I’m sending this message to my email list.  Thought I’d share on here, too…

Hello,

First of all, I would like to thank everyone for such an enthusiastic welcome back!  It’s been exciting to cook and enrobe in the kitchen again for BonBonBar, and the days are flying by once again.

This is just a quick reminder that orders for Thanksgiving should be placed as soon as possible.  I will be shipping out the last Thanksgiving orders Saturday & Monday to ensure that they arrive in time.

Our seasonal Pumpkin Pie Candy Bars and Pumpkin Pie Caramallow are perfect for the holidays!

Thank you!
Nina
Founder & Chief Chocolatier, BonBonBar

Pumpkin Pie Candy Bar Pumpkin Pie Caramel & Graham Cracker

Pumpkin Pie Caramallow Pumpkin Pie Caramel wrapped around Vanilla Marshmallow

Single Malt Scotch Bar Chewy Caramel, Malt Ganache, & Maldon Salt.

Single Malt Scotch Cake: Chocolate Chiffon Cake, Caramel Filling, Scotch Simple Syrup, Scotch Milk Chocolate-Caramel Frosting, Maldon Salt.

It’s hard to believe, but this is Chad’s 4th documented birthday on this blog.  One year ago, there was the Salted Chocolate Nut Cake.  Two years ago, there was the Blood Orange Creamsicle Cake.  Three years ago… I barely knew how to make cake… so we went to The French Laundry.

And now, it’s Chad’s 30th birthday, and here it is: the Single Malt Scotch Cake.

Chad had made a few reverential comments about the Salted Chocolate Nut Cake during the past few months, so I’d schemed to make it again, but with Scotch in the frosting for variation.  When asked directly about his choice of cake this year, he said he wanted a cake a modeled after the Scotch Bar.  My eyes lit up and I told him about my hybrid idea, but no, he wanted a straight translation of the Scotch Bar — nothing more and nothing less than Scotch, chocolate, caramel, and salt.

The structure of the cake is actually pretty similar to last year’s, and has the salient properties of the Scotch Bar to boot.  Chad even had the great idea of “enrobing” the cake with a dark chocolate shell, but I couldn’t get around to doing that, and I’m also not crazy about cutting chocolate-covered/wrapped cakes.

The cake is a Chocolate Chiffon baked in angel food cake form, and it included the Walnut Oil like last year, because I thought that it would add a subtle note of interest and is perhaps healthier than all Safflower. I was a little bummed because I overbaked the cake enough to make it a little dry (I baked it 15 mins longer than the prescribed 60 mins b/c it kept making a foamy sound whenever I pressed the top, and it didn’t really bounce back much).  Luckily, the moistness of the caramel and frosting made up for it, but still, I guess this is what happens when you’re a rare cake-maker.

I brushed a Scotch Simple Syrup to imbue the cake itself with flavor; ratio of sugar to water 1:1, with Scotch to taste (and taste!).  The kind people at Talisker sent me a selection of Single Malt Scotch when they found out that I use Talisker in my candy bar, so I decided to use the Caol Ila 18 year. It’s smoky, but oh so smooth.

For the Caramel Filling, I again used the caramel recipe that I make my Caramel Nut Bar with, but omitted the nuts. Just as I was about the make it, though, I realized that the nuts gave it structural support, and caramel fillings are usually in the form of a buttercream — not a straight caramel.  My CNB filling is basically a modified caramel sauce, and I decided to go for it to try it as a cake filling.  But I decreased the amount of cream in the recipe by 15% and increased the amount of butter by 15% (honestly, this wasn’t even planned, I just rounded up and rounded down, and just did the math now).  I reasoned that the standup quality and shortness-giving properties of the butter would make for a sliceable frosting-like caramel.   I also added 15% more glucose for a little bit of thickening.  It worked nicely, though it would have torn up the cake if I’d tried to spread it on; instead, with gloved hands, I flattened a bit of caramel at a time and put it on the cake. It was still quite soft when cut into with a knife or fork, though, so it was just the right consistency — not chewy or tough.

