And now, back to candymaking

Stopped by the farmer’s market yesterday and went into a frenzy of ingredient purchasing:

• rose geranium leaves
• lemon verbena
• lemon basil
• lemongrass
• Thai basil
• fennel
• Dancy tangerine marmalade
• Meyer lemons
• Yuzu (a Japanese citrus with an intriguing scent)

I probably won’t use all of those, but I want to have enough on hand to work with the inspiration of the moment.  And herbs are cheap at about $1.50/bundle.

A word on the marmalade.  I don’t normally buy ingredients for my chocolates, preferring to make everything myself, but June Taylor marmalades are something else.  They’re better than anything I can make, which is rare, so I’m buying theirs.  They don’t have the bitterness that most marmalades (including my home-cooked ones) do, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.  They have a marmalade-making class in January, and I may take it just to figure out how they do it.  I suspect they either blanch the orange peel or remove the white part – may try that with the yuzu.

I haven’t quite figured out the sequences of events yet for next week.  Some friends are coming over on Friday and/or Saturday to help me pack and ship the truffles, so that’s obviously the final day.  The truffles/molded chocolates have to be finished at most a day in advance of packing and shipping (to keep them fresh – since they have no preservatives, they are pretty perishable).  So that’s Thursday and Friday.  But what to do on Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday?  I’m thinking more fudge, experiments in jellies, and some taste tests with ganaches.

Unfortunately, like an idiot, I didn’t buy enough Ivoire (Valrhona’s white chocolate) to make chocolates with.  I only bought 1 kg, which was mostly consumed in making the lavender-lemon-white chocolate fudge.  So now I have 400g left, which isn’t enough to dip truffles.  But I can make two batches of ganaches to fill truffles with, so I will probably do coffee and one other (as-yet undetermined) flavor.