August: Why we temper chocolate

It’s taken a while to write this one up because I have very little to say about it.

It was August. We hosted a small party for my husband’s staff, for which I made a small cake. I went with the classic combination of yellow cake (from the Cake Bible) with chocolate frosting (recipe around here somewhere — I will find it and post), decorated with some white chocolate transfers.

I figured since it was white chocolate (and therefore wouldn’t discolor) and would be sitting right on top of and against the cake, it wouldn’t need to be tempered.

Incorrect.

It was August in Chicago, after all, and though I got them on the cake pretty quickly and easily, the side decorations just couldn’t hold up.

I managed to salvage the 2015 on one side by working the numbers back into place and shape with a small spatula, but the RSMI on the other side had folded itself completely in half and had to be scraped off completely.

Ultimately the simple design still looked nice, and it tasted great.

So we’ll call it a win, but it inspired me to take on tempering chocolate for the October cake, which I made last weekend (and therefore will post about circa 2017, at this rate…).