Bounty Bar

Bounty bars are very simple. They're like Almond Joys but they lack the almond, and they have their logo and palm trees stamped on their bottoms. I guess they're the Commonwealth equivalent to Almond Joys. They have different ingredients, too. I like their wrapper more, though.

Chocolate Turkish Taffy

Yippee, novelty candy! Turkish Taffy is this airy, slightly porous, dense marshmallow-y light sugar candy that is advertised to be snappable. The idea is that you hit the bar against a hard surface, causing it to shatter. Then, you eat the pieces of the bar. I chewed the pieces because that's how I eat candy. The bar had a really clean break, which is interesting for a candy with the consistency of hard caramel and the flavor of cola.



Good candy bar for angry or violent people. And non-angry non-violent people.

It is definitely preferable to hit the candy while it is still wrapped, or else you get chunks all over the floor and table.

Life's So Sweet Chocolate Place

Maybe I'm dabbled enough in Food Science, but a tour of a chocolate shop would've excited me to no end a few years ago. Now, it doesn't faze me. Perhaps I already have a working knowledge about chocolate. Anyway, as I'm now doing a Food Science summer program at Cornell University, my fellow interns and I decided to go to Trumansburg NY and take a grand ol' "tour" of the Life's So Sweet Chocolate Place.

We arrived at about 2:30, which was half an hour early, and the storekeeper told us to leave and walk around for half an hour. I guess the astounding ten of us overwhelmed the tiny storefront, whose floorspace could barely fit two Smart Cars. And so, we trudged through the only street in Trumansburg that had shops, and dilly-dallied until 2:55, when we re-entered the store.

There, we were now welcome with open arms.

We started with an introduction of the shop. This is where the original Life's So Sweet Chocolate Place stood, some (at most 85) number of years ago. Here is a painting in the shop, reminiscent of the Taughannnock Waterfall some 10 minutes away.

We were then led into the back room, where we all sat down and listened to a lecture. First, we learned that we had just passed the chocolate storage area that was "between 60 and 70 degrees, with no humidity and no funny smells. We know that the chocolate there is kept well or else you would've encountered some funny smells when you walked past". Well, cool.
The person leading the tour was very nice, but honestly didn't offer much information that I wouldn't be able to find on Wikipedia. Apparently, we were supposed to be awed by the fact that chocolate comes from a plant. How astonishing. This tour was not geared towards anyone with basic science knowledge, and much less to (food) science majors. Therefore, I was slightly disappointed. However, I did get 3 pieces of chocolate out of the $5 for the tour.

We learned very generically about how chocolate is made. According to the lecture, cacao trees are about 5 ft tall, and are planted +/- 20 degrees from the equator, which includes Hawaii, Madagascar, Ecuador and some other places. Life's So Sweet obtains its chocolate from a company that makes a "perfect blend" (quoting lecturer) of cacao from all these places. However, they also sell chocolate with cacao from only one region, and the taste of this possibly varies by season. Unpopular chocolate truffle flavours have included "double cherry" and pie.




I touched a frozen cacao pod from Cornell, and checked out a jar of unroasted cacao beans. I learned that they had two tempering machines, and tempering chocolate takes about an hour and a half (with white chocolate taking less time and dark chocolate taking more).

They use bunny shaped moulds and hedgehog shaped ones. The metal moulds are 85 years old and are used out of tradition and durability, while it is easier to observe the chocolate spreading and hardening process in the plastic ones. Apparently, in the plastic moulds, when the chocolate has hardened, it unsticks itself from the mould. One of us (incidentally a Chemical Engineer) asked why that is, and the person giving the lecture gave an explanation that kind of sounded like this:

Well, it's because of chemistry. Let me try explain it in the easiest way possible. Well, if the chocolate isn't tempered well enough, it doesn't stick to itself. When it's tempered, it sticks together and, if you look here [shows chocolate in mould], the sides have already begun to unstick from the plastic, so later, the rest of the chocolate will unstick."

So, we still don't know. However, I do know that anything that is not chocolate is not made by the store, but by some other family owned business. For example, the jelly beans come from Jelly Belly (apparently 6 generations old), while the sponge candy comes from Rochester NY. There is also sugar-free chocolate, which comes from some other supplier.

The three pieces of chocolate included:

White chocolate half-coated dried apricot
Half-baked attempt to please apricot and white chocolate lovers. Why not cover the entire apricot?Sweet. Not waxy (more creamy). Miniscule grit, which I liked.


Milk chocolate
Plain milk chocolate with a "snap" sound when bitten. Creamy and typical, but not waxy at all. Miniscule grit.


Dark chocolate "Aztec" truffle
Simple dark chocolate ganache with 3 types of cayenne pepper with spicy chocolate coating and sprinkled with red pepper flakes. Not too spicy.



