Chocolate Rattlesnake Dragon

This was made as a Christmas present for Barbara May and her husband, Large Bear. The body is made of forty-seven chocolate cups with eleven different fillings, arranged randomly, so biting into each segment is an adventure, since there's no way of knowing what flavor it will be.

This was made as a Christmas present for Barbara May and her husband, Large Bear. The body is made of forty-seven chocolate cups with eleven different fillings, arranged randomly, so biting into each segment is an adventure, since there's no way of knowing what flavor it will be. Maybe there's some sort of gambling to be done here. Someone call Vegas. Speaking of which, I have a great idea for a restaurant in Vegas in which, for a fixed price, you get a pull on a slot machine to determine what you're going to get for dinner. The first reel could be the drink, then the appetizer, the side dish, the main course, and dessert. You might end up with lobster; you might end up with a BLT. Wouldn't that be fun?

Getting back to the dragon, the eleven filling flavors were golden sesame, ginger, citrus zest, green tea, red wine, wasabi, peanut butter, peppermint, coffee, orange, and cherry.

Why a dragon, you ask? Well, I reply, because that's what occurred to me. I had another idea first, involving a demonic Santa Claus playing God, holding up a DNA strand covered with the screaming heads of tormented elves, but I didn't think I'd have the time to do it right. It's too bad, because that would have been more Christmas themed. Maybe next year.

Initially, I was planning to make the body out of candies made in several sizes of peanut butter cup molds. This fell through because the peanut butter cup molds I ordered over the internet didn't arrive at my apartment in New York until after I left to spend Christmas at Barbara May's house in California. I therefore had to run around to candy supply stores looking for usable molds. What I found (at Michael's) were molds for those little chocolate cups that you're supposed to fill with mousse or raspberries. It was actually a blessing in disguise, as these worked better than the peanut butter cup molds ever would have. They're big enough to fit a good amount of filling and they're proportioned really well for snake segments. Peanut butter cup molds would have resulted in much squatter, less graceful snake. Of course, I now have a bunch of peanut butter cup molds and nothing to do with them.

The first step was to make all the fillings, except peanut butter, which comes ready made in a convenient jar. I recommend using some kind of natural peanut butter. I used Trader Joe's.

The peppermint, coffee, orange and cherry centers were made of center fondant, which I've made many times before. My recipe comes from The Practical Candymaking Cookbook, which I highly recommend, though I believe it is now out of print. The fondant is basically sugar, milk, and butter, cooked, then worked on a marble slab to get the right texture. I then flavored it with candy oils (except for the coffee, for which I used instant coffee as flavoring) and colored it with paste food colors.

The golden sesame, ginger, red wine, wasabi, citrus zest, and green tea were much more of an adventure, because instead of a recipe, all I had was a brochure from a high end New York candy store, which I got at the New York Chocolate Show. It had descriptions of the candies, but it wasn't like a real recipe. For instance, all the instruction I had for the ginger candy was, "Milk chocolate blended with gin-flavored ganache and ginger."

The golden sesame and ginger have a milk chocolate ganache base, which is made by boiling cream, pouring it over chopped milk chocolate, and whisking them together. For the golden sesame I added finely ground golden sesame seeds and a splash of brandy and for the ginger, finely chopped ginger root and a little gin. I determined the proportions by taste and then wasn't smart enough to write them down, so I won't know any more the next time I make them than I did this time.

The red wine and wasabi start with a dark chocolate ganache base, made the same way as the ganache with milk chocolate. I then added red wine and wasabi powder (because I couldn't find fresh wasabi root) to taste.

Finally, the citrus zest and green tea are based on white chocolate ganache, flavored with orange zest (from Barbara May's own orange tree) and gin and with ground up green tea.

