Creating a sweeter world

This was the second week of my plated desserts class. We started the week with a day of production, which usually is making stock items for the bakery such as lemon curd, dough crust, ganache and pastry cream. When all of that work is done or when nothing is needed, we make individual sized pastries such as cookies, tartlets and mini eclairs. Taking advantage of a fully stocked bake shop I made lime curd tartlets with a meringue hat!

I also made these chocolate cups by painting the insides of muffin papers. The chocolate cups were then filled with a Passion Fruit Bavarian Cream, the recipe from my new Tartine cookbook. The cream turned out really well, but I wasn't too happy with the chocolate cup, which was very hard to remove from the paper muffin paper without breaking. Also since the Bavarian cream has gelatin in it, it had to be poured directly into the cups in order to set up. This is a problem because when the chocolate is refrigerated, it starts to weep. It wasn't bad after the first day, but wouldn't last longer after that.

My first independent plated dessert was a dark chocolate pot de creme with mocha-almond biscotti. The day prior to plating the desserts, I made both items and held them, ready to serve for the next day. Both items are shown above prior to entering the oven.

This was the result - Dark Chocolate Pot de Creme with Vanilla Whipped Cream and White Chocolate dipped Mocha-Almond Biscotti. I opted for a minimalist approach to plating this dessert.

This plating was an attempt to use an additional garnish, yet still keeping it simple as well as using a different size plate. Here the additions are the chocolate cigarettes placed in the whipped cream. This worked for me because the cigarettes were placed in the whipped cream. I have a serious aesthetic problem with placing garnishes directly into a molded creme like this pot de creme, so the whipped cream worked as a platform where I could place the garnish. I have found that these molded creams, creme brulee included, are the most difficult to garnish and serve in a nice presentation.

These are several chocolate butterfly garnishes that I made as practice. They would look beautiful on top of a chocolate cake or smaller ones on individual desserts.