For the frosting, I made the same Caramel-Milk Chocolate Frosting.  I’d planned to decrease the amount of cream to compensate for the added alcohol, but completely forgot.  But I forged ahead, adding Scotch and tasting until it was potent enough… 1 Tbs… 2 Tbs… 3 Tbs… Then the idea of adding a 1/4 cup of Scotch somehow seemed like way too much extra liquid — let alone, Scotch — to add… So I added 1/2 Tbs more.  3-1/2 Tbs = Perfect.  The milk chocolate frosting alone tasted slightly peculiar with the Scotch, but the sweetness balanced out with the dark cake and caramel filling.

When I finished frosting the cake, I thought it looked fine in its homespun way, with its ebb and flow of spoon-backed frosting that I like.  But then I realized that it wasn’t done yet…. And so I finished the cake with Maldon Salt, which I now think of as “adult sprinkles.”

It’s best to sprinkle the salt on for each piece as it’s served, though, because  if left overnight, the smaller salt grains will absorb moisture and break down into salty little puddles.

I like these Candy Bar Cakes.  They remind me a little of Pierre Herme’s style (or maybe it’s not just him?) of having set flavor combinations that are translated into different forms under generally the same name.

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Here’s the recipe!

This is the Single Malt Scotch Candy Bar in cake form — with scotch ganache frosting, caramel filling, chocolate chiffon cake, and plenty of Maldon Salt.  For the tastiest cake, use an assertive Scotch, such as Talisker Caol Ila 18 yr.  The peatier and smokier, the better.

CHOCOLATE CHIFFON CAKE

1/2 cup + 1 Tbs (50g) Dutch-processed cocoa powder, such as Valrhona
3/4 cup (6oz) boiling water
1 3/4 cup (175g) unbleached AP flour, such as King Arthur
1 3/4 cup (350g) sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
1/2 cup (3.75 oz) Safflower Oil, preferably organic
6 ea (120g) egg yolks, preferably organic
10 ea (300g) egg whites, preferably organic
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4 tsp cream of tartar

Preheat oven to 325F.

Whisk together cocoa powder and boiling water until smooth.  Let cool.

In a large bowl, combine flour, all but 2 Tbs of the sugar, baking powder, and salt.  Whisk for 1 minute.  Add oil, egg yolks, cocoa powder mixture, and vanilla.  Whisk until smooth.

Using a stand mixer, whisk egg whites until frothy.  Add cream of tartar.  Beat until soft peaks form.  Slowly add rmg 2 Tbs sugar.  Beat until firm peaks.

Mix 1/3 of egg whites into the chocolate mixture.  Gently fold an additional 1/3 of the egg whites into batter.  Gently fold in rmg egg whites until just blended.

Pour batter into ungreased 10″ aluminum tube pan, preferably with feet.  Run a thin knife through batter to break any large air pockets.

Bake for 60-65 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out clean.

Invert pan on feet (or over a glass bottle) until cool, about 2 hrs.

SCOTCH CHOCOLATE FROSTING

18 oz milk chocolate
2 oz bittersweet chocolate
1 cup (200g) sugar
1 3/4 cup whipping cream, preferably organic
1/4 - 1/2 cup Single Malt Scotch, or to taste

In a large bowl, combine milk and bittersweet chocolates.

In a small saucepan, bring cream to a simmer.  Keep warm.

Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan, stir enough water into the sugar so that it looks like wet sand. Place over medium heat.  Brush sides with wet pastry brush to thoroughly dissolve any sugar crystals.  Boil without stirring until syrup turns an amber color, about 7-8 minutes; it may be necessary to swirl the pan to ensure even cooking without scorching.  Turn off heat.

Slowly add whipping cream while stirring slowly– being very careful of vigorous bubbles. Stir over medium heat until any hard caramel bits dissolve.

Pour caramel over chocolate.  Let stand 1 minute. Whisk until smooth. Stir in Scotch, tasting until preferred strength is reached.  Chill until completely cool, about 2 hours. Let stand 1 hour at room temperature before continuing.

SALTED CARAMEL FILLING

1 cup (200g) sugar
2/3 cup (5.25oz) cream
2 Tbs butter, very soft
1 tsp Maldon salt

In a medium pan, stir enough water into the sugar so that it looks like wet sand. Place over medium heat.  Brush sides with wet pastry brush to thoroughly dissolve any sugar crystals.  Boil without stirring until syrup turns an amber color; it may be necessary to swirl the pan to ensure even cooking without scorching.  Turn off heat.