They all wound up tasting very good. I was particularly pleased with the ginger, red wine, and citrus zest. The only major problem I had was that the white chocolate-based flavors and, to a lesser extent, the milk chocolate-based flavors, were more liquid than is ideal for rolling truffle centers. This actually was no problem at all for this project, as I could just pour the liquid into the mold, but I was also using these ganaches to make rolled truffle centers, both for standard truffles and for the shrunken head truffles that I made Mom and Dad for Christmas. I think I could solve this problem next time by using less cream to make the initial ganache out of milk chocolate and white chocolate. See, I did learn something by making these, even if I didn't have the sense to write down my recipes.

With the fillings done, I was ready to make the chocolate cups themselves. The first step was to fill the mold with dark chocolate, and then set it in the fridge for one minute, so a thin, hard shell formed. Then I poured out the excess chocolate and set the molds back in the fridge to harden.

Once the chocolate shells had solidified, it was a simple matter to pour the fillings in and then pour another thin layer of chocolate on to seal off the top of the cup. Shaking the mold a bit helps to settle the chocolate on top into a flat surface. Then, back in the fridge they went to harden.

Now the fun part begins! It was time to begin adding the artistic details. For this, I found it best to use melted dark chocolate mixed with just a smidge of corn syrup. This gives the chocolate just a little more solidity so it holds its shape better. It also imparts to the chocolate a lovely dark sheen. The only drawback is that too much corn syrup will cause the whole batch of chocolate to seize up and become totally useless. I'll only admit to that happing to me twice.

I put a batch of this dark chocolate / corn syrup combo into a pastry bag with a #4 round tip and piped little dots of chocolate around the top and bottom of each cup. These made a nice visual division between the segments of the snake and also kept the cups from touching each other except around the perimeter, making it possible to break off a cup to eat without extensive damage to the neighboring cup.

Once those dots were dry (Another advantage to the corn syrup addition is that it makes the chocolate set up much more quickly.) I joined forty-six of the cups into twenty-three pairs, by sticking the wide ends of the two cups together. The remaining single cup was for the back of the head.

I was finally ready to arrange the snake on the gold foil covered cardboard cake circle I had designated as the snake's home. I chose to arrange the snake in a spiral, with the tail to be placed on the outside of the spiral and the head rising up from the center. This part went quickly, as it was a simple matter to stick the segments to each other and to the base with a little chocolate. I had to prop the head up on a few containers of luster dust until the chocolate that was holding it in place dried.

Next, the hard parts - the face and the tail. Actually, the tail wasn't all that hard. I made all of components of the head and tail on a piece of parchment paper, and then stuck them to the snake with a little more chocolate / corn syrup. The tail consisted simply of a series of rings of decreasing size. I believe I piped them with a #6 round tip. Once these dried, I stuck them together to form the rattle, and then stuck the whole thing onto the last segment of the body.

The head was more complicated. The basis was the same as the tail - a series of consecutively smaller rings, though these shrank in diameter more rapidly than those that formed the tail, resulting in a squat, round head. The holes in the center of the rings formed a mouth. I also made many whiskers of various sizes and shapes - some s-shapes, some curlicues, some simple swooshes.

Once all the components dried, I was ready to decorate the head. I started with the larger whiskers and worked my way down to the smaller details, basically making it up as I went. I was very happy with the result. While I was at it, I also reinforced many of the connections between the segments to make sure nothing came apart.

I applied the finishing touches with white chocolate - teeth, eyeballs, accents on the tips of the hair and beard, and little spikes on the rattle.

Once it was wrapped I was a little nervous about the head collapsing, but there was nothing I could do at that point (except unwrap it to double check, then rewrap it, which I only did once) but I was worried for nothing. In fact, it was quite sturdy. Unfortunately, Barbara May and Large Bear were leaving for Hawaii in two days, so they couldn't eat the dragon right away. We stuck him in fridge to await their return.

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Shrunken Head Truffles

These candies were made as a Christmas present for Mom and Dad. They're more just really small heads than actual shrunken heads. The original idea was to see whether the facial expression had a noticeable impact on the eater's enjoyment of the candy. Is it more pleasant to eat a happy face or an angry face?

