Sphere au chocolat

Well, friends, enough of sewing machines in small restaurants in Kentucky -- I've just gotten home from Paris!  The food was glorious, of course, and I made myself obnoxious by photographing not just my own and my husband's plates, but those of everybody within camera range.  What a fabulous assortment of ingredients and presentations.

I'll start by sharing Ken's favorite dessert of the trip.  He liked it so much that we returned to the same restaurant for our farewell, and he ordered it again.  I was happy because on the first trip I was so busy taking pictures of somebody else's dessert that he had already eaten half of his, thus spoiling my photo op.  And you can see why it demanded a photo.

The name of the dessert was Sphere au Chocolat, and when the plate arrived, there was the sphere, nestled in a bit of yellow-orange puree.

Carefully tip the top hemisphere off, and you find more of the puree (mango and passionfruit) and a little scoop of ice cream.  Ken thought it was something other than vanilla because of the little brown specks, but I thought it was just -- well, you know, French vanilla.

While he ate, I wondered just how you make the little chocolate hemispheres.  Do you dip an icecream scoop type of device into the chocolate, let it drain, then pop off the chocolate with an icecream scoop type of mechanism?  Or do you dip your round tool in upside down and let the chocolate form around the outside?  Who knew chefs had to be engineers.