Alrighy---as they say in Minnesota (thanks to Pat for telling me that). This was a pretty easy experiment, if not a very cheap one.
From what I read at various sites, the glaze works best when poured over a cream base--think chilled mousse. This already has a gelatinized skin that can adhere to the mirror glaze.
So what I had to do FIRST was make a base to put the glaze on. I opted to make CI's strawberry mousse with fresh strawberries that taste like...umm, have you ever bought flowering plants already started in bio-degradable pots? The kind you can just pop directly into the ground and eventually they become part of Mother Earth?
Okay. That's what these strawberries tasted like. Only they were red. But just on the outside.
The next thing I knew about this process was that the glaze is ladled over the base sit upon a wire grid so the glaze can flow down the sides. I "should have" used my round spring-form cheesecake pan, but grabbed the square one instead. That was a mistake which came back to haunt me later on.
Mousse base made? Check. On to the glaze.
If you look at the glaze ingredients, it's basically sugar. Sugar as in sugar. Sugar as in glucose. Sugar as in condensed sweetened milk. Sugar as in chocolate.
So...it's sugar augmented with water, gelatin and whatever milk products are in condensed milk.
Ingredients:
20 grams gelatin = 3 packets of Knox with a scootch removed. (each package is 7 grams) = $2 box of four packets
300 grams glucose = 3/4 of a $5 jar glucose (438 g)
300 grams chocolate = I used white chocolate because I wanted to tint the end result. Used a Godiva, Lindt and Guittard bar because that's what I had in the pantry = $9
300 grams sugar = $ who knows.
200 grams sweetened condensed milk = half the $2.5 can.
Combining the ingredients is straight-forward. I used my stick blender to emulsify the whole thing which filled a large Pyrex bowl. The final mixture starts out ~125 degrees (after adding the boiling sugar mix to the cold condensed milk and then the chocolate) and I started checking the temperature with my digital Thermapen. Thirty minutes later, I realized this was ridiculous as I was waiting for this HUGE amount of glaze to cool down when I knew I would only need about 1/4 - 1/3 of it. So I ladled 3 cups into a smaller cold bowl and that dropped the temperature immediately. It still took a good 20 minutes to reach 95 degrees, at which point I tinted the ivory-colored glaze and ladled it onto the base.
Remember that whole square spring-form comment earlier? Well, THIS is where it proves itself to be a royal pain in the dupka. This particular pan retains the base with a rim, so all of my glaze puddled there. I really needed to do two coats, but I couldn't. So the result is thinner than I wanted, but still amazingly shiny.
However, either someone is Photoshopping the bejeesus out of those images published earlier or a very low paid intern is poking away tiny air bubbles because my results--while shiny--do not look like a Lamborghini paint job.
Plus now I have 3/4 of the stuff left over and it's set up and I have no clue if you can melt a set gelatin structure and reuse it? But then I'd have to make ANOTHER base to pour it over...
So this experiment is probably over.
https://recipeswap.org/fun/wp-content/uploads/Finer_Kitchens/Mousse2_crop.jpg~original
From what I read at various sites, the glaze works best when poured over a cream base--think chilled mousse. This already has a gelatinized skin that can adhere to the mirror glaze.
So what I had to do FIRST was make a base to put the glaze on. I opted to make CI's strawberry mousse with fresh strawberries that taste like...umm, have you ever bought flowering plants already started in bio-degradable pots? The kind you can just pop directly into the ground and eventually they become part of Mother Earth?
Okay. That's what these strawberries tasted like. Only they were red. But just on the outside.
The next thing I knew about this process was that the glaze is ladled over the base sit upon a wire grid so the glaze can flow down the sides. I "should have" used my round spring-form cheesecake pan, but grabbed the square one instead. That was a mistake which came back to haunt me later on.
Mousse base made? Check. On to the glaze.
If you look at the glaze ingredients, it's basically sugar. Sugar as in sugar. Sugar as in glucose. Sugar as in condensed sweetened milk. Sugar as in chocolate.
So...it's sugar augmented with water, gelatin and whatever milk products are in condensed milk.
Ingredients:
20 grams gelatin = 3 packets of Knox with a scootch removed. (each package is 7 grams) = $2 box of four packets
300 grams glucose = 3/4 of a $5 jar glucose (438 g)
300 grams chocolate = I used white chocolate because I wanted to tint the end result. Used a Godiva, Lindt and Guittard bar because that's what I had in the pantry = $9
300 grams sugar = $ who knows.
200 grams sweetened condensed milk = half the $2.5 can.
Combining the ingredients is straight-forward. I used my stick blender to emulsify the whole thing which filled a large Pyrex bowl. The final mixture starts out ~125 degrees (after adding the boiling sugar mix to the cold condensed milk and then the chocolate) and I started checking the temperature with my digital Thermapen. Thirty minutes later, I realized this was ridiculous as I was waiting for this HUGE amount of glaze to cool down when I knew I would only need about 1/4 - 1/3 of it. So I ladled 3 cups into a smaller cold bowl and that dropped the temperature immediately. It still took a good 20 minutes to reach 95 degrees, at which point I tinted the ivory-colored glaze and ladled it onto the base.
Remember that whole square spring-form comment earlier? Well, THIS is where it proves itself to be a royal pain in the dupka. This particular pan retains the base with a rim, so all of my glaze puddled there. I really needed to do two coats, but I couldn't. So the result is thinner than I wanted, but still amazingly shiny.
However, either someone is Photoshopping the bejeesus out of those images published earlier or a very low paid intern is poking away tiny air bubbles because my results--while shiny--do not look like a Lamborghini paint job.
Plus now I have 3/4 of the stuff left over and it's set up and I have no clue if you can melt a set gelatin structure and reuse it? But then I'd have to make ANOTHER base to pour it over...
So this experiment is probably over.
https://recipeswap.org/fun/wp-content/uploads/Finer_Kitchens/Mousse2_crop.jpg~original
