This is how they’re supposed to look.

The glaze for the tortes didn’t get made till today because they requested milk chocolate in the ganache.

Preference for dark chocolate vs milk is statistically a northern California/southern California difference, which I find curious. I remember reading an article years ago about how when Trader Joe’s started opening stores up here, few people were buying what everybody bought down there and they had to come up to speed fast.

Having none of the latter in the house because we just don’t, I had to wait till the local store was open again for the day. They do carry it in such a percentage, just not a lot by comparison.

Take one Pound Plus (ie 500g) bar in its wrapper and throw on the floor repeatedly. Inside a ziplock bag if you want to be sure none gets loose. Easiest way to chop chocolate ever, and it generally divides itself along the lines of the little squares in there.

Got that done, reached for the half gallon of extra heavy cream from Costco…

The fridge. The floor. Me. I remembered to grab the carton off the floor as it was chugging away down there, and what was still in there hadn’t made any contact with anything yet and there was still enough for that glaze. (Barely.)

But man.

This was going to take awhile. And this is in a kitchen where, to take its drawers out, you have to pull the entire fridge forward to get it clear of the oven doors it’s at a 90 degree angle with. I did not get them out.

There was still a bit in the tread of my shoes but I tried.

I gave up and used bath towels on the lake on the floor.

And then I tried to wash the bath towels.

All it needed was a few drops of red food coloring in the stuff and we would have had The Cat In The Hat Comes Back. It could leave one surface for another but you could not make it go away, as I learned when I opened the washing machine and wondered at that white band just below the rim when the load was supposedly done. Oh man. I wasn’t trying to make butter!

I paper toweled that out of there the best I could and ran the thing again on hot. Still some, but a lot less.

Crossing my fingers and mindful of the extreme drought (but it’s supposed to rain tonight!), I threw the load in the dryer.

It came out with a lovely smell of fresh cream. For now.

I bet the cashmere sweater I hand-washed does, too.

But the tortes got their glaze. It did not look like normal; it was runnier than I expected and refused to hold the deep indentations I usually put into the tops (picture above pilfered from my recipe) –and then I realized that of course. It’s got milk and sugar substituting for more of the actual chocolate and they don’t have the same properties.

Leading to the quite irreverent thought that, there it is: milk chocolate is the Hollywood plastic surgery of the cacao bean. So smooth. Wrinkle free.