I cannot emphasise enough how entranced with Fall Out Boy I am at the moment, and I love the song that they performed with Elton John, so much I quoted it for a blog title. And honestly, it's applicable both in its current form and with the next word. (No.)
On my list of bad habits there are two significant entries. I get super into things, like baking, chocolate making, climbing and all sorts of other things, and I am obsessed for an indeterminate period of time, and then I kind of stop having time for it. It's not that I go off it as such, but just that it stops being the centre of my life. It's not always because I've found something else to do, but almost like the motivation has left me. I've also got a bad habit of buying everything I think I will ever need for sad hobby very early on and being a bit all the gear and not much idea.
Tonight, after logging off of work I decided that I was finally going to get around to starting making something I've been thinking about for literally years. It's going to be a bit of a long process, but right now, I don't care, I just wanted to start. A few years ago I saw an awesome chocolate mold that was shaped like Christmas trees and I thought I could make something which is effectively a riff on a walnut whip, without the walnuts and with some special Christmas-y ingredients. It took me a while to find the mold again on eBay when I eventually decided to do them and this last year, I forgot that I had the mold until too late in the day to make them for Christmas 2023. If I don't at least have a go at making them, not using the word crack because I don't want to curse them when they come out of the fridge, I don't know if I'll do it this year.
I wanted to make them with tempered chocolate, but tempering chocolate is a process which requires more patience than I actually have, so I gave up in the middle. I wasn't convinced the thermometer was working right, I wasn't convinced I had guessed the amounts of chocolate right (God only knows where I have put my scales) and I wasn't convinced that I could keep a bowl of tempered chocolate at the right temperature once it was done for long enough for me to fill the bottom of the molds and then brush enough chocolate for a shell up the sides. Honestly, I think it might need to be done in layers next time, because there is going to be quite a tough piece of chocolate at what will form the top of the whip from where it all dribbled down inside. (Though this won't necessarily be a bad thing, because I was thinking about blow torching the top ever so gently and quickly so I could stick a star in the top, though now I think that that might be a little too delicate, so I might just melt some white chocolate in a piping bag and pipe a messy star not the top. I'm also debating icing sugar snow over the top as well, but that's going to have to wait for me to see how they look when they come out. I've also considered putting tiny coloured hundreds and thousands into the melted chocolate before putting it into the mold but I'm not sure it will work out properly.)
I've also considered where I can make them as tea cakes and also considered whether I can make green chocolate, but the easiest chocolate to colour is white chocolate, and white chocolate is probably going to be way too sweet for the other ingredients I want to put into the middle of them.
Anyway, tangent, I would normally be considering something like getting a chocolate tempering machine, but for one thing, I'm well aware of the fact I will likely get bored pretty quickly, but also, they're really expensive and I'm not sure that tempering chocolate is ultimately worth it. Yes, it makes it shiny, yes, it makes it stronger, but it's so much effort...
But I'm proud of myself for not doing my ultra impulsive thing of just going for getting something that will just take up space in my house. Even if doing the tempering without a machine makes me want to scream. I think I just need more practice. (And more chocolate).
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