Shabbat (mostly)

There was snow Friday morning, turned to sleet when I left work, which was snow again when I left the T at Harvard. But not for long: it soon became thundersnow*! The first flash, as I crossed the Yard, made me wonder momentarily who'd been trying to take flash pictures in a storm. I got my answer as the thunder arrived a few seconds later. And that wasn't the only time; there were more as I crossed the yard, and through the afternoon. It ranks high on my list of eerie weather.

* "Thundersnow" also makes me think of the Australian book Thunderwith, just for the name similarity; there is no thundersnow in the book.

There was time to shovel the sidewalk before Shabbat, but not enough time to do a really good job; we're now stuck with some thick ice of snow trodden down until it melts (which takes longer than it should, even in winter, since we're on the south side of the street, with the sun low enough in the sky that the buildings block most of the direct sunlight that could melt it more quickly).

After Shabbat started, I had a fair bit of time to unwind; dinner wasn't until much later. Luckily, I made my saving throw against nappage, and made it to my hosts' at the stated time. Which was good, because I hadn't seen them in far too long (*wave*), plus I got to meet a new person. Really meet, over an hours-long dinner, rather than the barely-meet of new people at a party, where, if I meet new people at all, I find one or two random things out about them, not enough to remember them for very long as individuals (unless I meet them again soon in some other context). Anyway, dinner was both yummy and fun, with much random silliness (some committed by me, what a surprise :-).

I left later than I'd expected to manage being awake, and the walk home was invigorating; it took a while until I could sleep. Luckily, I managed to sleep late (non-trivial for me), starting to make up a noticeable sleep deficit.

When I wasn't napping, I was rereading the Abarat books, realizing that yes, I don't care for the (not really an) ending of the first book, and part of what made it so creepy for me the first time wasn't the story itself, but the pictures (all done by the author). When I read, I mostly go too quickly to make detailed pictures in my head (which is why I'll read much scarier things than I'll see onscreen), but these made them inescapable. (There's also that it's a reread, so of course things don't have the same initial shock.) They're still creepy in some ways, but it's easier to read now.

And that took up the day; this was the earliest-starting (and therefore earliest-ending) Shabbat of the year, starting at 3:54. Next week it starts moving later again, beginning at 3:55. It's slow change in the extreme weathers of the year, faster change in spring and autumn, by 6 minutes or more a week.

Truffles

Wednesday, the Truffle-Master came over to make truffle guts with me. He brought a very nice kitchen scale, a pint of frozen cream (I'd just bought one, which wasn't enough, as it turned out), and many pounds of Callebaut 6040 chocolate chips, which has less cocoa butter than normal for the amount of cocoa mass (if I've gotten that correct), so more intense chocolate flavor.

He weighed out chips in three containers, then heated the first pint of cream. When it was quite warm, he poured it into two of the three containers, making equal weights of chocolate and cream (I start to debate getting a serious kitchen scale myself). We stirred each until the heat of the cream melted the chocolate, then considered the flavoring options I had around the house. What we ended up with for these two were alcohol-based, using two tablespoons of Amaretto di'Saronno in one batch, and two tablespoons of Kahlua in the other. (I'm glad I still have that huge bottle of kahlua from way back when; I believe there's now a question about its kosher status.)

The third batch was flavored differently. Once the cream was defrosted, we infused it with lavender I picked off the shrub growing in the kitchen. Except that I didn't know how much to use, and erred on the safe side. We added a couple of lemon tea bags to the mix, and that still wasn't very effective (though it did add a lot of ideas for next batches; chai truffles? rooibos truffles? and so on...), so I double-checked, and I found I did have a couple of teaspoons left in the pint of vanilla extract I'd thought finished long ago. Yay! That went into the mix as well. After a while (half an hour?) the lavender leaves and blossoms and the tea bags were fished out of the cream, and the presumably-infused cream poured over the chocolate in the third container and stirred to encourage chocolate meltage.

Once the three were fully combined, I let them sit out overnight before covering them (paper towel, then plastic wrap) and putting them into the fridge to await truffle forming. Thus three ganaches were made.

Motza'i Shabbat, the Truffle-Master returned, and the rest of the process happened. I had started rolling the ganache into small not-quite-spheres (it's tricky rolling things that have a tendency to melt in your hands, but yummy to clean up from afterward :-). It took a while. In the meantime, he melted more of the Callebaut 6040 in my bain-marie (read: double-boiler, essentially). Once it was fully melted (and there was enough of it melted for the coating), he took it off the heat and added more chips to provide the seeds for the chocolate to coat properly. Once they'd melted, it didn't take long at all to dip the truffles (using a fork to fish them out of the chocolate bath). The first batch, the Kahlua, didn't have a topping; I couldn't think of anything that would match, particularly. After he'd finished dipping them, the Truffle-Master drizzled more chocolate over them. And then that tray went to chill in the coolest room in the house, which is actually outside my apartment, in the unheated back stairway. (I'm glad I got the shelves up again this summer.)

After that the Amaretto truffles were dipped, and halfway through, I realized I had sliced almonds that could decorate the top. So half of these have almond bits atop them. And the vanilla-lemon-lavender ones were topped with crushed bits of chocolate nibs, so all the varieties were distinguishable.

There was dipping chocolate left in the pot, so a bag of crystallized ginger was dipped, too, and some banana. Yum.

I brought an assortment of truffles to the chocolate party that evening (the original impetus for the truffle making), and to the xmas party nearby as well. They were well-received in both places, though I felt a bit of a fraud, as people attributed them to me alone, when I relied on the expertise of another. Though if I get a scale and some excellent chocolate, I might start experimenting myself...