By Mrs.Cakes

Making chocolate cigarettes and shavings

Start with some melted real chocolate; this is semisweet, but you can use white or milk also. Chop if it is a large block, you want pieces about ½ inch large. Put about a cup of pieces in a microwavable bowl and melt at 50% power about 2 minutes. Stir until smooth, then add another ½ cup of pieces and stir until smooth. This is called “quick-tempering” and makes the chocolate easier to work with.

Step 1: Using an offset (icing) spatula, spread the warm chocolate on a marble slab, like here, or over the back of a flat cookie sheet. Don’t make it too thick, about the thickness of a cake round. Let sit until it just starts looking dull and not shiny.

Take a bench scraper, or a pancake turner (not the flexible type, you need something with a straight edge that won’t bend) and hold it at the angle shown, about 30-40 degrees above flat. Push firmly away from you. (My arm is at a weird angle because I’m holding the camera with the other hand.) The chocolate will start to bunch up at the edge of the scraper.

Step 3: This is the cigarettes starting to form. Try different angles for different widths. If you use the whole length of the bench scraper and high angle, you can make long thin cigarettes; for more open shavings and fans, lower angle and shorter pushing strokes.

Step 4: After some effort, you’ll have some nice irregular shavings for your cake! Use the bench scraper like a shovel to carefully transfer them to another pan to harden up. Just keep going until the chocolate is used up. Any you’re not happy with can just be melted down again.

Here are some on the side of a cake. I used a flexible wide scraper to press the hardened shavings against the soft cream… this is a tiramisu, but it works on all kinds of icings. You want to do this over a wide pan so any shavings that don’t stick will fall back onto the pan and not make a mess. Chill so the icing firms up and holds the shavings in place.

The whole cake, dusted with cocoa powder.