Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and this week we are making chocolate decorations
including chocolate cigarellos.
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Let's start with tiny chocolate feathers.
Take a knife, dip it in some chocolate and then put the tip onto some acetate .. then
flatten the knife down, lift straight up and pull back letting that chocolate drip down
to make the quill part of the feather.
So start at the tip of the knife, flatten it down, lift it straight up and pull back
to let that chocolate drip down.
These are good if you need bulk decorations for cupcakes or individual desserts because
they are really quick and really easy to make.
Once they are set take a hot knife and indent it on each side just a couple of times to
give it that feather look.
Now if you are after bigger feathers or more detailed feathers watch the chocolate feather
video and I'll link you to that one at the end.
Moving on to the chocolate tubes.
Take a rectangle of acetate then fold some baking paper in half and cut out a rectangle
out of that.
Open it up and place it down so that one of the edges of your rectangle lines up with
the edge of the acetate.
So the others should have the acetate underneath it but one needs to be right on the edge.
Take your chocolate and pipe it back and forth diagonally across your rectangle making sure
you go right to the corners and then swap and go back and forther the other way.
Now it's important that when you're making chocolate decorations that you use real chocolate.
Just check your ingredients and make sure it has cocoa butter in it, not vegetable oil.
If it's got the cocoa butter in it then it needs to be tempered to make it set at room
temperature.
So you can't just melt it and use it.
If you don't know how to temper, I'll link you to my chocolate playlist at the end and
there's a video in there called chocolate secrets and that shows you how to temper chocolate
at home.
Lift the baking paper off so you're left with just chocolate on the acetate.
And then roll that up carefully just edging and sliding that in until the edge bumps into
the other chocolate so you've got the full circle there.
Roll it all the way up and secure it in place, you can use a cookie cutter or some sticky
tape or even a peg on each end of your acetate.
And then once that is set just remove the cookie cutter and gently unroll your acetate,
taking it off the chocolate and there you have a chocolate tube that you can put on
top of desserts or you could put dessert inside it.
At number 3 we have chocolate swirlies.
I like these ones.
Place some masala or other wine in the freezer for about 4 hours.
Then pipe swirls of chocolate into the cold liquid.
Now because of the alcohol in the wine it will not freeze at 0 degrees.
Which means we can pipe chocolate into it and it will set immediately into these 3D
swirly shapes.
If you don't want to use alcohol then sugar also lowers the freezing point of water so
you can make a 40% sugar syrup and use that instead.
I'll put directions for that on the recipe post on howtocookthat.net and there is a link
to that below.
You can make these chocolate swirlies small or big just play around with them, just pipe
it in they're great fun.
They look good on top of cupcakes.
They also look good piled on top of a big cake or just taking one of them and using
it to garnish a dessert for a different modern look.
Next we have chocolate leaves.
Take a leaf from the garden and wash it and dry it really well.
Spread some chocolate onto the back of the leaf, not the front you want to do it on the
back, making sure you cover the whole thing.
If you have too much down the bottom just wipe it on the paper to let the excess come
off, you don't want it to come around the front of the leaf.
You only want it on the back.
And then leave that to set.
Then you simply peel the leaf off the chocolate and you end up with a detailed chocolate leaf
with all those veins and all the pattern of the leaf in your chocolate.
Now to the harder one ... Chocolate Cigarellos (cigarettes).
I've had lots of people asking for a tutorial on this and I couldn't understand why because
there are lots of videos showing chefs making them they don't look that hard when they do
it.
But then I tried it and had heaps of problems!
At first I ended up with a whole bowl of failures and only one lovely looking cigarello.
So I did a bit more research and lots more practices and finally figured out here's what
you need to know.
Number 1.
You need a cold piece of benchtop.
It needs to be in the fridge for at least a couple of hours to cool down.
Number 2.
This is the one that kept tripping me up ... do not temper your chocolate!
This is where I was going wrong.
For this one, you cannot temper it or you won't be able to roll it.
Spread your white chocolate out using a pastry comb to give you that stripey look in your
chocolate.
And then as it's starting to set, add your milt chocolate and don't temper that either,
neither of them can be tempered.
Spread it out using an offset spatulat to get it nice and thin and so that chocolate
fills in all of the gaps.
Then neaten up your edges and all you need to do is push with the scraper.
If they are a little bit thick, too thick to roll by themselves like mine are, just
give them a helping hand rolling them up.
Not tempering the chocolate makes all the difference, now they can be rolled up.
Finally success!
We have chocolate cigarellos.
Put all your requests in the comments below
Click here for more chocolate videos and here for my latest video.
Make it a great week and I'll see you on Friday.