Tien Chiu

  • Home
  • About
    • Honors, Awards, and Publications
  • Online Teaching
  • Gallery
  • Essays
  • Book
  • Blog
  • Dye samples
You are here: Home / All blog posts / food / Temperamental
Previous post: Final design class project
Next post: Promised photos

November 20, 2010 by Tien Chiu

Temperamental

Today has been a somewhat frustrating day – I failed (again) at casting the chocolate shells, and will have to wash out the molds and start over.  The odd thing is that the dipped chocolates (which I did using the same batch of tempered chocolate, both before and after attempting the molds) came out perfectly.  I’m going to do some troubleshooting tomorrow and see if I can get it working.  If not, all the chocolates this year will be dipped.

Which brings me to the other frustrating thing: the chocolate has been thickening on me after a relatively short working period, making it difficult to get anything done.  It takes about 15-20 minutes to get a batch of chocolate tempered, after which I have about 20-30 minutes of working time before it gets too thick to work with, which means I spend only about half my time dipping chocolates and the other half sitting around waiting for the chocolate to finish tempering.  I suspect the high humidity has something to do with it (moisture thickens chocolate, and it’s been raining all day), but think it might be my technique as well.

But! despite all the frustrations, I have made substantial progress.  I have dipped all the caramels (and there were a LOT of them!), have prepared all the citrus peels to be dipped, and have dipped all the candied yuzu peel.  All in just about six hours.  If I put in a longer day tomorrow (which I plan to!) I think I will be able to finish most of the stuff I set out to do.

Pretty pictures tomorrow!

Share this post!

  • Tweet
  • More
  • Email
  • Share on Tumblr
  • Print

Filed Under: food, chocolate

Previous post: Final design class project
Next post: Promised photos

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Information resources

  • Dye samples
    • Procion MX fiber-reactive dye samples on cotton
    • How to "read" the dye sample sets
    • Dye sample strategy - the "Cube" method
  • How-Tos
    • Dyeing and surface design
    • Weaving
    • Designing handwoven cloth
    • Sewing

Blog posts

  • All blog posts
    • food
      • chocolate
    • musings
    • textiles
      • dyeing
      • knitting
      • sewing
      • surface design
      • weaving
    • writing

Archives

Photos from my travels

  • Dye samples
    • Procion MX fiber-reactive dye samples on cotton
    • How to "read" the dye sample sets
    • Dye sample strategy - the "Cube" method
  • Travels
    • Thailand
    • Cambodia
    • Vietnam
    • Laos
    • India
    • Ghana
    • China

Travel Blog

Entertaining miscellanies

© Copyright 2016 Tien Chiu · All Rights Reserved ·