One Experiment and One New Skill

Today was a great day! By the sound of that, you'll probably guess I didn't do much studying today. Ha ha! Two friends from my pastry class joined me here at the apartment for a little experiment with gelling agents. We were talking about gelatin in class the other day and how it is made from animal products so sometimes people won't eat desserts with gelatin if they are, say vegetarian or vegan. Our chef mentioned 2 alternate gelling agents that are not made from animals, agar-agar (a seaweed product) and this stuff called Mycryo (a patented, very finely powdered cocoa butter made by Callebaut). The three of us GALS decided to make a recipe from our text that calls for gelatin, and also make the same recipe using agar-agar and Mycryo. I won't say that I LOVED all three of the final products, but we definitely did what we set out to do. The agar gels a little differently than gelatin (it melts at a slightly higher temperature than gelatin, so it doesn't "melt in your mouth" like mousses, etc made with gelatin), but it's completely tasteless, so the actual taste is very similar. The Mycryo really does give the final product a very cocoa butter flavor, and it didn't seem to gel up for us. We never could find a decent conversion ratio for using it, so it's possible we just didn't use enough or we used too much. I love science! I love dessert! I'll bring a batch of each in to class on Tuesday so that everyone can taste for themselves and also so that Chef Kathryn can tell us what we might have done differently. Speaking of Chef Kathryn, my other activity for the day today was to be one of her assistants in a recreational class she was teaching on How to Pull a Sugar Ribbon (you know like how they do with those amazing sugar masterpieces on Food Network?)...The class was from 5-10 and was FULL! Not only did I learn a ton, have lots of fun and get to work with the sugar (usually as an assistant, you are not promised anything as far as practicing the skill, but you can at least listen to the lecture), but I think I may have earned myself a commissioned job from a local artist who asked me if I'd make a sugar sculpture for him to use in one of his paintings!! WOW!! Here is a picture of the bow I made from pulled sugar ribbons today. I can see myself REALLY getting in to this....