Halloween Buffet

This past week was tiring. We spent all Monday and Tuesday making and finishing not only our desserts, but also any additional products required for our action stations. And in the middle of this, I was working on another special project which, unfortunately, didn't work and couldn't be included in the buffet. :( On the bright side, we got in specially ordered black chef jackets and paired them with bright orange neck ties. We looked good!

The buffet itself was quite successful! We set up a few tables just at the entrance to the 4Nines cafeteria. When potential customers rounded the corner, a few of us would greet them and draw their attention to the buffet and its plethora of enticing delights.

The chocolate class made us a super awesome chocolate show piece.

Beside the buffet was the ice cream action station. Little hotel pans of ice cream were kept cold by placing them into a block of ice. A pretty cool idea for keeping ice cream nice and cold.

The cotton candy and deep fry station were inside the Marketplace. Despite the success of the buffet, these stations were neglected by the lunch crowd. It was too bad especially because the cotton candy was wound around puff pastry filled with either raspberry jam or cinnamon and sugar. Such a tasty combination!

We only did one buffet but I was beat! I can't imagine doing a buffet every single day like many hotels. I won't say I'll never try working at a hotel, there are lots of different kinds of jobs there afterall, but buffet work is definitely not on the top of my list right now. :P

Oh yes, I never explained what this extra project I was working on was, did I? I was attempting to recreate a dessert from a famous restaurant in Chicago. It is a piece of taffy that is filled with helium, making it float just like a real balloon! You can see a youtube video of the dessert in action here. Unfortunately, I never did get the formula just right and the restaurant never replied to my inquiries. Either way, it was a lot of fun to experiment and I was so happy our Chef was willing to go out and buy us a tank of helium. We don't always get a lot of creative freedom in this program, but when we do, we gotta run with it!

Next up, bread sculptures!

Preparing for the Buffet

This week started out a bit slow, but it definitely picked up.

The secret is a dollop of gooey pecan caramel in the middle

I mentioned before that our class is going to host a dessert buffet. All we knew was that it is going to be Halloween themed. I'm sure I wasn't the only one with lots of ideas racing through her mind. But when Monday rolled around we found out that the Chef had already prepicked all the recipes and that we drew them out of a hat, talk about disappointment! But in industry, you usually don't get to make up your own desserts anyway. My partner and I drew passion fruit curd with coconut tapioca in a test tube. Not really Halloweeny if you ask me. For the four person action station, we drew cotton candy.

Cute holders for our cotton candy

Right away M and I threw out the gelee part of the dessert. Gelee is essentially a jello and we didn't think it would work well in a test tube with a tiny spoon. Instead we replaced it with strawberry poprocks! We found some containers of various sized poprocks and then coated them in strawberry flavoured white chocolate for protection. (Moisture and poprocks makes for sad soggy sugar balls.) M wanted the curd and tapioca to be set at angles and I didn't want to overpower the dessert with poprocks. With those ideas, this is what came out!

The chocolate garnish follows the poprock spiral

It does look more Christmasey than Halloweeny, I have to agree, but no one complained about our colour palate. We may change the poprocks and chocolate garnish to an orange colour for the final product.

Here's a sneak peek at some of the other desserts that will appear on the buffet.

Monte Carlo: layers of chocolate cake, apricot jam, almond and meringue

Milk chocolate popcorn panna cotta with salted caramel and an orange poprock garnish

Awesome pierced tongue black cherry macarons

This is something I've been experimenting with. If I can get it to work, I want to make it a part of our action station.

The dessert buffet will be at lunch time at the 4Nines cafeteria on October 30th. Definitely come check us out if you can! Did I mention there'll be deep fried homemade oreos and deep fried dark chocolate caramels? :P

"We're Not Making Cookies Anymore"

How was everyone's Thanksgiving? I hope it was full of delicious goodies and fun times with those you care about. I didn't have a chance to go home, but my favouritest guy friend (read: boyfriend) and I cooked up a wonderful vegan feast. Yup, we eat vegan at home. My diet currently is 80% vegan, 20% vegetarian. The sneaky 20% mostly comes from treats at school. :P So what did we eat instead of turkey? A lentil walnut loaf! Actually, it wasn't the best dish on our delectable delights. It wasn't bad, but not the tastiest meat-loaf like substitute. Mixing the gravy, stuffing, and roasted garlic mashed potatoes was my favourite. :)

Thanksgiving dinner

The title of this post is actually a quote from one of my Chef's. On our first day back to school, he gave us this huge list of tasks and said "We're not making cookies anymore" which was exactly what the class next to us was making. Fast forward to Special Projects class and we're making cookies, again. Once again, it is all about consistency and perfection. All the cookies had to be the same height and diameter, not too dark, not too light. We had the added "challenge" of packaging them neatly. If the round cookies were too wide, you had to cut them down to size which meant some cookies lost their outer coating of sugar or almonds.

Left to right: Nut shortbread, raspberry linzer, almond sugar cookie, sugar cookie,
fondant dipped lemon, chocolate dipped cherry

Yummy linzer cookies!

We also started making little pumpkin tarts. In the end, it will be a layer of salted chocolate with ganache topped with a pumpkin creameau - a fancy term for pumpkin cream. I haven't tried the creameau yet, but the caramel and ganache were delightful.

Chewy chocolatey deliciousness

In summary, nothing very exciting has happened thus far. The exciting stuff is going to start happening next week. This class is all about setting up a dessert buffet. That means we get to host our own dessert buffet! Each pair makes a dessert for the buffet, and each table of four creates an action station in which we can interact with the customers while making them something scrumptious.

We haven't been assigned our flavours yet, but my partner and I are looking around for inspiration. She loves little silcone moulds and I like poprocks or surprises. The dessert buffet will be Halloween themed so maybe dry ice will make an apperance. :)