Week 24-25: Intro to Plated Desserts

Our first plated dessert unit was only 6 classes long, but boy did it feel like a lifetime. Perhaps one of the units I was most looking forward to, it was almost a complete disaster. I'm now regularly blogging at Food 2, and you can read all about my class's struggles with plated desserts in the Food 2 School series here.

Chocolate Marquise with cherry compote & creme anglaise

Here's all the pictures I took from the unit. Everything we made was as delicious as it looked, if not more. My chef pants grew even tighter over those two weeks (and they're tight to begin with being as they're manufactured inexplicably so that the "elastic" waist is half the circumference of 1 pant leg). For many reasons, I was really happy to leave behind individual desserts for the time being.

Creme Caramel

My favorite items from the unit were probably the pineapple tarte tatin and the creme brulee (which has long been my favorite dessert). Any of the ice creams and sorbets we made were delicious, and I could usually be found covertly (ok, maybe not so covertly) taking additional scoops of them.

Creme Brulee with Pistachio Shortbread

My least favorite was definitely the creme caramel (flan). How can a cousin of creme brulee taste so bad?? For me, when I don't like an item it's usually because of the texture, and creme caramel is the perfect example of this.

Fennel Hazelnut Tart with Fig Ice Cream

To illustrate just how many components go into these desserts, for two of the pictures I identified each of the items on the plate.

Lemon Tart with Basil Creme Anglaise & Berry Sorbet

Milk Marmalade Tart

Manjari Chocolate Tart with Coconut Ice Cream

Banana Macadamia Financier

Pineapple Tarte Tatin with Pineapple Passion Sauce

& Lemon Frozen Yogurt

Spinach and Cheese Jalousie with Bechemel Sauce

Memorial Day Weekend

The first official day of summer isn't until next week, but to me, the start of summer is always Memorial Day Weekend. I went home to the Jersey Shore for MDW and did a lot of baking. I had a couple free days, a few barbeques, and a lot of new recipes I wanted to try out.

First on my agenda was a fondant-covered cake. I've struggled with fondant for a long time now and felt this was a good opportunity to practice being as I had a birthday party barbeque to go to. The cake was a yellow cake (not a good enough recipe to repeat, so I won't include it here) with a chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream (my new favorite type of icing). I used a new fondant sold at Michaels by Duff of Ace of Cakes fame. I LOVE how Michael's is really beefing up their cake decorating aisle. Every time I go in there, there's more and more stuff I want to buy. Anyway, this new fondant tastes a lot better than the usual brand I use, but it's so much more expensive. $20 for 2 lbs whereas I usually pay about $15 for 5 lbs.


I made the bow loops out of sugar paste on floral wire. I'm slowly getting better at working with fondant, but have a longgggg way to go still, and not enough time to practice.

The cheating/bonus tart

I also made a strawberry cream cheese tart. The dough for the tart was a shortbread, which made it very difficult to work with. The recipe makes it sound like you can just roll it out and move it to the tart ring, but as soon as you picked it up, it broke. I found it worked best by pressing it into the tart mold. Once the shell was blind baked and cooled, it was filled with a cream cheese custard. If I made this again, I'd add a little bit of gelatin to the custard to give it a bit more stability. The strawberry compote was pretty straight forward. The recipe makes way more than 1 tart's worth of custard and compote, so my mom had a pre made (store-bought) Oreo pie shell that I just threw the extra custard and compote in that. Not my preferred method, but better than wasting the extra ingredients.

Original Tart

I also made an orange glow chiffon cake. I love chiffon cakes. They sound so retro to me, but they're so moist and delicious. This one was a huge pain in the butt because it stuck in my bundt pan (lessons learned - I should have listened to my mom and sprayed the pan), but well-worth the effort being as I ate it for breakfast for the next 3 days. The recipe didn't have an icing, but I mixed up a really simple glaze with just orange juice and powdered sugar and poured it over the top of the cake. The glaze was pretty thin so you can't really see it in the picture.


I had planned on also making a key lime coconut cheesecake, but as usual, I didn't budget my time very well and being as I also wanted to sleep over that weekend, the cheesecake had to be nixed.