Turkish Delight

May 15, 2015 By Korena in the Kitchen 8 Comments

Turkish Delight | Korena in the Kitchen

For the Month of May, Rachael from Pizzarossa challenged us to make candy but not just any candy! She challenged us to make Turkish Delight, or Lokum.

This month, I joined the Daring Cooks (counterpart to the Daring Bakers) to make Turkish Delight, the jelly-like, powdered sugar-coated squares of rose water candy. If it sounds a little weird, that’s because it is. Weird, but good, and the homemade version is pretty close to the Turkish Delight I remember eating in the holiday candy boxes that my teacher parents usually received around Christmas.

Turkish Delight | Korena in the Kitchen

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Daring Bakers: Nougat Torrone

March 27, 2014 By Korena in the Kitchen 22 Comments

Nougat Torrone with Almonds, Pistachios and Cocoa Nibs | Korena in the Kitchen

The March 2014 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Rebecca of BakeNQuilt. She challenged us to learn to make classic nougat and to make it our own with our choice of flavors and add-ins.

Nougat is not something I’d ever contemplated making before this month – the only real experience I’ve ever had eating it is inside a Toblerone bar, so I wasn’t exactly sure what I was in for. Nougat is, in our host Rebecca’s words, “an aerated candy made from sugar, honey, egg whites, and nuts”, which can range in texture from “chewy, soft, and tender to hard and brittle”. It’s a mostly European confection (nougat torrone is the Italian kind), although it seems similar to divinity or divinity fudge in the Southern US, and if you’ve ever eaten a Mars or Snickers bar, you’ve had the watered-down industrial production version. When soft and chewy, traditional nougat is sort of like gourmet marshmallow for grown-ups. When hard and brittle, it’s rock-solid enough to break a tooth on but still very satisfying when chiseled into small bits to savor (and it would be so good mixed into chocolate, à la Toblerone!).

Nougat Torrone with Almonds, Pistachios and Cocoa Nibs | Korena in the Kitchen

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Christmas Baking 2013: Salted Caramel Chocolate Truffles

December 31, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

I’ve been making chocolate truffles at Christmas for at least ten years, ever since a friend of my Mum’s let me know how easy it was – just make a ganache of melted chocolate and cream, let it cool, then shape and roll in cocoa powder. Some years I decide to get fancier and dip each truffle in tempered chocolate. I usually spike the ganache with some kind of booze, but this year I made the caramel version I’ve had bookmarked for years in one of my Canadian Living cookbooks. All it entailed was cooking sugar into a caramel syrup, adding cream, and pouring it over chopped chocolate to make the ganache filling – simple, yet delicious. Because of the extra sugar in the caramel, these truffles were very sweet, so I added a pinch of salt to balance it out and made them into tiny portions (in hindsight, I wonder about using some portion of unsweetened chocolate in the ganache… perhaps an experiment for next year!).

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Daring Bakers: Chocolate and Candy!

August 27, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 15 Comments

The August 2011 Daring Bakers’ Challenge was hosted by Lisa of Parsley, Sage, Desserts and Line Drives and Mandy of What the Fruitcake?!. These two sugar mavens challenged us to make sinfully delicious candies! This was a special challenge for the Daring Bakers because the good folks at http://www.chocoley.com offered an amazing prize for the winner of the most creative and delicious candy!

Did I mention that right now, Nate and I have sworn off refined sugar six days a week? Oh man, this challenge came at the wrong time! But it was also so, so right…

The premise of this month’s challenge was to have all us Daring Bakers learn to temper chocolate, and then use it in our candy creations. To temper chocolate, you heat it, cool it, and heat it again to specific temperatures in order to create small, uniform crystals of cocoa butter in the chocolate so that it stays nice and shiny when it hardens and has a good snap when it breaks. It also gives a thin, even coating to things like dipped candies. Untempered chocolate will have a mottled, dusty look when it hardens, and will crumble rather than snap cleanly when broken. For chocolate making, couverture chocolate is the gold standard – this is chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa butter that, when tempered properly, results in a shinier, snappier, mellower finished chocolate. Lisa and Mandy provided chocolate tempering instructions plus a ton of chocolate and non-chocolate candy recipes, and to be eligible for the Chocoley contest, we had to make two kinds of candy: one chocolate, and one of our choice (chocolate or otherwise).

I started out with a non-chocolate candy: sponge toffee.…