Hot Silk
This is my recipe for Sugar High Friday, as directed from David Lebovitz’ wonderful site. Only for David. I am not a real sweets lover, and then mainly fruit based sweets, this one had to be chocolate. I like chocolate, but I am not usually its slave. I used Valrhona chocolate because it is what I always use, trudging home from Eurochocolate every year with a kilo or two. Everything I make tastes better made with Valrhona.
Tonight my kitchen is a morass of butter and sugar bits that flew free from the mixer, cocoa powder that fluffed and dusted and slid from there to everywhere, and as I type I can hear the crack-crack of hardening caramelized sugar syrup. I am nipping at pieces of prosciutto to get the taste of sugar out of my mouth.
I tried to think of what I would like if it were chocolate. I decided I would like something slick, something crunchy, something creamy and that it should have chilies, but not inside the chocolate.
With the chilies in the spun sugar, the shy can eat less and the bold more. It actually is quite nice!
The chocolate
1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
4 sq. melted Valrhona Le Noir Gastonomie chocolate
2 teaspoons rum
2 eggs
½ cup sifted Valrhona 100% cacao powder
2 more eggs
Cream the butter and the sugar together until really well blended.
Add the melted chocolate and the rum and incorporate them well.
Beat in 2 eggs, one at a time, beating 5 minutes to incorporate each at medium speed.
Sift the cocoa onto the mixture gradually while continuing to beat.
Add the next two eggs, one at a time, beating again five minutes after each egg is added.
Lightly spray molds with oil, then fill them with this mixture, using a large spoon, then use a palette knife to flatten them and to remove excess mixture. Chill in the refrigerator for several hours.
When they are firm, turn them out onto waxed paper and then slide them onto a pool of heavy cream on a serving plate. Mine needed the urging of a dip into warm water first.
The spun sugar
2 cups granulated sugar
1/2 cup water
1/2 teaspoon corn syrup
6 small very hot chilies, cracked open
Vegetables spray and/or oil
1. Use a Silpat if you have one. If you want to make forms, then spray oil onto the outside of an upturned bowl. I used plastic, just in case I had to toss it.
2. If you don’t have a Silpat sheet, and why don’t you, use buttered foil or the shiny side of freezer paper.
3. Place the sugar, 1/2 cup water, the peppers and corn syrup in a heavy-bottomed saucepan, over low heat. Stir occasionally until sugar is dissolved. Raise heat to high and bring mixture to a boil. Continue cooking until the temperature registers 310*F (hard-crack stage) on a candy thermometer. If you do not have a thermometer because the battery man didn’t have it ready the two times you have returned to pick it up, have a glass of cold water ready for testing the syrup. When it is ready, it will be a lovely amber color and form a hard crack ball in the water. Remove from heat, and briefly plunge the saucepan into cold water to stop the cooking. Let stand to thicken slightly, about 1 minute. It was less for me.
4. Dip a fork or balloon whisk (preferably one that has had the wires cut off leaving many straight wires, but I couldn’t bear to torture mine like that) into the sugar syrup and wave back and forth to draw out long, fine, threadlike strands over the baking sheet. The syrup will begin hardening almost immediately. You may have to use your asbestos fingers to pull at it as it cools. Just break off the larger pieces that makes. With practice you can form the strands into a forms and shapes or a dome by drawing them out over an upside down oiled bowl.
Makes about about 2 cups.
Lay the spun sugar you’ve made over each mold on the serving plates.
So, here it is. Anybody hungry?
14 comments January 20th, 2007
