So my best friend and I took a chocolatiers class over the weekend (that's like Mouskateers but with chocolate, and no hats. Boo).  This is the friend who owns AJ's Moonlight Bakery, so you know, already with the mad skills in the kitchen.  And me who really likes cooking sugar.  We both wanted to expand our chocolate skills, especially tempering.  It is a fine and distinctive art, and it was a very instructive class.  Ooh, and they served wine during chocolate class!  Dude! 

Anyway, the whole tempering process basically involves melting chocolate then dropping the temperature down, agitating it to allow crystals to form, then bringing the temperature back up to a particular temperature so it will set in that nice crisp chocolate one finds on dipped berries and such.  It is all very precise and science like, which is ironic because I totally almost failed high school chemistry.  Squeezed out a C at the last minute (as I was wont to do).  I blame the math.  Except I always got percentages because those involved shoe sales and how to squeeze a C out of an F average. Thank you very much.

So we were practicing tempering and the teacher happen to make a comment about "like reheating metal". And I thought, as I sipped my wine, "Yes! This is like the annealing process when you're forging metal," because metalsmithing is another set of classes I've taken. Then for a while as I "agitated" (smeared with a spatula) chocolate and checked said chocolate's temperature I also entertained fond memories of heating a chunk of silver to white hot metal and bashing it therapeutically with a hammer against an anvil, which reminded me that I needed to practice some drums this week because my speed has gotten quite poorly and I really need to get it up if I ever want to play punk music and that's when it occurred to me…

All my hobbies involve fire and hitting things!  Geez, aggression much?

 

I think I'm gonna call my punk band The Angry Minivans.  I'll spit Sauvignon Blanc into the crowd, wear a ratty apron.  Don't push me, I'll bite the head off this truffle!