OK, so I wasn't really going for the wild native tribe punishes the self-righteous white man type of shrunken head, but that would be cool, too, wouldn't it? These were more just really small heads than actual shrunken heads. My original idea was to see whether the facial expression had a noticeable impact on the eater's enjoyment of the candy. Is it more pleasant to eat a happy face or an angry face? Does an excited face taste better than a sad face? In other words, does the emotion evinced by the candy translate into an equivalent emotion felt by the consumer? I still think this is a interesting idea to explore, but I don't think this project furthered my research much, mostly because creating a specific, distinct expression on each face turned out to be much more difficult than I had imagined it would be. I basically wound up just gong with whatever face emerged of its own volition. One of the truffles wound up looking like a retarded vampire.

My plan was to make two truffle heads of each of six flavors - two based on dark chocolate (red wine and wasabi), two based on milk chocolate (ginger and golden sesame), and two based on white chocolate (citrus zest and green tea). I got these flavors from a brochure for an upscale New York chocolate shop, which I got at the New York Chocolate Show. I didn't really have recipes, just descriptions, so I had to guess at all the proportions. For instance, all the instruction I had for the ginger candy was, "Milk chocolate blended with gin-flavored ganache and ginger."

All the truffles start with a ganache base, which is basically just chocolate (dark, milk, or white) mixed with hot cream and whisked until smooth. To these ganaches I added red wine, wasabi powder (I couldn't find any fresh wasabi root.), finely chopped ginger root with a little bit of gin, ground golden sesame seeds and a splash of brandy, orange zest (from an orange from Barbara May's own orange tree) and gin, or finely ground green tea.

They all wound up tasting very good, particularly the red wine, ginger, and citrus zest. I did, however, have a problem with the consistency of the white chocolate-based flavors and, to a lesser extent, the milk chocolate-based flavors. They were much thinner than the ideal for rolling truffle centers. I think I could solve this problem next time by using less cream.

The white chocolate-based flavors were so thin that I couldn't make them into hand-rolled truffles and would up using some nice molds I had lying around. I poured melted white chocolate into the mold, then set it in the fridge for one minute so the outer edge would set a bit. I then poured out the excess chocolate and set the mold back in the fridge to set. After a few hours the white chocolate shells were hard enough to pour in the citrus zest and green tea fillings. I then piped a layer of white chocolate on top of the filling with a #6 tip to seal off the tops. I put them back in the fridge and, once the white chocolate was set, those candies were done.

The milk chocolate-based and the dark chocolate-based ganaches were thick enough that I could roll them into centers, about 3/4" in diameter. I dipped these into tempered chocolate, corresponding to the chocolate used for the ganache centers. I then chose the nicest, roundest ones to draw faces onto.

At first I tried piping features on with straight chocolate. This proved problematic because the chocolate was too thin, making it difficult to create any detail. So I tried an experiment. Modeling chocolate is a putty-like compound made by mixing chocolate with corn syrup. It can be sculpted like clay or rolled out like dough. I thought that if I added just a smidge of corn syrup to my chocolate, I could make something in between modeling chocolate and regular chocolate, which would be thin enough that I could still pipe it with a pastry bag, but thick enough that it would hold its shape. The results of the experiment were as good as I could have hoped for! The chocolate / corn syrup combo not only held its shape better than the regular chocolate, it also set up faster and had a lovely sheen to it. The only drawback is that this can only be done in small batches because eventually it will harden inside the pastry bag and become unusable. There's also a danger of adding too much corn syrup to the chocolate, which results in the whole batch seizing up into a useless lump.

With my new discovery in hand, I piped facial features onto two of each dark chocolate flavor and two of each milk chocolate flavor. Naturally, I used milk chocolate for the milk chocolate truffles and dark chocolate for the dark chocolate truffles. At this point I did try to shoot for specific facial expressions, but to a large extent the chocolate simply did what it would. I think I could do better in controlling the chocolate with a little more practice.