I didn't fancy any of the chocolates for sale, since they all seemed kind of normal, though there was a balsamic vinegar truffle which someone said didn't particularly taste like balsamic vinegar. I think I read somewhere online that balsamic vinegar actually brings out the chocolate flavour more, though.

They also had some novel idea where you put a box of 5 chocolates where the shoe goes.

Montreal Day Two

My brother and I went to the Biodome, Olympic Tower, and botanical garden. The garden was an eye-opening experience for me, since I knew so little about the cool plants beforehand. Because the gardens were so interesting, we missed lunch.

CC Cafe Quiche Lorraine ~5$

• Eh. Normal quiche.

Franx Express, ~5%

• Delicious poutine at the Peel RESO, which is this underground area that connects a bunch of metro stops and is stocked with clothes stores and food courts! Not-too-salty gravy, slightly off-tasting cheese curds (due to no refrigeration?),  and ever-crispy fries! The cheese curds were stringy and slightly melted too, at parts. So, poutine can be delicious!
• The guy who sold the poutine to me actually doesn't know much French. He used to live in the US, and then moved here and loves it here.
• Unfortunately, the Peel RESO closes around 6 pm, and we didn't realise that the McGill RESO was the popular one and closes at around 9.

Crepes Gerard $9

• We got a peach melba crepe. It was a canned? peach, one scoop of vanilla ice cream, one strawberry, a handful of almonds, and caramel syrup, all made lovelessly with ungloved hands, 10 minutes before closing. It was a very bland, chewy crepe.

Kinder Surprise from Super C (3.29$ for 3)

• I no longer long for Kinder Surprises. There is no price that can buy back my 5 or 7 or 9 year old's excitement at nibbling at a hollow egg, and snapping open a bright orange capsule filled with plastic parts that can be assembled into a tricycle or something. Sure, the wrapper looks the same, and the milk/white chocolate is just as scanty (20 g...), but this time, the capsule was a mustard yellow one-piece blob! Disappointment!
• To make matters worse, my toy was a piece of paper! Time to stop liking Kinder Surprises on Facebook, I suppose.

Whole Wheat "Leftovers" Cookies

Well. It's my last Sunday subletting at HamCore and I have to use up all my food by (Thur|Fri|Sat) of next week.

SP and I made delicious whole wheat cookies with curry powder, cinnamon, and dark chocolate. We did not freeze the dough (as the instructions say), and after baking, we both proceeded to devour the whole batch of cookies (well, we made half a batch of cookies - 1 leftover stick of butter) while watching Sheep in the Big City. These cookies were quite filling (both emotionally and physically) and tasted a bit like gingerbread and had a satisfying sandy texture. I also wanted to just eat the cookie dough raw. So there - no more butter and chocolate! SP tried to grind  a cinnamon stick, first using a knife (nice little chunks, but highly inefficient), and then using a cocktail masher + bowl. We ended up with sizable chunks of cinnamon along with the puny bits.

I also had about a liter of skim milk leftover and I was afraid that it would go bad, so I decided to freeze it with some maple syrup, to make milk and maple granita. Basically, you break the ice slurry every hour or so until you have pin-sized ice crystals. You can easily chip at this structure to get a good amount of dessert. It is not creamy but it's fine. I'm not sure why I didn't make this with all the leftover milk and half&half during the semester. So, milk used!

Finally, I was a counselor for an Engineering camp last week, and at the final reception, there was a giant cake, with an anticipated 100+ servings (I assume - there were 69 students, and you have to include their families!). Miraculously, there were about 13 slices leftover, and they were going to trash all those slices! So, I claimed it, took it to DRL, fed some physicists, and brought the rest home to eat. Unfortunately, the end pieces of cake were slathered with "American Buttercream Frosting", a publicly-celebrated disaster. To me, that stuff is vile. Fatty and flavourless. I scraped off most of it from the cake parts and ate those, but I didn't want to throw out this butter+powdered sugar concoction, like I have done in the past (at least three times, especially whenever we got the Costco cakes). The answer hit me like a slice of pie hitting a serving plate - bake with it! Duh!

So I mixed it with the rind, juice and pulp of two lemons I happen to have, 1.5 c of whole wheat flour, a sprinkle of instant rice (just for experimentation) and some baking soda, and baked the stiff dough at 350 F for 10 minutes on the middle rack of the oven. I ended up with 18 cookies with a crusty exterior (crispy bottoms) and a cooked gooey filling. The cookie is not particularly sweet, and did not expand significantly while baking. It was quite lemony and I'm pretty glad I found a use for gross "American Buttercream Frosting"!

So, all I have now are about 6 eggs, some Brie, flour, almond meal, cocoa powder, oil, cooked pasta, rice, frozen mango, frozen veggies, an apple, and yogurt.

