Not many candymaking days left before the holidays

The weather has been perfect for making chocolate. Chilly and dry. However, the behemoth green fridge pumps out a lot of heat, and cranked up the temperature to almost 69 degrees F. In this house, with the chocolate I use, it's best to keep the temperature around 67, but I was able to produce quite a few nice batches yesterday. The photos below are a representative sample of what I created. Further down, you can read about (and see the evidence of) John's and my adventure making shrimp scampi with an Emeril Lagasse recipe. We should have titled it "When recipes go awry." Enjoy!

Here's a close up of some of the nicer marbeling. I swirl the chocolates together in a bowl over hot water before spooning the mixture into the molds and spreading it with a small, food-friendly paintbrush.

I have so much fun making the marbley starfish and seahorses. The big challenge is getting both chocolates to be the same temperature so that when I chill the molds, the white doesn't crystalize. It's weird, the dark never crystalizes--only the white. It took a couple of runs at it, but then they started working out just fine. These have a chocolate hazelnut filling -- not a lot, but enough to make a difference.

When I started making candy, these were among the first shapes I tried. The blue should be familar to any woman worth her salt. I'll give you a hint--the song "Moon River" was the theme to the Audrey Hepburn classic film that includes the name of the store that uses the famous boxes of the same color. These are filled with a gooey marshmallow creme. They measure about 1 cubic inch.

Dark chocolate filled with a cherry filling that includes real cherries. I like the fun shapes.

This was my first shrimp dish after welcoming seafood into my life after 15 years of vegetarianism. Below the main recipe is the recipe for the Essence. It really should have been written in the portions needed for the scampi, but it wasn't. That was a problem because we used the entire 3/4 of a cup instead of the 3 teaspoons needed for doubling this recipe. It could have been worse--I could have used all the salt called for in the recipe and we both could have had heart attacks instead of just really racing hearts. Oh well. The photos that follow show how we made it.

Thawed, frozen shrimp, prior to our peeling off the tails. I got a little squirmish about it (hey, I'm only newly unvegetarian), so John did the honors while I busied myself with other preparation.

These were the only uncooked, peeled and deveined shrimp we could find. Two pounds for US$26.99. We thought they were on sale and nearly bought two bags. Not a rip off, though. They were big shrimp in great shape that tasted very good.

Way too much Essence of Emeril for this dish. Note to self: buy ground pepper. Grinding enough black pepper for a doubled amount of Essence can irritate your throat and nose. It's orange comes from all the cayanne pepper and the paprika. I used the sweet, hungarian kind.

Ronzoni rotini in my wonderful All-Clad saucepan (courtesy of John's mom, who was super generous with gift-certificates to Williams-Sonoma last Christmas. Connie, this pot always cooks everything perfectly!

Along with the shrimp, garlic and a few other yummy items, we picked up some curly leaf parsley at Wegman's in Bridgewater. The smell was fantastic. The bunch was way more than we needed for this dish, so I'm going to share some with Mom.

Mom had given me the Alaska Cutlery Mezzaluna quite some time ago, but the new wooden bowl was from our recent trip to Vermont. John and I picked it out at the original Vermont Country Store in Weston. Oh, that's minced garlic in the bowl. :)

This is not what it's supposed to look like. We used the entire Essence sub-recipe. It's only supposed to be around 3 tablespoons of the stuff. This is equivalent to about 3/4 of a cup. Yikes! By the way, for those of you who love to know the tools cooks use, this is a large Emile Henry bowl in green (not bright green, but more of an avocado green). The large silicone spoonula is from Williams Sonoma. Now everyone's got these branded kitchen instruments with the brand burned into the wood. They say that the silicone part can be pulled off and placed in the dishwasher. I don't bother, just handwash them.

We had two skillets going during the cook time. The recipe called for too much butter for us, so we cut it by a third. The fresh parsley smelled great.

The plated pasta and shrimp. Joann had brought us these lovely pasta dishes a couple of years ago, and we use them all the time.

Don't let the photo fool you, due to our over-cautiousness about overcooking the shrimp, we botched the recipe. BAM! is pretty much the understatement of the year. It wasn't the cayanne pepper that was the killer, it was the freshly ground black pepper. John had ground two tablespoons of the stuff to match the recipe for the Essence. Note to the Food Network: when you provide a subrecipe for a portion of the larger recipe, ensure that the portions are specific to the larger recipe, and emphasize the difference prominently. We later rinsed the shrimp with cold water (since we couldn't eat them as is) and chilled them for a day. Last night, we tried the shrimp without the sauce. I ate one cold and John heated his over some plain rotini. Very garlicky and somewhat salty. A big learning experience for both of us.

The view from my window at the Marriott Waterside, Tampa, FL.

Directly across from my little balcony on the 21st floor, was the structure-in-progress shown in the snapshot on the left of this collage. The photo on the left is of the Tampa Convention Center. It takes up the lion's share of a city block, with scenic walkways on the water.

More candy

Today I spent much more time making chocolate than I would have liked. However, it was a productive day in preparation for the holiday season. I also needed to fill a small order. Below is a selection of photos that show two boxes I put together (a small and a medium) and some close-ups of the ones I made today. Enjoy!

We forgot to leave a tip at the place we stayed in Freeport, Maine, so we're sending them a special box of my chocolates. This is the middle layer, left to right and top to bottom: Dark Chocolate Toffee Crunchie, Milk Chocolate Fruit Creme, Dark Chocolate Strawberry, Milk Chocolate Crisp Rice Jewel, Dark Chocolate Fruit Creme, Oh Canada!, White Chocolate Toffee Crunchie, Milk Chocolate Crisp Rice Jewel, Milk Chocolate Almond, Butterscotch Dreamy, Dark Chocolate Almond Treasure, Classic Caramel, Dark Chocolate Solid Mini Butterfly.

This is the bottom layer of the box I prepared for the James Place Inn, the lovely place we stay when we go to Freeport, Maine. From left to right and top to bottom: Dark Chocolate Ganache Peanut Butter Cup, Milk Chocolate Marzipan Wonderbow, Solid Dark Chocolate Sunburst, Dark Chocolate Almond Treasure, Milk Chocolate Fruit Creme, Dark Chocolate Marzipan Wonderbow, Milk Chocolate Crisp Rice Jewel, White Chocolate Toffee Crunchie, Dark Chocolate Coconut Fantasy, Fudge Mintie, Dark Chocolate Solid Butterfly.