Hey, sorry I didn’t write lately … the reason? -No time! We are so busy making chocolates. Believe it or not, but yesterday was the hottest day here out in Manassas (103F) and we were enrobing chocolates for 6 hours and finishing Pate de Fruit for another six. The air conditioning had a workout and so did we 
It is good to get in the groove again though, slowly the summer progresses and we are getting ready to prepare ourselves for the big season. Due to some exciting (and unforeseen) orders we did work until midnight in the past few days and next week is even more crowded with tasting appointments and more. More on that later in this post. Look at this:
Doesn’t this look good? It is a close shot of our ginger confections after cutting the ganache. Tomorrow we will enrobe the chocolates - I just had to grab the camera to take a picture and capture this. The pieces inside are candied ginger that we add to the ganache. The actual flavor does not come from the candied ginger though (those just give a little crunch and texture to the whole experience), but rather from the ginger root that we cut up and steeped in the cream before we make the ganache. The ginger praline is one of our summer flavors and while it tastes really good and refreshing, it will disappear from the menu in a few weeks to make space for some delicious winterly and Christmas-y flavors.
So, while I was looking for some older confectionery tools on ebay in Germany, I came across something that I thought I would never get my hands on: A set of tools to decorate and form confections like marzipan and nougats. Of course you can get that anywhere you say (and I also have a few versions out of plastic already) but this one is different. It is dated late 18th century and hand-carved from horn (rhino or similar). Tools like that where used back then, when there was no plastic to form - my first chef Josef Buecker (Vice-President of the Pastry Guild, Germany) told me about a tool-set like that and how good it was to work with the marzipan, because the tools would never stick to it and have no seam.
Since that night (2nd year of apprenticeship, it was about 10:30PM and we were modeling marzipan figurines) I always wanted to have tools like these. Since decades it is prohibited to make things like that out of horn and I never thought I would be so lucky to get them. But now I have my very own set of tools and they are in surprisingly good shape. They are very detailed and also very light in your hand - lighter than the plastic ones even. I will model some marzipan with it - just to try them out and to get the feel for them and I will probably be ending up putting them into a frame or sth… I am glad I found this piece of pastry and confectionery history
Out of our last newsletter, coming up in exactly one week is this:
Start your weekend off early with a complimentary chocolate and wine tasting at Cork and Fork in Gainesville, VA on Thursday, August 16th from 6-9pm. In addition, the Virginia Gateway community will be celebrating a “Midsummer’s Night of Music†with performances by New Day Rising and The Josh Burgess Band.
If you want to know exactly where we will be and what we are up to, why not subscribe to our newsletter? We promise you not to bombard you with too many emails (frequency is once a month) and we will keep your data private. You will be the first to know what we create next and who knows - maybe there will be some subscriber specials for the holidays?
