Chef Sprinkles Class With Chocolate Tips and Sweet Revenge

Even Willie Wonka of chocolate factory fame might be able to learn a few things about making mouthwatering confections from chef George Geary.

Geary is in charge of making candies, cakes and cream puffs at Disneyland, and the class he taught one recent weekday night covered how to whip up rich truffles, creamy fudge and buttery peanut brittle.

His lecture was loaded with as many insider tidbits on making professional-quality candy as there are calories in a truffle.

Don’t buy the grocery store chocolate that comes wrapped in individual squares, he warned.

That stuff is next to last off the assembly line and is wanting in natural ingredients, especially precious cocoa butter. The same goes for chocolate chips--they are the last thing off the production line and contain such taste-numbing ingredients as paraffin to make the chips hold their shape.

“There’s nothing natural in those chips,” he said with raised eyebrows.

He recommends instead using Merkens, an American brand of chocolate that is not only higher in quality but also costs about $1 less per pound than the supermarket variety. Cake decorating stores such as the Crafty Kitchen in Westminster, where this class was held, carry it. (His personal favorite is a Belgian chocolate that, alas, costs around $12 a pound. It can be bought through the Williams-Sonoma catalogue.)

Use unsalted, or sweet, butter in all your recipes, he said. The salt is simply a preservative and means the butter has been on the store shelf longer than the unsalted versions.

And, he advised, use pure vanilla extract--”unless you don’t want your company to come back again.”

Invest in a good candy thermometer, he said. Temperature control is crucial in candy-making and can mean the difference between goof and good.

Geary reminded his class of that the hard way. His peanut butter fudge refused to set and ran off the sides of the pan, much to the amusement of the 20 women attending the class. And his peanut brittle almost burned while he was trading humorous banter.

Geary, a 6-foot-plus teddy bear of a guy whose chuckles multiply as fast as bubbles in sweet milk on the boil, only laughed more.

For he has developed a lighthearted mantra for the blunders, which he passed along to his students, who took to chanting it back to him by the end of the evening.

What to do with a bad batch?

“Give it to the neighbors!”

* Geary teaches about three classes a week at community colleges and private schools throughout Orange County and also leads culinary tours. For a listing of his classes, write him at: P.O. Box 782, Fullerton, Calif., 92632-0782.