Pastry Chef Amanda Hansen: A Passion for Chocolate

By Patricia D. Sherman

“I could eat chocolate cake every day,” says Amanda Hansen, Pastry Chef at La Toretta del Lago Resort and Spa in Montgomery TX. Her creations are served at the resort’s restaurants Prime and Energie. She is building a reputation among resort guests and area chocophiles, many of whom make the hour’s drive from Houston, for her chocolate profiteroles, chocolate truffles (see recipe) and a very special Chocolate Decadence Cake. “It’s a triple chocolate chiffon with 72 percent chocolate ganache, chocolate cocoa glaze, chocolate shavings, dark chocolate truffles, and chocolate sauce. It is served with a white chocolate ice cream.”

Chef Hansen, who grew up in Liberty Hill, TX, says her grandmother’s chocolate meringue pie is one of her earliest chocolate memories and is still one of her favorite desserts. “She makes six of them from scratch for the holidays every year. She even beats her meringue by hand. She just uses flour and milk and cocoa powder and Hershey’s syrup, but there’s nothing like it!”

After earning a degree from the Texas Culinary Academy in Austin, she headed for Las Vegas where she worked at Spago by Wolfgang Puck, quickly moving up to become pastry chef and manager, and then moved to Wolfgang Puck’s Bar and Grill and Cut. Even as she has held many jobs in famous kitchens, she says, she was discovering her own professional direction. “Chocolate and pastry became my passions. I just love the look on people’s faces when they eat a good chocolate dessert,” she says.

“After five years of the Vegas life, I decided to come back home to Texas.” She worked first at Bon Appetite in Austin, where she was pastry chef and manager, and then took over pastry production at the resort on Lake Conroe. She and her staff produce the daily desserts as well as special occasion creations, such as elaborate wedding cakes.

In fact, she is planning some pretty elaborate cakes for her own wedding early in 2010 after her fiance has finished a tour of duty in Afghanistan. “The cakes I will be doing for the wedding will be primarily chocolate. The groom’s cake is going to be a large cowboy hat with the brim out of modeling chocolate and the base German’s chocolate. The whole cake will be sprayed with a dark chocolate glaze to resemble felt. The centerpieces I am thinking of doing in chocolate, too. Sort of a chocolate sculpture/show piece idea,” she says.

On the other hand, she doesn’t always want something elaborate. When she just craves chocolate for herself, “I go for a Mr. Goodbar.”

When it comes to chocolate in general, she has three tips for home bakers:

• Taste: “I am a Valrhona girl. The cocoa powder is 78 percent chocolate, and I like the way
  it blends.”

• Aesthetics: The most important step in making show-stopping creations is tempering. “It’s a science. It takes practice to do it right. You probably won’t do it right the first time.”

• Bloom: Humidity can kill chocolate and make it bloom. Then when it’s tempered it won’t have the shine it should have. You can use chocolate with a bloom in brownies. But I wouldn’t eat a truffle that has bloomed. That’s a sign it might not be good.”

She sees one very welcome trend in chocolate: “Sugar-free items. If you were to look for a sugar-free chocolate three years ago you would be hard pressed to find one that tasted good, that you could exchange for normal chocolate, or could temper. Now almost every chocolate provider offers a sugar-free option in white, milk, or dark 63 percent. Fechlin is one of my favorites because their 63percent dark Swiss chocolate that is sugar free tastes just like their regular 63 percent dark. Here at La Torretta we offer our truffles in both regular and sugar free. And we also make cookies that have sugar free chips and Maltitol powder as a substitute for sugar. Most people don’t know what Maltitol powder is, and if they do they are scared to use it. In baking, it is the only non-sugar substitute that weighs out in equal proportions and bakes the same as regular sugar. The side effects if consumed in very high amounts are not pretty, but Equal, and Splenda have the same effects; the flip is they are not equal proportions and do not bake the same.”

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