If chocolate seems to be separating, how do you get it to come back together?

Counseling.

Doh! Now why didn’t I think of that?!?

You’re screwed. Once chocolate starts to seperate I’ve never gotten it back together. I am so not totally a chef though.

you have to be a professional chocolate counselor, and the chocolate must want to get back together. mixers are a great way to meet other sweets, but they are like blind dates, or I should say visually impaired tropical fruits. They have to be orchestrated very carefully…okay, I’ll stop now, you’re probably just getting annoyed with my flippant answer. sorry.

@epz: no, I quite enjoyed it. Lurve to you.

lurve back atcha. :-)

So I’m a long time fluther lurker, but I thought I might be able to lend a hand in answering this so I went ahead and joined up.

First thing… stirring until your arm broke off was a bad idea. :) When dealing with chocolate and hot ingredients, it’s best to stir slowly but constantly. The chocolate will initially separate, but that’s to be expected. If you continue to stir, starting with concentric circles in the middle of your bowl and working your way out, it will eventually turn into a homogenous mixture.

I don’t think putting the eggs and whip creme in the wrong order matters, but overworking the whip creme is a big no-no. Mousse can be tricky, and you should try and be 100% sure about what you’re going to do with it before you do it—overhandling can ruin it, at least from an aesthetic standpoint.

That being said, if it tastes good off the spoon… who’s to complain?

Welcome @stephK!

You’ve been initiated into the baffling world of chocolate emulsions.

In mixing together the chocolate and the two liquids, you create an emulsion. An emulsion can have one of two configurations- the fat complex can envelope the water complex, or vice versa. Which of these happens will depend on many factors, including the proportion of chocolate to liquid. If you have large amounts of chocolate and only a little liquid, as is likely the case here, the fat camplex will do the enveloping. This kind of emulsion is inherently unstable. The fat and water complexes will appear to combine under agitation, but they will separate out once the agitation stops.

In many recipes, that would be really bad news, but probably not in this one. The proportions of the ingredients might not have even allowed this to happen. And even if you managed to create a nice, smooth fat-in-water emulsion (which you’d want in most other applications), that emulsion would have reversed when you mixed the whipped cream in (because the whipped cream is itself a water-in-fat emulsion). The most you could do in this recipe is integrate the emulsion as well as possible right before mixing in the rest of the stuff. Vigorous mixing is indeed called for, and a whisk would do a much better job of this than would a spoon.

In mousses that use whipped cream, it’s very important not to over whip the cream; the texture will be grainy otherwise. And the cream has to be last thing mixed in, because the fat in the other ingredients will begin to set up as soon as cold cream hits it, The cream has to get folded in very quickly and efficiently so that the mix homogenizes before the fat fully sets, then you mess with it as little as possible from that point on. any unnecessary mixing or manipulation after the fat sets will break down the aerated structure.

I’ve learned not to assume that published recipes (even ones from famous chefs) are workable. I’ve witnessed first-hand the half-assed way that many of these recipes are born.

It’s not so much that the recipes are half-assed, as that if you turn your back for a moment, the cream goes too far. They told me what to do, mostly, except they didn’t say what to expect with the chocolate.

Two different opinions on stirring. Who knows what we mean by vigourous. It was a fairly constant stirring in the way Steph suggested, and it seems to have worked. I think the cream was the biggest problem.

Anyone know about instant orangey strips?

I was thinking of julienning some orange peel, boiling in in squeezed juice and maybe a bit of sugar (is that necessary) until the juice reduces a lot, and then pouring in a bit of grand marnier.

The point would be to place a couple of orangs juliennes as a garnish on each slice of the cake.

The real test is, how did it turn out?

As for the stirring, anytime you’re dealing with an emulsion, the goal will be to break up the “dispersed phase” (whichever complex is broken into droplets, typically the fat) as finely as possible. It’s not possible to overdo this. Commercially, the best results are achieved by high-speed mixers, similar to giant food processors. They produce an extremely fine emulsion. Gentleness gets you nothing in the emulsion game. This applies to any emulsion, even chocolate ones.

The reason I have doubts about your recipe is that it’s highly unusual to start a mousse by combining chocolate with liquid like this (with the exception of those that begin by actually making a ganache, and this one doesn’t do that); anyone who works much with chocolate would realize that this is asking for trouble.

I is a part of a cake. I made a genoise, which is essentially a casing for mousse. I made a frosting today, and also the custard you are supposed to put the cake slices in. I made some candied orange peel to decorate each slice.

We’ll see how it works tomorrow night. But at least it’s done, and I don’t have to do anything except serve it.

Hey, recipes can be misleading. I tried Julia Child’s recipe for the Perfect Hard Boiled Eggs, and after doing it exactly as written down, they still turned out at less than perfect. I think some people suck at writing recipes. That’s why I keep all my recipes in my head.

Recipes that appear in articles and books are often adaptations of perfectly good pro recipes that get hopelessly distorted in the process of rewriting for home use. One problem is that pro recipes are for large batches, and typically prefer metric and weight measures over standard and volume measurements. So when the pastry chef gets asked to convert his recipe down from 30 portions to 4, and has to figure out how many cups of sugar equals 275 grams, there’s a lot of room for error. He may also use mixtures or techniques that aren’t practical for the home kitchen, so alternatives may have to be substituted. And I’m aware of plenty of chefs who wouldn’t give their real recipes out under any circumstances. The recipes that appear in print under their name has nothing to do with how they actually prepare the item.

Some publishers do a thorough testing of recipes before they publish. They may catch any glaring problems, but even they don’t typically know exactly how the item is supposed to turn out, so they won’t know when the result doesn’t match the chef’s intent. The majority of publishers, though, never even test the recipes; they’ll print them exactly as the chef submits it. The chef may have just guessed his way through the entire adaptation, between the two seatings of the Saturday service, and they’d never know.