Guess what!? I am finally in the plating class and I love it! I have been looking forward to this class since I started. I love presentation and making things look all nice and fancy. We will see by the end of this class, but I think that is what I might want to focus on for my externship...plated desserts. You eat with your eyes first right?! : )
Ok so here are the 3 platings we have done so far! You might be thinking "3? in two weeks?" Yep. Lots of prep work goes into each of these desserts, so it takes some time to get them ready to go. Ok anyway...
This first one is a fancy shmancy creme brulee including a tuile cookie, brandy snap cookie basket filled with fresh fruit, and an almond sugar spear.
So the tuile cookie is the round one with holes in it. It usually doesn't look like that but we don't have the iron that you mold them with and this is what my teacher came up with...so no arguing! Anyway, tuile paste can be made up and refrigerated and the cookies can be bent and molded while they are still warm so they are used for lots of decorations.
The brandy cookies are basically just sugar and fat so they spread a lot and bake out super thin. We cut them in circles right after they came out of the oven and bent them over tablespoons to shape them into bowls.
The almond sugar spears were a bit more difficult...first you stick toothpicks in a bunch of almonds...try it, I dare you! It is near impossible to do without the almond braking! Ugh. Anyway, then you caramelize some sugar, dip the almonds, twirl them around until the cooked sugar is the right consistency, then hang them up. As the sugar drips down you have to trim the spear part with scissors or else it will hit the surface underneath it and curl. Try to picture about 30 students doing this with hot sugar and fickle almonds...it was a pretty stressful day.
This next plating is a napoleon. Now obviously this isn't just your average napoleon. This has orange creme diplomat filling, colored net sugar, chocolate sauce, raspberry sauce, a sugar spear, and fresh fruit!
So, the net sugar is made using isomalt. Apparently isomalt is not actually a type of sugar at all...it is its own thing...but what you do is color the crystals and lay them out on a silicone baking mat. As they bake they get all bubbly and the bubbles pop and leave cool holes in the sheet of melted isomalt. Then you just brake off a piece to use in your plating!
The chocolate and raspberry sauce were both piped using a parchment bag. Pretty easy but spacing is sometimes tricky...I had to do the lines a few times to get them in the right spot and to keep them straight. But I am actually proud to say those circles were the first ones I did! : )
The sugar spear is just piped caramel. Sounds easy right? WRONG. Hot sugar is pretty scary to work with. I may or may not have been shaking a little bit the first time we did this in class. We had our parchment bags all prepared and resting in containers of sugar (to hold them in place and also so if you spill while pouring it won't land on your skin) and I had double layers of gloves on to keep as much heat away from my skin as possible! Oh and sugar starts to caramelize at around about 320 degrees, but by the time you cook it to that nice color it is hotter. Point is, you don't want that crap on your skin! Actually a girl in my class did get it on her hand and got a pretty darn bad 2nd degree burn. Anyway, so we cooked the sugar, poured it in the bag, and piped as fast as we could. It's actually kind of funny because the harder you squeeze the hotter the bag feels in your hand but since you are piping something you can't let go so you end up just laughing and squeeling until you finish! hahahaha...I hated piping sugar at first but I have done it a few times now and feel pretty comfortable with it....it is kind of fun!
This last plating is an apple something. I really don't know what to call it...it is just cooked apples in cinnamon, sugar, and butter inside of a phyllo dough cup. I guess I can just call it an apple phyllo cup maybe? Anyway, this also involves a tuile cookie, sugar swirl, soccle, piped chocolate, caramel sauce, raspberry sauce, spun sugar, and vanilla ice cream.
The tuile cookie was made using a stencil we just cut out of a cake box. Then for the stripe you pipe chocolate tuile paste on top. It is hard to tell in these pictures but the cookie is also wavy...I did that by laying it across 3 dowels right after I took it out of the oven.
The sugar swirl was piped just like the sugar spear you saw above. This was a LOT harder than a spear though! I was pretty dang happy that I got one to look this good! I probably piped out 20 swirls!
The soccle is what the vanilla ice cream is sitting on top of. It is chopped up phyllo dough mixed with butter and cinnamon sugar and pressed into a muffin tin and baked. It actually tastes better than it sounds.
The spun sugar is what the phyllo cup is sitting on top of. You make it by dipping a neat tool thing in your caramelized sugar and draping it across two horizontal spoons. It is hard to explain but it ends up looking like a little nest.
The vanilla ice cream was also made at school. We used creme anglais and heavy cream as the base and just ran it through the ice cream machine. Well, actually, to save time our classmate Tim ran all of our creme anglais through the machine and also scooped it into perfect little ice cream scoops for us!
The infamous piped "A"...this was so funny for some reason the day of our practical. You would see people attempt to pipe out the fancy "A", groan, then immediately walk to the sink to wash off their plate. I am pretty sure some people piped their "A" over 20 times. I think that this one was my 7th "A" and I didn't want to do it again so I just went with it!
Alrighty, those are our first 3 platings! I have a practical tomorrow on a plated tart tatin so I will post pictures in one week of that. And be prepared to see a really awesome plated dessert week 6 because we all have to come up with a creative plating for our final and I have started on working on mine already. I am sooooo excited!
