You Spin Me Right 'Round, Baby, Right 'Round

With vacation to burn before the end of fiscal, I extended my birthday weekend by two days and decided to devote one of them to making hidden hazelnut pralines. Armed with 35 chocolate discs made the week prior, which I had arranged on a wax paper lined cookie sheet, I was ready to move on to the next step.

First I put 300 grams of hazelnuts onto a pan and toasted them in the oven for about 10 minutes. I then wrapped them in a clean towel and let them steam for a minute, before rolling them around in the towel to remove the skins -- an effective, if messy, process. I set aside 35 hazelnuts and then weighed out 225 grams from the remaining nuts, setting them aside to cool.

I then melted 50 grams of dark chocolate using a direct tempering method. Using a dot of chocolate on each disc, I attached a hazelnut to the centre of each one.

Next I tossed the hazelnuts with an equal weight of powdered sugar into my food processor. The instructions in Notter's The Art of the Chocolatier said to process them "until the mixture has a runny consistency." Now, I've made nut butters before, so I knew the process would take at least 15 minutes. But the addition of the sugar really slowed down the process. I scraped down the sides. I stared at it. I scraped down the sides again. I tried walking away. I scraped the sides. And after 30 minutes the nut paste was finally "runny."

It was about this time that I decided it would be a good idea to grab a towel and wipe the powdered sugar away from the food processor. Unfortunately, I forgot that I'd used it to remove the skins of the hazelnuts. Grabbing it without thinking, hazelnut skins rained down across the counter and the floor. Clean up on aisle one? I paused my work to clean up the mess I'd just made.

Back on task, I transferred the nut paste to a bowl and added 225 grams of tempered dark chocolate to it. I stirred it every few minutes, monitoring the temperature of the gianduja and checking the consistency for piping. Somewhere around 20 degrees Celcius, the consistency appeared correct, so I transferred it to a piping bag fitted with an open star tip. Then I commenced piping.

And that's when I realized my critical error. Yes, worse than hazelnut skins raining down on my kitchen from a towel. As I attempted to pipe a rosette around each hazelnut, the chocolate discs -- shiny side down on a piece of wax paper -- starting spinning right 'round, like a record baby. I had no way to control them and no easy method to hold them in place without getting gianduja everywhere. Undeterred, I experimented with different piping styles and then decided to just chase the discs around and hope for the best. Lesson learned -- next time I'll put them on a silicone pad or similar surface to prevent them from spinning quite so much.

I also learned just how tricky it can be to pipe gianduja. The heat from my hands started to melt it while I was piping, so a few pralines were too soft and didn't hold their shape quite as well. At the end of the day, it didn't matter all that much because they did set up. 

Behold! Hidden hazelnut pralines. These are insanely delicious and, despite the piping challenges, very pretty. They also have an incredible texture with the snap of the chocolate disc, the crunch of the nut, and the creamy gianduja.

I would probably consider a few modifications if I were to make these again. First of all, I would probably use a milk chocolate disc instead of dark chocolate. I personally don't like the appearance of the gianduja against the dark chocolate disc -- even though the gianduja was made with dark chocolate it looks like milk chocolate because of the added nut paste. That said, I also don't think anyone who ate one looked at the bottom, so maybe it doesn't matter. I also might try a slightly smaller piping tip for the rosettes or I might use a large French pastry tip instead and pipe more of a bullet shape. 

Will I be hiding nuts inside gianduja again in the future? 

As sure as I'm sitting here singing, "You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round, like a record baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round..."

Using a Chocolate Stencil

Hidden hazelnut pralines sound like a delicious treat and they're an opportunity to try a technique that I've never used before. But they also have multiple steps, so about two weeks ago, in anticipation of making these pralines on my next vacation day, I completed the first step: making chocolate discs.

I've made a type of chocolate disc before using a mold. They were archery-themed chocolate coins. I bought the mold so that I could create a special gift for Jay at Highland Bow & Arrow, who taught me how to shoot and got me hooked on archery. I've made these coins a few other times as well, as a prize for a friend's Biggest Buck competition and to celebrate a few fellow archers' accomplishments at a tournament. These coins, however, are too large to form the base of praline. Cue my newly acquired stencil.

I wiped down my countertop and while it was still wet I placed a piece of acetate on top. Then I put my new chocolate disc stencil on top of the acetate. I also dug out my large Ateco offset spatula that I received in a prize package from How to Cake It after tweeting one of my creations (a cake ball that looked like a cupcake). Equipment assembled, I then tempered 250g of dark chocolate. 

After checking the temper, I poured some chocolate at the top of the circle stencil and pulled the chocolate across it with the cranked spatula. I definitely poured too much chocolate on this first go, so I did a second pass of the spatula to remove as much chocolate as possible. Then once I saw that the chocolate was starting to set, I removed the stencil. I walked away for fifteen minutes and when I returned, I had 35 chocolate discs. 

