Plated dessert project

Today we did our final projects for Plated Dessert Design. After the sugar showpiece fiasco from Advanced Baking, I am relieved that my plated dessert was excellent!

I made a Spring Berry Napoleon. It has layers of puff pastry with a whipped cream cheese filling and berries. I used strawberries, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries. The plate is garnished with berries and raspberry sauce.

Here's the side view.

And a view of the plate from the top.

Mmm...it tasted as good as it looks! The puff pastry was perfectly buttery and flaky, the filling was light and creamy, and the tart fruit and sauce were a perfect contrast.

Too humid for sugar

We made our sugar showpieces last night. Our kitchen was so humid, some of our components never actually dried. My classmates mostly had thicker pieces for their showpieces, so they could still get them put together, even with pieces melting. My showpiece was all flowers, and my beautiful thin petals melted before I could even assemble the flowers. What a huge disappointment!

I don't have a lot of great pictures, but here is one of my showpiece in the process of melting. The green vine-like support was supposed to be going up, not over. We propped it against the stockpot to try to keep it standing up, but it just kept stretching and sagging. I put the red shards to indicate where the flowers would have gone.


Here is a picture of one of my petals melting. Can you see the little puddle at the tip? That used to be a delicate thin spiral. I worked for hours, and made over a hundred petals for three big showy flowers.


Look at how my classmate's coral is melting. What a mess!



I made a beautiful sheet of bubble sugar, which completely melted onto the parchment.



I'm going to try to make the flowers again later. I wanted those flowers so bad! Maybe in the fall I can find a nice dry day.

Frozen desserts/fruit desserts

We made quite an assortment of desserts today. I made some individual chocolate souffles. I had never made a souffle before, but they were perfect! We served them with a sabayon (sort of a foamy custard sauce flavored with white wine.) Here's a picture before we added the sabayon.


This is a chocolate & peanut butter bombe with a homemade marshmallow and a piece of peanut brittle. I wish I had taken a picture after we cut it open, but we all gobbled it up.


Here is a beautiful frozen dessert. The bottom layer is a tequila-orange granita, topped with a blood orange sorbet and garnished with a grenadine sauce. The sorbet was one of the best things I have ever tasted!


Last, we have a lemon-lime meringue pie, with a brown sugar meringue. Again, I wish I had taken a picture after the pie was cut, but the pie was busy being shoveled into our mouths.

Blown sugar

Have you ever seen pastry chefs on tv blowing sugar? It looks so simple. You just push the tube into a wad of sugar, pump the bulb, and you have a perfect sphere! Except it doesn't happen like that.

Blown sugar is HARD to do. First, I had trouble getting my sugar into the right shape to start without it cooling too fast, then I couldn't get a good seal around the tube. The ball wouldn't stay smooth and round, either. I had thin spots, and flat spots, and the whole thing made me want to pull my hair out.

So, here are some pictures of the things my classmates & I made. First, our balls and waves, and a vase my teacher made. I made the pink ball, and I think the biggest yellow one is mine, too.

This was the beginning of a fish (I didn't make this.) He doesn't have eyes yet; they will go in the depressions at the front. The blue thing in the background is a ball that deflated while I was cooling it.

Sugar burns

Oh, the blisters! We did pulled sugar last night. Even with 2 pairs of gloves, I burned my thumb and first two fingers as soon as I started working my sugar. Of course, you need your thumb to shape the rose petals and leaves we had to make, so I spent about 2 hours pressing my blistered thumb into a mass of hot sugar, while a heat lamp burned the top of my fingers. I feel like such a wimp.

Here are some of the roses we made.

We did lots of pretty ribbons.

I love this ribbon. I wish I had made it.