Of chocolate and compudobbies

I’m going to a guildmate’s birthday party tonight, and I agreed to bring chocolates,  so I’ve mixed up a batch of cinnamon-honey truffles.  I’m curious how it will turn out, as I substituted honey for glucose in the recipe.  (Corn syrup would have been better, but I didn’t have any.)  The cinnamon  is from a wonderful cinnamon liqueur which I left at a friend’s place by accident, and subsequently got ignored for about 10 years!  Normally liqueurs don’t improve with time (after about a year of aging), but this one is different, perhaps because the flavors are spices that improve by steeping longer.

Anyway, the result is a rich, spicy cinnamon flavor – like cinnamon red-hots, only smoother and with subtle undertones from the other spices in the mix.  I should make more of it, now that I think of it!

Anyway, these are not like the yearly chocolate production run – very simple, and rolled in cocoa rather than dipped in tempered chocolate.  Nonetheless they should be yummy and I can’t wait to try one of the finished ones!  They have been piped into truffle shapes and are firming up; after that I’ll roll them into ball shapes and dip them in cocoa powder.  I may add a bit of cinnamon to the cocoa powder, if the native cinnamon flavor isn’t strong enough; haven’t decided yet.

And my compudobby is coming back today!  I had sent it back to AVL for repairs.  They discovered that my solenoid woes had been entirely due to heat buildup in the dobby box.  I suspect the small filter that I installed over the fans of having impeded enough airflow to fry the dobby components.  I put it there because the box was filling with lint, but apparently I should either have used a smaller air filter or replaced the fans with stronger fans.  I’m going to do both now, and B. has offered to install a temperature monitor inside the box so we can monitor the temperature to prevent future frying.

Regardless, I’ll be glad to have my dobby box back, as it means I can resume threading.  My goal for this weekend is to get the warp threaded, wind the yarn for the dye study group from hanks to cones (so they can be re-wound into smaller skeins), and dye the first set of samples for the red to yellow gradient.  Next week I hope to finish sampling for the red to yellow gradient, and dye the skeins themselves!

Finally, our wedding photographer has put up a couple of our photos (with permission) on her blog.  Some of them are very nice, so check them out!