow us on Instagram for more pics.

Thank you Gennaro Pecchia for the photos!

Hot chocolate

June 1, 2011 by

We took Memorial Day to work on a fun project- testing the hot chocolate varieties we hope to have in our cafe. We initially imagined a matrix of hot chocolates built around different variables like milk, water, melted chocolate, cocoa powder, sugar, caramelized sugar, and more. We began with the basics. Initially, we mixed melted 70% dark chocolate with different quantities of water and milk. We used chocolates from different origins- our Venezuelan and Costa Rican. Next we played with cocoa powder, water, and milk. For this we used Costa Rican cocoa powder, pressed with our cocoa butter press.

After a few rounds of testing, we realized that there are very distinct types of hot chocolate. There’s a Swiss Miss-style hot chocolate that brings you back to childhood nostalgia and cold winter days. Then, there’s a variety that turns on the coffee part of your palette. You could imagine a hot chocolate that has the same rich, smooth punch as coffee, but made with cocoa powder and water. There’s European-style drinking chocolate, dark like the inside of a molten chocolate cake. Finally, we even created a pudding-like hot chocolate that’s velvety and buttery.

Throughout the course of the day, our initial idea of a hot chocolate matrix began to shift. We’ll still work with the full set of variables. But, we hope to find a short set of hot chocolates that hit all of our different associations with the drink. For each of these, we’ll play with the right chocolate, liquid, and sweetener until we nail it. Someday, you’ll be able to come to Valencia Street and taste the full flight!

Finally, yes, our stomachs hurt pretty badly after a full day of hot chocolate tasting. It didn’t help that Todd made delicious homemade marshmallows.

posted by alice

Dessertsum

April 26, 2011 by

As much as we like to eat plain chocolate bars all day, we needed an excuse to try baking with our chocolate and seeing how well it worked in mousses, cakes, pies, pot de cremes, ice cream, etc. We decided on doing a dessertsum — it’s like dimsum, but instead of plates of small Cantonese dishes, we had tiny dessert bites spread out over an evening. We ended up making about 30 desserts in total — and had massive sugar overload. Here are a few shots from the evening; hopefully we will do some events like this when our chocolate factory / cafe opens later this year.

(thanks to Mark and Elaine for the photos).

Black and White Brigadeiros

March 27, 2011 by

Recently I visited my friend Steve and he mentioned a classic Brazilian treat that I had never heard of. A brigadeiro is kind of like a truffle, but a thousand times easier to make. You simply take a can of sweetened condensed milk, cocoa powder, butter, and sugar, and then cook them in a saucepan until some of the moisture evaporates. When cooled, this creates a gooey, sticky ball that you can coat in whatever you like.

Recently, we worked with a machinist to develop a cocoa butter press and I’ve been left with a lot of excess cocoa powder. This seemed like a perfect excuse to try out something new. There are many different variants of the brigadeiro online, many of them using Nestle Quick as the powder. Since our cocoa powder has no added sugar, I decided to add sugar and reduce the cocoa powder in our version.

INGREDIENTS
1 can (14oz) sweetened condensed milk
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 tablespoons cocoa powder
1 tablespoon sugar

For the toppings:
cocoa powder
pearl sugar
… or anything else you like

INSTRUCTIONS
1) Combine the ingredients in a small saucepan and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly.
2) Keep stirring until thickened (you should be able to see the bottom of the pan for a few seconds after each scrape).
3) Pour into a small glass pan (3×5), set aside to cool.
4) Once cooled, roll into small balls and coat with a topping.

That’s it. It really was a simple and easy treat to make. It didn’t taste quite like anything I had tried before, but was very tasty… sort of like a gooey, sticky toffee ball. The pearl sugar added a nice crunch but made it very sweet. The ones I coated in cocoa powder had a nice, chocolate-y punch. I tried a version coated in nibs, but I wouldn’t recommend it as it was a bit overwhelming.

On the chocolate making front, it was good to try this recipe as learned something new about our cocoa powder. The germ is a dense part of the bean that we usually remove as part of our winnowing process. This cocoa powder was made from some quick test chocolate that we hadn’t winnowed fully and so you could actually taste small bits of germ in the center of the brigadeiros. It wasn’t bad actually, they were almost like small, chocolate poppy seeds, but definitely something we will thoroughly remove next time unless we are specifically aiming for that texture.

Homemade S’mores Bar

March 9, 2011 by

 

Back in October I had an opportunity to visit the Salon du Chocolat in Paris with Clay Gordon and a number of other chocolate enthusiasts. We spent the days ambling the conference hall, sampling single origin mousses, taste-testing new formulations, and meeting famous French chocolate makers like Bonnat and Pralus.

At the back of the conference hall was a small demonstration kitchen. After watching a few presentations on filled chocolate bars, I decided it would be fun to adapt one of my favorite desserts, the s’more shot, to bar form. I’ve been meaning to try this for a while now, and just recently I realized someone had beaten me to it! So here then is my humble attempt at the s’mores bar.

To start you will need chocolate, graham crackers, and marshmallows. I made the graham crackers and marshmallow meringue from this recipe, but that’s really extra credit. For the chocolate, we had some 70% Dominican Republic in the temperer, but you can use whatever you have handy.

INSTRUCTIONS
1) Temper some chocolate (more info here). You don’t have to get fancy with this, simply melt the chocolate in the microwave, stopping every 30 seconds to stir it.
2) Fill a bar mold with chocolate all the way to the top.
3) Let it cool at room temperature for about 1-2 minutes, then flip it over, tap the chocolate out of the mold, leaving behind a thin shell. Let cool completely.
4) Pipe a layer of marshmallow into the molds and lightly toast it with a mini butane torch.
5) Press a graham cracker (or graham cracker pieces) into the marshmallow.
6) Spread another layer of chocolate over the back of the bar, let cool completely.
7) Eat and enjoy!

In the factory, we usually stick to roasting individual beans and keeping everything super simple in our chocolate (just nibs and sugar), so this was a fun challenge. Next time, I would make the graham crackers much thinner and pipe twice as much marshmallow into each bar. I also let the chocolate cool too long before emptying the mold, making a very thick top. I think these bars would benefit from just a touch of chocolate, so I wouldn’t let too much chocolate solidify before emptying the mold.