With the major facial shapes done, I added hair, facial hair, and eyebrows using dark chocolate on the milk chocolate truffles and milk chocolate on the dark chocolate truffles. I then used white chocolate for details like eyes and teeth. It was at this point that one of them emerged as a vampire because the perimeter teeth came out longer than center teeth.

For some reason, one and only one of them developed blooms, a surface discoloration to which poorly tempered chocolate is prone, so he appeared to have some sort of skin condition on his forehead.

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Gingerbread Swamp House

This house was inspired by the beautiful ironwork on houses in New Orleans. Barbara Jo made it during her Christmas week visit to Barbara May's house.

This gingerbread house was inspired by my recent trip to New Orleans. I took a walking tour of the Garden District, which, by the way, I recommend to any of you should you happen to find yourselves with a free day in New Orleans. The stunning ironwork was what first caught my attention. Fortunately, my parents had just given me a digital camera for my birthday, so I spent the rest of the afternoon happily snapping close-up of delicate architectural details.

I'm not very good at making nice, normal, friendly gingerbread houses, so, naturally, I decided that this should be a dilapidated bayou house, complete with alligator, rowboat, and swamp water.

The basic pattern of the house was remarkably easy (Though not so easy that I didn't manage to cut the roof pieces too short, but that's a story for later on in my gingerbread saga.), consisting simply of four sides, two rectangular balconies, and four long roof pieces. It took me almost no time to draft the patterns for those, which was good because it took me hours to draft the patterns for the intricate railing and decorative grillwork I had planned for the balconies.

That was all the prep work I could do until the week before Christmas, as I was planning to spend Christmas in California with Barbara May and royal icing balcony rails can hardly be expected to survive a trip across a room, let alone a trip across the country.

Finally, my big travel day arrived and, gingerbread plans carefully packing in my carry-on bag (so I wouldn't have to do without them for even a day in the event that there was a problem with my checked luggage) I hied myself to LaGuardia and boarded my plane.

Within but a few hours of my arrival in San Francisco (where I rendezvoused with our parents, who had flown in from Michigan for the occasion) I was hard at work rolling and cutting gingerbread pieces. You see, I had to have them baked and ready, as Gingerbreadfest was the next day! Gingerbreadfest is the biggest of our annual craft parties. We have to provide all of our friends with pre-made gingerbread house pieces, all manner of candy decorations, and approximately twenty gallons of royal icing with which to stick everything together.

Actually, it turned out that it really didn't matter that I had the gingerbread pieces baked in time for Gingerbreadfest, as it took me all day just to pipe the tiny royal icing grillwork, using a #1 tip. Frankly, Gingerbreadfest isn't a great time for either Barbara May or I to get much work done on our own gingerbread houses, as we have to spend most of the time replenishing candy bowls, mixing batches of icing, and assembling everyone's houses. It's all worth it though, just to see what everyone comes up with. The undisputed triumph of Gingerbreadfest this year was the gingerbread rebel stronghold, complete with guard tower and bomb shelter entrance, which our youngest guest (age five) made out of the little leftover pieces (doors, chimneys, etc.) of other houses. I helped.

Even the day after Gingerbreadfest, the only thing I had a chance to do to the gingerbread pieces themselves was to glue the balconies to the front of the house with some thick royal icing. I then spent most of the day running Christmas related errands, so all I had time to do that evening was cut fifty sticks of peppermint chewing gum into tiny bricks, then paint them various shades of brown and red.

Once I finally started decorating the actual house, things went quite smoothly. The balconies were the first pieces I tackled. I frosted both sides of these with slightly thin, brown royal icing, and then scored the icing with a toothpick to create planking. For maximum verisimilitude, I tinted some of the boards with various shades of red and yellow food coloring.