As is my usual method, I put the chocolate into the fridge for a few minutes just to be sure the chocolate would crystallize properly, and then popped them from the acetate. The side of the chocolate that was against the acetate had the most incredible shine.

Grade? I'll give myself a B. 

These aren't perfect. A few are too thick because I used too much chocolate and didn't manage to remove it all evenly with the spatula. I also feel like I can see a few tiny pieces of chocolate that didn't fully melt out in the tempering process. But they are chocolate discs and they do have a great shine, so they are going to work well when I make the hidden hazelnut pralines. Next time, I'll use less chocolate and try to keep it to only one pass of the spatula. 

They say practice makes perfect, so I'll just have to make more chocolates, right? 

In the words of Ina Garten, how bad can that be? 

Chocolate Discs and Gianduja Rosettes

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, in November when I flipped through Notter's The Art of the Chocolatier to find inspiration, I settled on a recipe for cointreau butter ganache pralines. The suggested method, though, was completely foreign to me. It called for piping the ganache onto a chocolate disc and then dipping the entire piece into couverture using a fork. While the book has many beautiful photos, there wasn't one of this particular confection. I found myself wondering how precisely that would work and whether you would see a ridge between the disc base and the piped ganache once it was dipped. I decided instead to use my standard truffle method: scoop the ganache and refine the shape by hand before hand-rolling in two thin coats of chocolate. Based on the feedback I received, they were a hit. But the method outlined by Notter stuck in my head and I decided that in the new year I would have to revisit it. And so tonight I am reading about chocolate discs and gianduja rosettes.

Notter suggests that chocolate discs are a common base for a variety of confections. They are formed using tempered couverture chocolate, a disc template, and a piece of acetate. It's also possible to make the discs without a template, but it's difficult to get consistent results. I've watched chocolatiers on YouTube depositing chocolate on one piece of acetate and then carefully laying a second sheet on top, causing the chocolate to spread into a thin disc. This method takes more practice to perfect (kind of like trying to pipe macarons of the same size). 

Notter has a number of recipes that employ these chocolate discs, including one that caught my eye -- "Hidden Hazelnut Pralines." It's a gianduja rosette piped around a sugar-sanded hazelnut on a chocolate disc. 

I've become obsessed with gianduja since taking my professional chocolatier course. It is the most delicious filling imaginable -- the thicker, nuttier, more mature cousin of Nutella. With roasted nuts ground into a paste and mixed with couverture chocolate, it's pure heaven. I've molded it into tiny Easter eggs that I then enrobed in chocolate, I've slabbed it and cut it into squares that were later dipped with a fork, I've pipped it into an Easter bunny. Its flavour, texture, and consistency make it ideal for so many applications -- but I can honestly say that it never occurred to me to pipe it the same way you would buttercream icing. 

Gianduja is quite fluid when it is first made, thanks to the nut paste combining with melted chocolate. As it cools, however, and the chocolate begins to crystallize, the texture thickens. By the time it is fully set (depending on the ratio of nut paste to chocolate), it can be quite firm. The trick, I would imagine, is piping it at exactly the right temperature. Just like there's a sweet spot for piping ganache, still fluid enough to be piped but firm enough to hold its shape, there will be a sweet spot for piping gianduja -- and the only way to find it will be to wait, watch, and test periodically. And of course take the temperature and record it for future reference!

And so in anticipation of an experiment in the not-so-distant future, I'm assembling the necessary tools. Piping bags and tips are no problem. My cake decorating stash has everything I need to pipe gianduja. I also have acetate (food safe, of course) from when I did my chocolatier program (it was on the list of recommended supplies, but because we could choose from a number of techniques for our various assignments, mine went unused). I have couverture and I have nuts. But a disc template? My stash of chocolate molds is pretty impressive, but there's ne'er disc template among them.  

Cue Amazon. It does, after all, have everything you need from A to Z. And it did not let me down. Sure, it took a few tries with the search terms to get exactly what I wanted, but I persevered and was rewarded with the listing for this beauty. As it turns out, you can also buy these in a variety of shapes, including long triangles. That one is used to create decorations for desserts. Once the chocolate begins to set, but before it is fully crystallized, it's possible to manipulate the acetate so that the pieces set with a curve or twist. I'm trying to resist the urge to order the triangle stencil, but the more that I think about it, the more I want to try that as well...

One of my friends always says, "You can't have Barbie without the Malibu Dream House." It's dangerous to take that advice to heart. So, because I have a plan, I'll stick with the circle stencil. For now. 

There are Hidden Hazelnut Pralines in my future.