For your convenience, here’s links to the four posts for Sugar High Friday #27: Chocolate By Brand:
The word ‘consulting’ always sounds like a dream job when you’re stuck working in a restaurant kitchen, slaving over a hot stove, on the line. As a consultant, it sounds like you sweep into a kitchen, where the staff welcomes you with open arm as their savior, and you magically transform the meals coming out of the kitchen into extraordinary feats of culinary magic.
In fact, it couldn’t be more different.
Restaurants call in consultants when they’ve exhausted all other possibilities, and the kitchen is in such dire trouble that they need to get some poor sucker from the outside to come in a try to fix what they’ve screwed up. The pay seems great, until you walk in the kitchen and realize no one wants to talk to you, no one wants you there, and worse, no one wants to change anything, since it means more work for them (and if they really cared about their work, they wouldn’t have had to call in someone from the outside in the first place.)
I was once a consultant for a corporation that owned several prominent restaurants. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that one of their major problems was that there were a lot of high-paid executives sitting in meetings upstairs, while there were a lot of low-paid people downstairs, in the kitchen, putting the food on the plate. And let’s face it: Customers don’t care about executive meetings, they care about the food.
And that’s basically it.
When I mentioned this discrepancy to the high-paid executives (who hired me to tell them things like that…right?) we had another round of meetings, discussing things for hours and hours, until I told them I couldn’t sit through any more meetings since I had work to do in the kitchen. (Stupid me! What was I thinking? Those meetings were totally cush. Why slave over a hot stove? Maybe those executives weren’t so wrong after all…)
Welcome to Sugar High Friday #27!
What?
You might be saying, it’s not Friday yet, David!
To be honest, I was blown away by the amount of entries and the quality of responses, and decided to start the round-up early in the week to get them all in. Thanks to everyone who participated and although I tried to leave comments on many of your blogs, time didn’t always permit me to, so I thank you all here and now.
So, dear readers, here’s the chocolate entries, based on the theme I chose: Chocolate By Brand. Bloggers made chocolate recipes, including an infinate variety of cakes, cookies, creams, and candies, using a particular brand of chocolate and talked about why.
Enjoy!…
Veronica at Kitchen Musings was a double-dipper and made Chocolate Chocolate Cupcakes X2, two recipes from two cookbooks…using two chocolates! One recipe with ScharffenBerger and the other using Valhrona.
If you like lots of lick-able chocolate frosting, you’ll love ‘em both.
Over at Winds and Breezes, Treasa used Lindt 70% chocolate for a scrumptious-sounding Chocolate Cake, with chocolate she brings back from France every time she “sets foot in the place.”
(The French are wild over Lindt chocolate, as you’ll see in other entries, and apparently so is Treasa.)
It’s a Rocky Road over at Sui Mai, who used Cailler dark chocolate to bind together marshmallows, almonds, and dried blueberries. And where did she get the chocolate she used? And why did she use that one?
The plot thickens…like her chocolate…
In the Très facile category comes Chocolate Hazelnut Madeleines from Marie-Laurie of Autres Delices using Nestlé chocolate.
Her tiny, shiny, shell-shaped little cakes would make Proust proud!
My Franco-American compatriote stateside, Béa falls for chocolate with a petite Dark Chocolate and Raspberry Cake with Chocolate-Ginger Mousse, infused with ScharffenBerger cocoa powder and Valhrona‘s Manjari chocolate.
Although it seems pretty fancy-pants, Béa makes it all look so easy, mais oui!
Check out Orange-Flavored Milk Rice with White Chocolate Icing from Nemisbéka in Hungary, which her dessert will make you, especially when you see how she uses both Nestlé Caramac bars and Milka hearts from Switzerland.
Lighter-Than-Air Chocolate Roll by Kristin at Dine and Dish, with a heady suspicion of Grand Marnier. Like her chocolate cake roll, Kristin got so light-headed on chocolate she forgot to note which brand she used. When she came back down, she noted it was San Francisco’s Ghiradelli.
Claudia at Food For Food made some very tasty-looking Chocolate Honey Caramels using Valhrona chocolate. Even though she claims the recipe was supposed to be difficult to make, she did an admirable job, as you’ll see…
Across the border in Umbria, Judith at Think On It! got over her aversion to chocolate (!) to participate, and added some chilies to the spun sugar to give it an extra kick. Check out her dessert, simply titled Hot Silk, made with Valhrona, which she says makes everything, including stuff on her other site, a little yummier.
Although the name One Whole Clove doesn’t make one normally think of chocolate, check out Lou’s sinful Boules au chocolat et au rhum. They’re enriched with Montignac 85% sugar-free chocolate, sweetened with maltitol, which she found at her local chocolate shop Cupidon.
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