I glued the chewing gum bricks to the side and back pieces with a thin layer of grey royal icing and covered the front of the house with slats made of thinly rolled fondant. I also made shutters for all the windows out of rolled fondant, scored with a toothpick. I then piped royal icing frames around all the windows, doors, and shutters using a wide, flat decorating tip while watching the thematically appropriate, yet woefully incomprehensible movie Eaten Alive.

Finally, the exciting moment of assembly arrived! I had cut a one-foot square base out of 3/8" foamcore, to which I glued first the back, then the sides and front of the house. It went together pretty well. I always get a certain amount of warping and curvature in the gingerbread pieces as they bake, which results in some gaps in the assembled structure. I understand that some people recut each piece after baking before the pieces is cooled for greater accuracy. I should try that next year. In this case, however, the gaps were minimal and easily covered with the careful application of a few more chewing gum bricks.

Now we come to my greatest error in judgment - the roof pieces. I'm not quite sure whether the house was more out of whack than it looked or whether I just cut the roof pieces too small, but when I went to attach the roof pieces, they were too short to sit on top of the sides of the house as they were intended to. If I had been clever I could have built up the sides with some royal icing and allowed that to dry prior to attaching the roof pieces. I'm not that clever, so I just glooped on a whole mess of royal icing to fill the gaps and held my breath until it dried, hoping that the entire roof wouldn't just sink into the body of the house. In the end, the problems with the roof turned out to be rather fortuitous, as one end of the roof sagged threateningly and greatly enhanced the dilapidated look of the house, which was, of course, what I was going for in the first place.

With roof pieces safely in place, I set about tiling the roof using little squares of fondant, about 1/2" on each side. I made two colors of tile, one a deep purple marbled with some black, the other a deep green, also marbled with black. Then I applied the two colors at random, to nice effect. I also attached the shutters at this point, some open, some closed, some on the verge of falling off entirely.

With the structure of the house in place, it was time to paint! I distressed everything, using mostly green, red, black, yellow, and brown food coloring. Prior to this point, the siding on the front of the house, the window trim, and the shutters were pristine white. By the time I was done, they looked like they had been sitting in the swamp for a century. I also ran a coat of water across the roof to give a damp sheen to the fondant tiles.

Now it was time to make the finishing touches - a little rowboat and oars, the pier for it to dock at, and the giant alligator to menace anyone who might be foolish enough to venture forth into the ominous swamp around the house. All these I sculpted from fondant, white for the alligator, marbleized brown for the rowboat and pier.

The pier was easily made by rolling out a strip of fondant and scoring it with a toothpick to make individual boards. I also distressed the ends of the boards for that all-important aged look. The legs of the pier are simply little rolled cylinders of fondant. The boat was also quite simple to make, but took a little longer, mostly because the first one I made was ridiculously out of scale so I had to make another one.

The alligator was, of course, my biggest sculptural challenge of this project, but fortunately I made gum paste frogs a few months ago for a friend's wedding cake, and the skills are quite similar. I pulled a good research picture off the internet and set to work. Once I had the basic shape of the body and head, I added textural detail to the hide with a toothpick and with a star decorating tip. I made eyeballs by gently pressing in a #8 decorating tip and nostrils with, I believe, a #3. I then propped the mouth open with a folded bit of was paper and left it to dry.

The first step in landscaping around the house was to build up a hill in back of it with a wad of fondant, so it appeared to be fronting on the swamp, while the land rose behind the house. Then I attached the pier leading to the front door. In retrospect, it might have been easier to pipe the grass under the pier before I attached the pier, but it's too late for that now.

