As it turns out, everything I know about chocolate doesn't apply to a chocolate fondue fountain.

My entire pastry career has been spent mastering the art of making chocolate hard (tempering, glazes, ganaches, etc), and I think I have it down pretty well. Now as I'm trying to maintain a chocolate fountain, my challenge is to keep it runny.

It's a fine line between too thick and too thin for a chocolate fountain. If the chocolate is too thick, it won't flow freely over the fountain canopies. If the chocolate is too thin, it won't sheet as it falls. Then by virtue of the fact that the chocolate is falling, it's constantly losing heat to the air, thus becoming thicker.

Normally, if I were dipping things in chocolate, I would make a ganache, keep it warm over a hot water bath, and dip away. The warm ganache flows over the dipped food very freely, and sheets off nicely when I pull the food out. When the ganache cools, it becomes hard and shiny.

The ganache would have worked in the fountain, had the built-in heater been hot enough. Oh well.

In other news, I brought my cake into the coffee shop for display on Monday. Since then, I've sold 3 birthday cakes. I think my bosses are also having a fun time telling customers that I'm applying to the CIA. Everytime I turn around, someone's wishing me luck after being thoroughly amazed that I'm going to school rather than going back to school.

¶ 11:09 PM