afternoon of desserts

thanks to those of you who made it out for this - I know the timing wasn't terribly convenient, occurring as it did during the middle of the afternoon, but hopefully the free (and delicious!) desserts were worth it. As some of you may know, the culinary students at my school work in the school's (highly rated, well-reviewed, bargain prix-fixe) restaurant during the last months of their program, gaining real-world experience on the line. For a variety of reasons, that format doesn't work with the pastry program. We have, instead, the "Afternoon of Desserts." Today approximately forty-five of our class' nearest and dearest descended upon the school in two shifts to enjoy the fruits of our dessert-plating labors and give us some experience putting desserts together to order. The menu for the occasion consisted of the frozen desserts we worked on earlier this week, fruit soups we learned how to make this morning, and a creme brulee and bread pudding chosen by students. My partner and I ended up manning the creme brulee station, a situation which greatly pleased my inner pyromaniac. Professional pastry chefs get to use some pretty serious blowtorches.

From what I've seen so far, about 98% of creating a great plated dessert happens before the customer even gets to the restaurant or sees a menu. It's all about planning and preparation. For us, that process began Tuesday with choosing our menu items. Upon drawing creme brulee, my partner and I decided to make a pistachio creme brulee with a chocolate ganache layer on the bottom, accompanied by chocolate cookies on the side. Yesterday we prepared the ganache, lined the creme brulee molds, made the pistachio custard, and baked the creme brulees. This morning we mixed and baked the cookies, selected plates, counted doilies and decided on a presentation.

Creme brulee is usually served in a simple manner, accompanied only by seasonal fruit or a cookie (or three), which made our job relatively easy. Half an hour before our "customers" arrived, we put together our station, assembly-line fashion, working left to right for maximum efficiency. Plates, doilies, a tray of cookies, demerara sugar and our trusty giant blowtorch awaited the first order, a sample plate for our chef. After he sampled it and pronounced it "very nice," we breathed a little easier. Just before service began, we had a short meeting to go over the process of expediting and calling out orders when they came in - one student would get the information from the waiter and pass it onto each station in a call and response fashion. "Ordering - one fruit soup, two panna cotta, zero mint dome, five creme brulee" and so on.

I've been externing in a restaurant, but the pastry team there doesn't do service, so this was my first experience plating desserts to order. I have to confess I had a few butterflies before we started - what if no one orders our dessert, what if I accidentally light myself or something else on fire, etc - but the first shift ironed those out. We posted a respectable five total orders, didn't ignite anything besides the sugar, and got our plates out in fine time.

The second shift, once we'd gotten the hang of it, was more fun. We served seven plates before we ran out of creme brulee, and got to read the comments from our diners. I'm willing to admit that some of the reviewers may have been a bit biased in our favor, but it was still fun to hear what they had to say. My personal favorite was a toss-up between the reviewer who said the description would "need Shakespeare to live up to the wonderful eating experience" and wrote "best creme brulee EVER" under "Additional Comments" and the one who just wrote "Amazing" in every category (at least that's what we think it said). Picture below, but I'm not sure it does the dessert justice - pistachio green doesn't photograph terribly well under institutional flourescent lights and a blanket of caramelized sugar.