For the last few years, Oreo Truffles and Peppermint Bark have been staples of my holiday baking. Every year I end up swearing over both of them when the white chocolate seizes up and turns into a gloppy mess. My mom, often on the receiving end of the telephone line from my foul-mouthed tirades, always tells me that I should swear off the cheap white chocolate chips and buy white baking chocolate (not that "candy coating" crap, because it's nasty).
I've never believed her. My mom's tastes in chocolate tends to run to Sharffen Berger, Valrohna, and other chichi brands. Ghirardelli and Guittard are ok and she only uses Nestle as a last resort. This is the woman who filled up a Central Market grocery cart this spring with several hundred dollars worth of chocolate for making my sister's wedding cake. So I just thought she was being snobby. I mean, after all, weren't white chocolate chips just the same thing as the stuff in the bar, but in a different shape?
This year I guess I was feeling flush when I did my holiday baking shopping. I sprang for a mix of chips and bars. I started out my baking with chips, but ended up with the inevitably seized up mess, so I decided to break out the bars. They worked beautifully! Instead of swearing over ugly truffles and uglier peppermint bark, I have beautiful truffles and gorgeous peppermint bark! It's delicious too!!!
So I guess Mom really does know best. Maybe that means I should revisit her position on things like wearing slips under my skirts and not allowing my kids outside in cold weather without their jackets.
4 comments:
I am so with you and your mom on this one! For a wedding present, my friends gave us "Bittersweet" - an all chocolate cookbook. She loves to cook (and is really good at it!), He graduated in the same chemical engineering class as I did and really got into the explanations about the crystallization states of chocolate - why exactly, scientifically, it is that makes chocolate seizes, why it you have to temper, etc, etc. They know I also love to cook, and being a geeky engineer, thought I would enjoy the book.
The book has totally changed my outlook on chocolate! And after making several of the recipes using both cheap chocolate (Bakers or Nestle) and expensive chocolate (I like Scharffen Berger but Ghiradelli isn't bad, either....and a little nicer on the pocket book), I agree that "you get what you pay for." I now love bittersweet....milk chocolate doesn't taste right anymore.
In my pantry is a 9.7 oz bar of 62% cacao Scharffen Berger semisweet chocolate just waiting (being hoarded?!) for the opportunity to be used. My favorite is the "fallen souffle chocolate cake" from the Bittersweet cookbook. Hmmm....I was wondering today what your home teacher would be bringing you for a Christmas treat - maybe I now know!
don't you hate it when that happens?
and don't you hate it even worse when your own kids do that to YOU?! lol
I just heard Paula Deen say that this week. It's not the cheap factor as much as it is the preservatives and stabilizers in the chips. Hate when my mom is right :S but yay for successful Christmas goodies!
I hear you on the chocolate but hold your ground on the slips
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