I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down

[venta]

I have to make a birthday cake for this weekend... and I was considering making the port and chocolate cake from Cooking for Geeks.

However, the recipe requires "bittersweet chocolate", and has a note not to substitute "semisweet chocolate" due to their differing cocoa fat content.

I'm not sure that I completely understand how those USian folks use the terms bittersweet and semisweet. Can anyone translate for me? Wikipedia's classification of chocolate describes the two kinds as "interchangeable when baking"...

I'm low on time this week, so no chance of solving this experimentally.

Comments

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

This looked more helpful/authoritative than the Wikipedia entry:
http://www.ecolechocolat.com/chocolate-flavor.php
Just use dark chocolate with a highish % cocoa (indeed, pretty much any that lists a % should do) and you should be fine.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Bittersweet Symphony - The Verve?

[venta.livejournal.com]

One kudo, ma'am.

[sushidog.livejournal.com]

I'm _fairly_ sure that bittersweet chocolate is plain, and semi-sweet is milk. That's what I'd go with, anyway.

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

The formal difference between the two is in terms of percentage of chocolate liquor (the cutoff is 35% IIRC). As such, whether or not they're interchangeable depends on what the rest of the stuff is made from and the exact percentages.

As I understand it, bittersweet covers basically all dark chocolate, so you shouldn't have trouble finding something compatible.

[venta.livejournal.com]

phlebas, did you delete your comment? It never showed up on the site, as far as I can tell, just as an email comment notification!

[phlebas.livejournal.com]

How odd. I can see it, but the text is grey and replies are disabled. Is it screened? It said:

This looked more helpful/authoritative than the Wikipedia entry:
http://www.ecolechocolat.com/chocolate-flavor.php
Just use dark chocolate with a highish % cocoa (indeed, pretty much any that lists a % should do) and you should be fine.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Aha! Found you!

Instead of appearing greyed out, like screened comments used to do, there's now a wholly separate link - on a completely different area of the page - which says "suspicious comments". I think it thought you were spam.

Also, the email comment notification didn't bother mentioning that you'd been sieved out as spam, or anything.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I've had a few comments sieved as spam lately. Seems to be if they contain a link and not much else.

A bit annoying when it's from someone who comments regularly: you'd think they'd check that.

[sarah-orange.livejournal.com]

heh I'm amused at 'suspicious comments'

:D

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Surely "suspect comments".

[lnr]

It's not very good cooking for geeks if it doesn't explain that, is it? :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Given this was excerpted on BoingBoing, it may explain in the book :)

Plus it may really only be cooking for American geeks...