POPPING IN THE KITCHEN FOR A FIRST TIME...

It has almost been a year since I started my blog, but before that, I was of course a huge fan of some great food blogs out there including one which I particularly love: Chubby Hubby’s blog. I’ve been following his food adventures for a long time now, but when I recently saw his post on Heston Blumenthal’s “popping candy chocolate cake" my smile reached all the way to my ears and immediately I told myself “I HAVE to make this!!!”. But I was curious about two things: 1) doesn’t the candy start “popping” in contact with the other ingredients? How is this going to work?! 2) Where on earth am I going to find popping candy? I know in the U.S. there are “pop rocks” but in France… it’s a bit more difficult to find the equivalent. It’s a candy that goes waaay back, that it’s vintage status has almost led it to become an extinct candy specie! I had to look in a lot of places before I found some…and still, I didn’t even find the powder on it’s own. I only found those lollipop with powder bags- you know what I mean? The recipe calls for 100gr of popping candy which would had meant that I needed to buy at least about 50 of those bags… just imagine the look of the cashier if I showed up with that! I already got an odd look with the dozen of bags I had purchased for this first trial.

Anyway, so what I did – as I was really curious how this was all going to turn out- was test out only the popping-candy base, and I divided the quantities in half. I actually did it twice. The first time I was overexcited that I didn’t even follow the recipe and started to experiment on my own. Instead of the hazelnut, I put cream…the way you would make a ganache. But once I started adding the popping candy, it started making that famous fizzy noise which meant that the effect was destroyed! Argh, silly me! So I went back into the kitchen and followed the recipe precautiously. Let me tell you, you have to be extra careful that not a single drop of water falls in and that there is no humidity whatsoever…or else everything is ruined! The recipe says you have to make a paste out of the hazelnuts, but as my food processor is currently broken I could only grind it (which is why you don’t see any hazelnut paste in my photos). When it came to the stage of adding the popping candy, I held my breath and crossed my fingers that I wouldn’t hear a fizzy noise… which I did NOT end up hearing! What joy! With this small test quantity I made, I decided to place the hazelnut-chocolate paste into little cups and tried out a bite of it … the popping candy effect was there! I then took another bite a few hours later…the effect was still there! Then again I tried it at the end of the day, and the day after and … it was still popping! Yes, the recipe did indeed work out- but only if you follow it religiously. So next time, I will do the full cake recipe hoping that I can find the popping candy on it’s own without the lollipops!

The bags I loaded up on...and that felt like a blast in the past!

Teenage mutant ninja turtles, my goodness!!

I had tons of lollipops to throw out... just keeping the popping candy!
Adding the popping candy!

For Heston Blumenthal's popping candy chocolate cake recipe, click one of the links below:

Via Chubby Hubby's blog: click here.

On the Times Online: click here.

Or on The Guardian: click here.