Slowly add whipping cream while stirring slowly– being very careful of vigorous bubbles. Stir over medium heat until any hard caramel bits dissolve. Pour caramel into a bowl.  Stir in Maldon salt. Let cool.  Stir in butter.

SCOTCH SIMPLE SYRUP

1/3 cup (66g) sugar
1/3 cup water
1-3 tsp Single Malt Scotch

Boil sugar and water in small saucepan until clear.  Let cool.

Add single malt scotch to taste.

ASSEMBLY

Dislodge cake using a long thin knife around the sides and core, being careful to neither cut into the cake nor the pan.  Dislodge the bottom using the knife.

Place cake on a cake board or plate.  Cut cake in half horizontally using a long bread knife.  Place top half aside.

With a pastry brush, dab the top of the bottom half thoroughly with Scotch Simple Syrup.

Using a stand mixer, beat the frosting until it’s spreadable and the color of milk chocolate, about 15-30 seconds. If too thick to spread easily, add some additional cream and beat until integrated.

With a pastry bag (or ziploc bag trimmed at one corner), pipe a thick ring of frosting on the outer and inner perimeters of the cake.  This will be a barrier to prevent the Caramel Filling from oozing out of the cake.

Pour Caramel Filling onto the cake between the rings of frosting.  If Caramel Filling is too firm, carefully stir in more cream, a Tbs at a time.  Smooth with a small offset spatula.

Place the top layer of the cake on top.

Dab the top of the cake with Scotch Simple Syrup.

Make a crumb coat on the cake by spreading a thin layer of frosting all over the cake.  Chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes, until frosting is set.

Beat frosting briefly again if necessary, to lighten consistency. Spread remaining frosting all over the cake.

If the whole cake will be eaten immediately, sprinkle generously with Maldon Salt.  Alternatively, sprinkle Maldon Salt individually over each slice.  If left salted overnight, the salt will dissolve into puddles on the frosting.

It’s hard to believe that over two years have passed since I started developing my candy bar recipes in earnest. The Peanut Butter Bar that I’m preparing to release was posted on April 18, 2007, and it will be exactly as I posted. I still love the form and design, and I’ve only tinkered with the peanut butter-milk chocolate ratio a little bit to adjust the texture.  So, why haven’t I released it yet?  It took me a while to source organic peanuts that are free from mold issues (turns out that New Mexican peanuts are the way to go — the mold does not thrive there as it does in the southeast US and as far as I know, salmonella has not been an issue), and now I’m waiting for my chocolate molds to arrive (they’re backordered).  At least, they should already be around by Easter, which I vaguely think of as the most peanut-buttery holiday.

In comparison, the Cherry Bar was fast, with ingredients that are readily available and a form that doesn’t need special equipment.  It has a Vanilla Almond Nougat enrobed in Dark Chocolate and topped with organic Dried Cherries.  I thought of it in late December, and developed the recipe and released the bar in January because I wanted to have it for Valentine’s Day.  It’s a simpler bar than the peanut butter bar for sure, because it has one thick filling rather than two thinner layers — in the tradition of 3 Musketeers or Charleston Chew — and it has dried cherries scattered on top.  It’s also the fruit of an exciting luxury that I didn’t have two years ago — a repertoire of my own recipes.  And even better, recipes whose shelf-lives I’m familiar with.

The Vanilla Almond Nougat is an evolution of the Pecan Nougat in my Orange Bar (which also has an orange caramel layer and candied orange peel with muscovado sugar on top).  When I thought about how I wanted the Vanilla Almond Nougat to taste, I looked at the Pecan Nougat recipe, and thought about what should be different, trying to be sensitive to every aspect of the Cherry Bar and the Orange Bar.

Substituting slow-roasted almonds for slow-roasted pecans was easy, although I added more almonds to the recipe, because it’s important for them to be prominent in every bite — whereas the Orange Bar has the orange caramel and candied orange peel on top to offer flavor if there are no pecans in a bite, and the pecans are not meant to dominate the flavor.  I also am using skin-on almonds because I prefer that flavor, and blanching them on my own would be a painful shore besides.