I used a grass tip to cover the entire area around the house with two shades of slightly unhealthy green icing and one of sickly yellow icing. While I was doing this, I also attached the delicate grilles to the front of the house. To say that it was nerve wracking working with those tiny, fragile pieces would be a tremendous understatement, particularly as I had neglected to make any extras of one section of the grille. To be more accurate, I made two sets of everything, thinking I would then have extras in case anything broke, forgetting that I needed two sets of some pieces anyway. Astonishingly, nothing broke except one tiny edge, which was easily repaired. Once I was breathing normally again, I finished piping all of the grass, then added and painted a little royal icing trim around the tops of the decorative grilles.

My plan for the swamp was to use Jell-O. In order to prevent the hot, liquid Jell-O from simply pouring over the side of the house's base and onto Barbara May's new table I had to made a dam around the edge of the base. I first tried to do this with royal icing, but I didn't like the results, so I scraped it off and made a new dam out of thick fondant, cut into strips and painted deep blues, greens, and blacks.

I decided to experiment with the Jell-O before pouring it onto the front of the actual house. I'm extremely glad I did, because it turns out that Jell-O is totally incompatible both with royal icing and with fondant. My experimental bowls wound up looking like hideous biological specimens in Petri dishes. The Jell-O dissolved both the royal icing and the fondant, then failed to set up properly, resulting in a gooey, bubbling mess, made all the grosser by the fact that I had added altogether too much blue food coloring to the Jell-O.

Scrapping the Jell-O, I turned to Plan B - piping gel. I had no idea that piping gel could be made at home, having always purchased it ready made from a cake decorating store, but Mom suggested that I look for a recipe online. She was right. I found a recipe in no time, which is a very good thing, because by this time it was Christmas, so it wasn't as if I could just run out and buy piping gel. My first batch of piping gel turned out too thin. I wanted it to be thin enough to flow under the pier and around the grillwork posts, but not thin enough that it would never set up. I tried again and the second batch seemed more promising.

After the Jell-O fiasco, I was careful to experiment with the piping gel before applying it to the house. This time, all went well. The royal icing and fondant samples seemed to suffer no ill effects from the piping gel, so I called it a go. This time I only added a smidgen of blue coloring to the gel.

I wanted to place the alligator before piping the gel onto the actual house. That way it could appear to be partially submerged, as if it were in the process of emerging from the swamp. In the end, I think I chickened out a little because I was afraid the detail of the alligator would be obscured by the piping gel, so it only ended up with one foot in the swamp.

Before I could place the alligator I had to paint it. I used shades of yellow, red, brown, and green food coloring, then added tiny royal icing ridges to his back and royal icing teeth to his mouth with a #1 decorator tip. He was then ready to effectively menace the inhabitants of the swamp house! I set him in place on the edge of the swamp.

The big swamp water moment had arrived! I dumped the whole sticky mess of piping gel into a piping bag with a #8 tip, and started slowly piping the gel in front of the house. Everything was going well until I hit one of the grillwork columns with my decorating tip and smashed it! There ensued an extremely tense period in which I performed some emergency surgery to replace the broken piece with a spare column, a process which involved very carefully trimming the new piece down to size with a pair of tweezers. I'm proud to report that the operation was a complete success!

With infinitely more care, I continued piping in the gel until the entire swamp in front of the house was full, as well as little sinkhole in the back of the house. It looked great, if I do say so myself. The royal icing grass was visible beneath the surface, and I could even see reflections of the house in the surface of the piping gel! Now, two weeks later, the gel still has yet to set up completely, but I don't think that's really a big deal.

The house was almost done, but something was still missing. I thought about putting some sort of decoration along the ridge of the roof, but then Barbara May and I hit on the answer - a weather vane! After settling on the traditional rooster design, I piped a weather vane in royal icing onto some wax paper. Once dry, and painted green and black, the weather vane proved exceedingly fragile and difficult to attach to the roof, but, six or seven repairs later, I finally had it in place.

I was finished at last! And it was still Christmas day! Between the success of my gingerbread house, the awesome quilt Barbara May made for me, and my parents' gift of another trip to the fabulous Wilton School of Cake Decorating, I think it was my best Christmas yet!

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