The English muffin dough is rising. I'll also make challah this week and perhaps cherry pie. I already made (and my kids have already consumed) a batch of shortbread cookies. I was going to make scones Tuesday but that's off until Thursday as my wife left on a last minute trip and will not return until late Wednesday. I am debating whether or not to make meringues Thursday. Any good recipes would be appreciated. They are usually too eggy for me. Would mixing some powdered egg whites with fresh egg whites help?

when I have extra egg whites, I often make meringue cookies with mini chocolate chips in them.

There are quite a few pages on the web that talk about how to temper chocolate. I had read several of them before going to chocolate school, it isn't that we did things differently there, but the hands-on experience was worth the time and cost.

The biggest trick on tempering chocolate is to be able to control and measure the temperature fairly precisely. In school we used infrared thermometers to test the temperature of the chocolate as we stirred it.

The temperatures below are for dark chocolate. For milk chocolate subtract 2-3 degrees (C) and for white chocolate subtract 6-8 degrees.

You need to get the chocolate warm enough to melt out all the existing fat crystals (45-50 degrees C) then cool it to the point where it can form new crystals. The crystals you want have the highest melting point of the five crystal structures, so you want the chocolate in the 28-32 degree range. (There is a sixth crystal structure, but it generally only forms when chocolate sits for a very long time.)

If you have some tempered chocolate on hand, you can use that to 'seed' the right crystals by stirring it into your un-tempered melted chocolate. You need to add about 10% by weight to seed it properly.

Otherwise you need to let the chocolate cool, working it to develop crystals (we did this on a marble surface), then reheat it to melt the 'wrong' crystal structures, which have a lower melting point and stir it some more to get the right crystals to spread.

We used strips of parchment paper to test how well tempered our chocolate was. Dip a strip in the chocolate then set it on a second strip of parchment to cool. If it is well-tempered, you won't get any streaks in the cooled chocolate and it will have a 'snap' to it.

I bought a small chocolate pot after spending a week at chocolate school. It gives me fairly precise temperature controls over a range of 20-50 degrees (C).

• This reply was modified 7 years, 10 months ago by Mike Nolan.

Aaron, Vermont Country Store used to sell them, but when I checked their site just now, I can't find them. Walmart online has them, if you can wait for delivery.

Looking at the Wikipedia guide on Good Eats, Season 1, Episode 13, "The Art of Darkness", is probably the episode where he talks about tempering chocolate.

I think I saw that episode in the list of programs on the Food Channel over the weekend, too.

Thanks everyone for the tips. I ordered Wilton Meringue powder from Amazon. It won't be here in time but I'll have them for the next time.

I think I actually have the Good Eats Art of Darkness. Someone gave me some Alton Brown DVDs so I'll check there.

I made shortbread cookies for my kids yesterday. I used brown sugar and cut back the butter a bit. They had a chewy snap and the reduced butter plus brown sugar really made the taste. I usually use corn starch in addition to flour but I was out so I substituted cake flour.