I kept the Orange Blossom Honey rather than substituting a different flavor of honey because I liked that it’s a delicate honey and the subtle orange would be a nice subtle flavor.  Bill’s Bees has Almond Blossom Honey available, but I didn’t see a reason to double up on the almond factor, especially since almonds are strongly flavored enough on their own.

I decided to add Organic Tahitian Vanilla Beans to the recipe, too, because I’ve discovered that I like Tahitian (fruitier) more than Bourbon (creamier) or Mexican (tangier).  I cook the scraped seeds in the sugar syrup in order to infuse it before whipping it with the egg whites; otherwise, just adding it at the end wouldn’t be as strong and I may as well use vanilla extract, which would permeate throughout the nougat in a similar way.

I also added a bit of salt to the nougat, though I wasn’t sure how to go about it exactly.  Salt is kind of rare in meringue and nougat recipes,  and I wasn’t sure if it would react with the sugar syrup (lead to more inversion or lower the boiling point, like it does water?) or the egg whites.  I don’t put in salt in the Pecan Nougat because the orange caramel already has enough salt for the whole bar.  I do use salt in the sugar syrup for my marshmallows, but I always have and they don’t contain egg whites.  So, I tried adding the salt with the sugar syrup as it boiled and at the end, with the nuts, and found that the salt was best with the nuts — the flavor was better and the nougat wasn’t as soft as when salt was boiled with it.

My Pecan Nougat also contains a little powdered sugar, which gives it a fluffier texture over time because of the starch in it.  I decreased the amount, though, because I figured that it could be a little more toothsome than the Pecan Nougat to make up for the lack of the caramel layer’s strength.

I decided to manually place the Organic Dried Cherries (which, like the honey and eggs, are from the Santa Monica FM) on top to make sure that they’re in just about every bite — otherwise, it would be impossible to evenly disperse them in the nougat.  Mars, apparently, has a special way to make sure that there are a certain number peanuts in each Snickers bar.  I like how simply putting them on top ensures the flavor — sour and sweet and bursting with flavor.  They’re really marvelous cherries.  I have to flatten them so that the bars will fit inside its packaging, but when I buy them, they’re rather spherical like their original shape, which would be obvious except that so many other dried cherries I’ve had have been flat and oblong.

So, there it is.  After making the Pecan Nougat for nearly a year, too, I’m more comfortable making nougat than I was when I wrote the Nougat Science nearly two years ago.  Putting the cherries on top solves the problem of trying to make a cherry nougat with real cherries.  And my nougat is surprisingly forgiving, or at least, as easy as I designed it to be (I tried to cut out as many timing issues as possible as is common with nougat), and I’ve never had a bad batch that had to be thrown out (knock on wood).  The sugar syrup once reached 10F higher than it was supposed to, so I added water to it and brought it to the proper temp.  The sugar once reached 5F higher than it should have and I used it out of curiosity, and it turned out just fine.  I always let it set overnight, and putting a Silpat on top of it protects it from humidity.

The only problem is that the tines on the whisk for my new mixer have proven to be weak, and are breaking at an awful rate.  I wish that I could reinforce the tines or reattach them once they break, but no one seems to have any advice for that… Unless you do!

So…  November and December went by in a flash of caramel and chocolate, with some days that ended at 5am and began again 7am, and some days that didn’t end at all.  I was lucky enough to have someone wonderful assisting me during much of the time, and after a year of having my own candy business, I felt pretty good…  I knew my recipes, I knew my packaging, I knew my perils… I had unlimited time in the kitchen… and my body knew that I was going to get all the work done no matter what.

But chocolate always keeps you humble.  For example, one afternoon during the cold week before Christmas, I lost the ability to temper chocolate.  It was quite sudden. My intern finished dipping a batch of Scotch Candy Bars in the chocolate melter that I use for tempering chocolate.  They set with a perfect dark chocolate shine, and she started on the Pumpkin Pie Candy Bars.  The chocolate set completely differently.  It had a grainy, matte-like finish and streaking soon became apparent.   It seemed like it could be over-crystallized chocolate, which usually happens after prolonged use, except that streaking of that sort usually doesn’t happen and the chocolate wasn’t that thick; usually it’s a cloudy-looking bloom.

