Day 28: Good Day Food Day

Fun day of plating today. We plated our chocolate mousse deserts made yesterday. To compliment the desert, Chef showed us how to work with the sugar to create designs for plating. Chef also showed us how to make caramel and tulle. All of these techniques were options to use in plating our deserts.

For my desert I used sugar work, blueberry coulis, strawberries, and mint leaves. I tend to work free hand when coming up with a design for my plate. Because we started with a sugar work demonstration I decided to start with this method first. I began by drizzling the sugar on to parchment paper making random patterns. I like to use freehand to see what I come up with and work from there. By stretching the sugar I made sugar strings that looked like floss. From this an idea came to me to make little berries with mint leaves on top. This idea came to me because there were no more raspberries left for me to use. I used my hands to shape the berries to their final shape.

What I didn't know at the beginning of the day was that we would be graded on our food technique and plating. The technique included taste and texture of the Genoise cake, chocolate mousse, and coulis. The plating was marked on composition of the pulled sugar designs, placement of chocolate mousse and accompaniments (i.e. coulis, fruit, pulled sugar). I felt that my plate was simple yet pleasing to the eye. In addition to being marked on our work, we were all invited to taste each other's chocolate mousse to get our palates use to different textures. A mousse is suppose to light and airy and melt in your mouth.

After we had eaten our deserts, we made another ~ crepes with flambe bananas.

Crepes are actually very easy to make but also very time consuming. A crepe is a thin version of a pancake. However, in making a crepe you do not add baking powder. I was having a bit of a problem making the crepes ~ swirling the crepe mixture on the pan evenly. Chef came over and gave me a few pointers on how I could do this easily. Chef told me to pour the mixture at the twelve o'clock and swirl it  clockwise to cover the pan evenly and quickly. With a thin layer of batter, it cooks very fast, so you have to move quickly when spreading the mixture. Rolling the crepe came much easier. For the filling we made flambe bananas using butter, honey and some sherry. Sherry is what gave it the flambe (fire). Chef also wanted us to plate our desert using caramel that we had made. To make the caramel, we added cream to the leftover sugar that was used for the sugar work in our chocolate mousse plate.

It was a fun day today with plating and making these delicious deserts. I'm looking forward to more plating and cooking.