Chocolate Pudding & Wonderful Stock

I haven't gone grocery shopping since the 22nd (I think?). Considering I usually spend <$8 per grocery shopping trip, this implies that I had/have a lot of leftover food to consume within the next two weeks! I can't wait to go home! Hopefully, I don't have to spend money on food until I get home (except for veggies of course).

With 3 leftover egg yolks (from failed macarons), I made chocolate pudding! I used fat-free milk, and added some red pepper flakes. I also replaced the cornstarch with about 6 tsp of white flour, and the sugar/cocoa with 120 g dark chocolate. The pudding was smooth and had a crusty top (which was pretty delicious!).



I also have been saving leftover plant parts in the freezer. I made a delicious stock with leftover cilantro, celery bottoms, potato peelings, onion caps/skins, garlic skins, and carrot tops, and eggplant bits. I think that I will do this from now on, and maybe even get my mum to do it at home! Vegetable stock is so easy to make as well -  just dump all the scraps into a saucepan of water, and let it simmer for a few hours! I'm sure non-vegetable stock is also easy to make - just simmer animal bones for a few hours. I think that next time, I'll cut the scraps into small pieces.




I used the stock for my risotto (to use up my leftover Arborio rice), and I also added some celery root juice that I got from Monell (they were going to use it for a study, but chose carrot juice instead). Celery root juice is tangy, sour, not sweet, and quite delicious!




In both instances, SP helped stir. Therefore, he was allowed to eat unlimited portions.

Portal Cake!

Today I made a Portal cake but failed at making jelly. This is a very sad day.

My brother finished his AP exams today, and as he is going to college next year, this is a graduation/belated birthday/end-of-high-school/congrats on [college name]! cake. I wanted to make a Team Fortress 2 cake but I couldn't figure out what object to make. Pyro? Sandvich (in other news, I got a Dalokohs bar yesterday!)? Natascha?

So, I stuck with Portal's black forest cake, even though none of us like fake cherry flavouring or maraschino cherries. My brother likes orange juice though, so there's orange juice in the cake and jelly. He also likes coconut, so the whole cake is covered in chocolate coconut ganache.

Unfortunately, he has not eaten the cake (and I don't think he will) because he had a bad day with bad news and dinner was ruined.

On the bright side, this means that the cake is now mine. Look at the lush back yard. It's been barely a week and the lawn needs mowing again.

The cake recipe is from here.

Changes I made:
1. I substituted 100 g flour with whole wheat flour, and 15 g with wheat germ. No one will notice!
2. Instead of 240 ml of milk, I used 120 ml milk + 120 ml orange (put in LAST--acidic, reacts with baking soda).
3. I used 1 tsp baking soda instead of 1/2 tsp.
4. Less sugar! ~250 g instead of 400 g.

I made three layers because I only have 17-cm diameter cake pans (6.69-inch, as opposed to 9-inch). Later, I realised that the Portal cake only has two layers!! Boo. I used all three layers in the end though. My cakes weren't flat, so I shaved off the cake tops until they were parallel to the bottom of the cake, meaning that each layer was thinner.

The first and only "black forest cake" I've ever had was on my 10th (or 11th?) birthday. We bought it from ParknShop, and although it was labelled as "black forest cake", it was actually a chocolate swiss roll with jelly and cream filling. I wanted to emulate that, so I made cherry orange jelly for the filling of the Portal cake. However, although the jelly set, it was extremely watery and had the consistency of thick jam. A lot of it oozed out so I ate it. I'll just pretend it's chocolate cake "infused" with cherry orange flavouring...

The chocolate ganache recipe is from here, although I changed it up a lot.

All you have to do is simmer the heavy cream and throw in all the chocolate, and then all the coconut.

100 ml heavy cream (but maybe fatty milk will suffice?)

150 g dark chocolate chips

150 g shredded coconut (sweetened...but you should use unsweetened)

You MUST wait for this to cool down as much as possible before you spread it on the cake or else it's just going to drip/fall off. As it was super sticky, I couldn't figure out how to ice the cake with it. It turns out that you can scoop some ganache onto the back of your giant spoon, and spread it UPWARDS onto the sides of the cake. After an hour or so, the ganache will be solid enough that when you poke it, only some oily substance gets onto your finger (as opposed to a glob of ganache).

This coconut ganache gives a great "Portal"-esque texture to the cake. Initially, I was going to make a zillion chocolate shavings to press onto the cake. I am EXTREMELY glad I didn't have to endure that tedious task.

The white icing is fat free yogurt + powdered sugar + coconut, in a ratio of 1:6:6. You only need a tiny bit. The red blobs, which are supposed to be maraschino cherries, are actually gum balls that we are never going to eat. We only had 7, so I cut one in half (to make two halves).