After some inspection, conjecture, and tabulations, we stopped the enrobing, and set the machine to reheat to 115. It was odd, but I practically expect chocolate to act oddly sometimes, so I wasn’t really worried. I worked on other things and ran a few errands until that night, when I tried to temper it again…. and all my tests set matte-like with strong white streaks, no matter what I did in terms of temp control and mixing. So, I decided to try again.  I simmered some water in large pots, transferred the chocolate to multiple bowls, quickly heated up all the chocolate to 120F, poured it back into the melter, and tried again with less seed.  Same thing.   I called my intern to ask if, by any chance, she’d noticed anything unusual while she was working with it.  As I’d expected, nothing.

Occasionally, I get into bad habits with my confections that gradually make things a little harder (under-seeding the chocolate for a spell earlier this year), so I began to wonder if I’d worked myself into a bad chocolate tempering corner — maybe an over-seeding habit this time.  So, I tried to temper just a small bowl.  Nope. I melted some fresh chocolate pistoles, and tried that.  It set with sharper streaks and a slightly less cloudy look, but it was still wrong.

At some point during this, I started to think about how it was cold in the kitchen, and in LA.  Well, for LA, at least… it was 60F in the kitchen.  For the past few months, I’d tempered chocolate with an ambient temp of 68-72F.  I hadn’t really kept track of it before then, except when it was too hot during the summer.

Since before I’d started my company, it had always been my fear that it would be too hot to temper chocolate properly — the problem is really that the chocolate will bloom because it takes too long to set.  I hadn’t imagined that it could be too cold to temper it properly.  Could that be right?  It had never happened in the years that I’ve worked with chocolate so far…

It was getting close to the middle of the night and I wanted to research in some books at home to confirm my suspicion and contact some chocolate-knowledgeable friends before I continued, so I went to home to sleep.  The next morning, I spoke to the friendly and talented Chuck Siegel at Charles Chocolates (where I once interned), and he confirmed that you have to take precautions when you’re in a cold kitchen… after joking about my SoCal definition of “cold,” of course.  Basically, if you’re working with a melter, the sides and bottom will be warm, but the center will quickly get cold — and the chocolates are usually dipped more near the center than the sides in order to have enough room.  So, you have to stir often and very, very well to keep the temperature constant and in the working range; depending on the chocolate, you could work with it at 92F, but 91F should be fine.  Letting it fall to 89F is not good; the crystals will grow fast, and want to set and probably bloom.  He recommended putting a pan or something to partially cover the melter to retain the heat, since the cold air takes away the heat quickly. You should also bring the chocolate up to 122F and hold it there for a while before adding seed so that all the bad crystals are definitively melted out.

It all made perfect sense.  And seemed more fussy than I wanted to deal with if I didn’t have to.  The other alternative was to heat the working room… except that my current kitchen is HUGE and I didn’t even know if it had heat (I’d made sure that it had AC).  Chad told me that he had a space heater that I could use, but in the HUGE kitchen, I wasn’t sure that it could retain heat in a space.  Speed racks were the best impromptu walls on hand that I could think of…

Luckily, the Chef at the kitchen suggested the last piece that fell into place: a small conference room off the front of the house.  It became my heated chocolate room.  I got a wonderful shine and snap on my next attempt at tempering chocolate, and production was on again.  I had to consolidate my chocolate work time even more than usual because space heaters use a lot of energy and take time to heat the room sufficiently.   And it can be the flipside of being too hot — heating the room in the cold middle of the night is as arduous on the system as starting up the AC in the hot early afternoon.   But at least I could have the chocolates finish setting and stored in the cold kitchen — that’s not possible in a hot kitchen.

So, anyway… there’s always more to learn about chocolate — especially around busy holiday seasons!  But with some problem-solving and good advice, it all worked out, and in the end, I just lost a day of production that would have been very nice to have (as well as a day at a farmers market).  And now I’m enjoying a lovely long vacation with my family — with a fortifying regimen of catching up, eating, surfing, swimming, reading, planning, walking… and sleeping!

The Los Angeles edition of DailyCandy is featuring my candy bars in Monday’s article! You can check it out here. (and in a cosmic coincidence, “Chad” is in the title of their NY article… so “shake your bonbon” and “pull your chad” at will)

And I’ll post more substantive posts soon. I have so many thoughts swirling around and so much happening that I really need to sit down and organize them… and not be so easily mollified by the outlet of Facebook status updates.