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We continue to make progress with the Tiny Great Hall. I had thought that we’d be further ahead than we are. However, it’s gotten much colder.
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I’d thought that tiling could happen in the same temperature range as painting, that is, you wouldn’t have any problems until you got consistently below 40 F.
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Didn’t bother checking until this weekend that no, grout and mortar require 50 F.
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So the mortar has not set, even though we finished putting down tiles more than a week ago. Or rather, the tiles we did last Sunday are set. The ones we did on Tuesday? Not so much.
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So…instead, we’ve been working outside. Yesterday, we built part of the frame and hung the door.
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This was both something that needed to get done, as well as for keeping the heat in. The mortar, after having a space heater running and keeping the room at 72 F is much more set, but we are still waiting until Tuesday before we grout.
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This past week, I made traditional truffles, that is, a flavored ganache that will harden slightly, rolled into balls and covered with cocoa powder.
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The truffles I made were actually vegan, as I shouldn’t do dairy, so I used coconut milk. I steeped Earl Grey tea in the coconut milk before I added it to the melted chocolate.
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The next batch of truffles I plan on steeping coffee in the coconut milk, then coating half of them in chopped up salted almonds, while the other half will be the usual cocoa powder.
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Then…It might be time to get fancy.
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I don’t know about you, but I generally don’t care for white chocolate. I remember my mom had a white-chocolate almond bark that she enjoyed. But she stopped getting it when I was still pretty young—maybe eight or ten.
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I may now understand why.
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White chocolate—GOOD white chocolate—is actually pretty tasty. The difference is that it has to be made from actual cocoa butter and not palm oil. I wonder if the place where my mom used to get her white chocolate almond bark changed chocolates on her, and she stopped getting it because it no longer tasted as good.
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So I plan on making some white-chocolate mint truffles (steeping mint leaves in the coconut milk) and then rolling those in chopped up hazelnuts.
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I, myself, didn’t enjoy chocolate until I discovered chocolate that was 75% or higher in cacao. Anything less than that I generally perceive of as being sweet and not much else.
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But I’m going to make truffles with less chocolate in them.
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And I suspect, they’ll be just as delicious.
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What about you? Are you a choco-holic, as they sometimes refer to it? Or do you prefer savory to sweet?
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My new book, available in November! Check it out!
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November brings NaNoWriMo. We got you covered! We're putting a collection of five Business for Breakfast books on sale for the month of October.
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In addition, for this month Blaze Ward's Star Tribes series is collected together into a box set for the first time! Get all five books, the entire series, for just $9.99!
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Daniel has had enough as a chef. The burnout convinces him to sell the restaurant to his Sous Chef, walk out the door, and never come back.
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Kathra Omezi’s star tribe faces poverty on a daily basis. Twenty-five ships in deep space against the entire Sept Empire.
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And then a conqueror steps into their lives.
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The Mbaysey tribe, and the galaxy, will never be the same.
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