Last week I decided to try making a butter ganache filling because they are supposed to last longer than a regular ganache. I looked through my book and decided to try making the lemon butter ganache. The only problem was that one of the ingredients was fondant. I have never made confectioner’s fondant before, in fact I had never even heard of it before. But I really wanted to try this recipe so I figured I would need to figure it all out.
So one day early last week I made the fondant. I was really nervous about it because it required agitating it at the end and I didn’t exactly know what to expect and didn’t know how to know if I was doing it correctly. But I decided I would just jump right in and see what happened. It actually went very smoothly. After I had poured it on the marble slab and agitated it for about 10 minutes, it began to get opaque and very thick. Then all of a sudden, it seemed like it turned into a rock. I was afraid I had ruined it. I knew it had to cure overnight so I was just hoping that it would soften up overnight. I decided it felt lumpy and so I massaged the lumps out of it and it seemed a better texture after that. I put it into a container and left it overnight. The next day Marshall sampled it and it was very smooth. So I was hopeful that it turned out the way it was supposed to.
I decided that today was the day to make the lemon butter ganache. I was a little worried about adding the tempered chocolate, but it all moved right along the way the recipe said it should. I sampled it and the texture was very smooth and the taste was lemony and not too sweet or too tart. I really liked the flavor.
Next step was to pipe the filling into logs. The instructions called for a very small tip which didn’t seem to make sense. I chose a tip about twice as big and then piped it. It still seemed like it was a very small diameter so I took the tip off and tried piping it with just the coupler on. Since there was a hole in the side of the coupler, it didn’t come out very uniform. I didn’t like the way it looked so I decided to try using the silicone mold and see if that would work out. It was supposed to take about 20 minutes for the filling to set up enough that I could roll the log over and put chocolate on the bottom. I went ahead and got the semisweet chocolate in the tempering machine and got everything ready. Twenty minutes went by, thirty minutes, forty minutes. The filling was setting up some but still not enough to roll the logs over. I was afraid maybe it wouldn’t set up at all. So I took the tempered chocolate and poured it into a chocolate mold and made shells. Then I took some of the logs that I had made, put the filling back in the bag and piped filling into the shells. That seemed to work fine. Then I put a bottom on the shells.
I was persuaded to take a break and so I left them for a couple of hours and came back. The logs had set up enough now that I could roll them over. I put chocolate on the bottoms and then proceeded to enrobe them.
What worked: Once the logs were set up, they seemed to work just fine. I
What didn’t: The filling took a lot longer to set up than it was supposed to. Should I have waited for it to set up more before I piped it? I need to look at the book and figure that out.
The chocolate in the molds was uneven. I really need to get polycarbonate molds. They did come out shiny and nice looking though.
The filling that I put in the silicone molds didn’t come out very good. I wouldn’t do this again.
Overall analysis: Everyone liked the logs the best, even the smaller ones. These were done with a no. 12 tip but they are wider than the tip. I tried pushing the log forward a little as I took them off the fork and it helped clean up the bottoms of the chocolates. They really taste delicious.