We don't have real candles so I used a peppermint stick thing taped to a paper flame that says "congratulations!" on it. I took a lot of pictures because this cake looks really pretty (and tastes good, according to me and my sister, who ate a lot of cake scraps and icing).

Artisserie Chocolate Cafe Chocolate Mint Truffle Tea

Tea? Yep.
Mint? Yep.
Chocolate? No. Not at all.

:( Kind of a disappointment.

Chocolate Star Cakes!

I sort of followed my Victoria sandwich cake recipe but also sort of made up my own ratios of ingredients because I wanted to use up the orange juice (~0.5 L left now--last night my brother and I had orange juice with seltzer water. It was pretty neat).

I could actually make a Swiss roll with this sheet of cake, but I figured stars would be more photogenic. I've just proven to myself that my cookie pan can double as a cake pan...

INGREDIENTS (2 20-cm rounds, or 1 huge cookie pan)

200-250 g caster/granulated sugar (your choice)

250 g unsalted butter - keep the butter wrappers!!

2 eggs

120 ml orange juice

>50 g unsweetened cocoa powder

150 g self-raising white flour

50 g whole-wheat flour

2 tsp baking soda

I initially added the orange juice to make an orange flavoured cake. However, I should either grate in some orange rinds, or just not use any cocoa powder because the chocolate makes the orange flavour barely noticeable. However, the orange juice and the baking soda react (acid/base) extremely neatly, to create this super moist and crumbly cake!

 METHOD
1. Cream sugar and butter.
2. Beat eggs, add eggs to creamed sugar/butter and stir. Add in orange juice. You will have something resembling puke (but yellow). It is COMPLETELY OKAY if there are lumps of butter in the batter.
3. Sift in cocoa powder and half of the flour. FOLD! (figure 8).  This will not look pretty.
4. Sift in the rest of the flour and the baking soda. Fold a little more!
5. Pour onto a pan greased with the butter wrapper.
6. Spread evenly.
7. Bake for 16-18 minutes on the bottom rack of an oven at 350 F or 180 C. Let sit in oven for 10 minutes. Then, open oven, poke a fork into the center, and see if it comes out clean. If it does, it's/you're all set!
8. Cut into shapes with a cookie cutter or just eat it. It turns out that cutting cake with a cookie cutter leaves loads of crumbs.

Fake Mousse

Half-melted ice cream refrozen for a few hours or so makes 2 layers. One layer is chocolate mousse, and the other is sorta chocolate flavoured snow cone. No kidding. I suppose the water (being more dense than fat) sinks down, while the fat stays at the top. The water freezes because it's 0 degrees. The fat, however, is solid at room temperature (saturated!) so it makes this creamy mousse thingy...

Cupcake & Notes

A few things...
0. Penn has decided that they'll email about food events literally 4 hours before the event occurs. However, because I have my sources, I know about free food events months in advance. Not that it makes much of a difference... so Penn had a "Winterfest" thing wherein they gave out waffles, candy, ice cream, marshmallows, and nuts (run by SPEC). Although I have no right to criticise, they really should consider a better setup. Why bump all the tables next to the walls? Why not have people line up on BOTH SIDES of the table to obtain food? This would - what do you know?! - shorten the line by 50%!!

Got my waffle and ice cream.

1. TJ gave me a cupcake from the dining halls. I'm surprised Penn Dining made desserts that are really pretty-- I mean, look at the squiggly peppermint candy! It tasted like a normal cupcake. But it's pretty.

2. Applesauce tastes like chunky ketchup. I am not kidding. It's sour... it's sweet... it's ketchupy.

3. Another Penn event was Amy Gutmann's "Holiday" study break/party. I didn't bring my camera, which was rather stupid. The place was classic-game themed. Obtained lots of smoked cheese. TJ and I were about half an hour early for it, and I did it at the expense of studying for organic chemistry (haha...terrible class...), although in retrospect, I actually don't think that my grades were negatively affected.

4. We all know that my college house should've won the Power Down Challenge. Since the authorities say that we didn't win, we had a party anyway, and we raffled off a Kindle, scooters, water bottles, rechargeable batteries, and a recycling bin. Twenty pizzas.

5. I'm home. I open the fridge. What I see resembles what I saw when I opened the fridge when I came back at Thanksgiving...

6. JM, GM and I ran to Starbucks and they got the Caramel Apple Spice, which was basically creamy apple cider. I didn't try it though. I got a Green Tea Frappuccino. In the winter? I know right...reminds me of the time JM and I ran to Colaco's Creamery, got ice cream, and walked back home in the snow eating it. I've been wanting to try it for the past year, but I never got around to it...not really sure why. In any case, we walked back in the chilly weather while I was slurping on layers of fat and sugar (no picture of it though) -- it was a beautiful minty green colour, and it tasted like vanilla ice cream. Nothing bittery/tea-like about it. I suppose the colour made up for it though.