Plated Desserts, Berliners and Line-O-Rama

So today I pulled into the parking lot at school and was sitting in my car when one of my classmates pulled up next to me.  As I'm getting out of the car she says, "Do you know why I'm late today? It's your fault..." Now granted, she does usually get there a few minutes before me, but there's still 15 minutes until class starts so I'll bite, "What did I do?"  "I got distracted reading your blog."  Well look at that, I'm officially contributing to the delinquency of my classmates.  Score one for the dark side.

A little while ago we learned out to make truffles and molded chocolates (bon bons!), which I'm sure you'll remember as the incident with my 3rd broken chocolate thermometer *mumble mumble*...
Anyway, before my ridiculous mishap, Julie and I actually made some pretty cool looking chocolates.  These ones make me think of Superman's fortress of solitude.  You know, if it was made out of chocolate and had a white chocolate praline filling...obviously.

More recently we've started learning how to put together plated desserts - what flavors go together, presentation style, etc.  We also have to hand in a menu project by Monday, June 7th, which is essentially us creating our own dessert menu without worrying about cost or product availability.  There has to be at least 5 items on the menu, and each one has to have 4 elements: main, frozen, sauce and garnish.  I have a few ideas so far, but I'm having trouble coming up with a solid theme other than "pirates" - any ideas from the masses?  And by masses, I of course mean the 5 people that read this blog (hi guys!).

So yes, last week we worked on a lot of elements that wound up going into massive plated dessert turnouts for us to serve to the rest of the school.  During the first part of last week, Julie and I wound up making a vanilla bean ice cream, pineapple upside down cake, chocolate doughnuts and decorative tuille cookies.  It was really a lot of fun, and we had a great time playing with everything - especially the cookies.

Pineapple Upside Down Cake

Those are our chocolate glazed doughnuts on the right.  The Chef even told us that they were the best chocolate doughnuts she'd had made by a student team - score for us!  It was especially funny because later that night I was casually mentioning to Dave that we'd made chocolate doughnuts in class and I have to tell you, I've never seen his head swivel so fast!  When he found out that I didn't bring any home he started giving me the lip and the sad face and it was all I could do not to giggle.  I tried explaining that we were supposed to put everything we'd made on the buffet, etc. and how the Chef had said how good they were and he looked at me with a completely straight face and said, "Oh, so Chef Katie gets to try them, huh?  Maybe you should marry her instead!"  Seriously folks - nothing but comedy gold over at the Kelly household.

One of the team made actual "berliners" which if you're either a fan of Eddie Izzard or of German, you'll know it means doughnuts.  I was a little disappointed that Chef Katie didn't tell us a story (knowing how much of a history nut she is) about how when President Kennedy said "Ich bin ein Berliner" he meant to say "I am a Berliner", but what he actually said was, "I am a doughnut."  (Watch the video link from Eddie Izzard's name, you won't be disappointed)

Angry moose cookie

Instructional spoons

This is what you're supposed to say while eating my desserts!

Also, you should be a fan of these guys

Examples of some of the awesome plated desserts

Kiwi sorbet with crepes, a tuille and raspberry sauce

The second half of last week was a bit tumultuous.  A ton of people were out on Thursday, and then about 30 minutes into our class, Chef Katie wound up having to leave because they were readmitting her father to the hospital (p.s. I've heard that they just released him today - hooray for medicine + positive thinking!).  So needless to say, things were a bit nutso at the beginning.  She actually had Julie & I scheduled to work in tandem with another group, making a bunch of petit fours for a platter and individual plates.  This wound up being kind of a funny pairing because as luck would have it, both Julie and one of the girls from the other pairing wound up being 2 of the 5 people out that day.  It all turned out okay in the end though, because Val, the other team member who was there, and I wound up working really well together.  It was actually kind of fun, because there were just two of us and we had two big tables at our disposal so we wound up getting a lot done and had the opportunity to get a little ambitious.  Over the two days (our partners were both there for the second day) we wound up making financiers, mini milano cookies, almond slices, brownie bites, marshmallows and little lemon curd tartlets that were freaking out of this world!  In an effort to not be wasteful, we also took the leftover short dough that we used to make the tart shells, rolled it into logs which we then rolled in cinnamon sugar and then sliced them for more delicious cookies. 

Petit Four Platter

We also wanted to take advantage of our chance to be really creative and decided that I should make some actual plates for our petit fours out of meringue.  These wound up being really cute and we got a lot of compliments from the other students in the school.  Here's a picture of one of our plates with a marshmallow, financier, milano cookies and a tartlet on it:

Who doesn't love an edible plate?

Unfortunately I didn't get a lot of pictures of the other plates, but here's one of some awesome apple strudel with ice cream, caramel decorations and I believe apple chips:

 Another thing that's kind of funny is that it seems as though a lot of my classmates are so sick of dealing with BB that they're actively revolting against her.  Even her new partner, ML, is trying to make nice with everyone else because she finally sees how hard she is to handle now that she's stuck working with her everyday.  I'm convinced that she missed class on Friday for the sole purpose of not having to work with her for one day.  BB somehow managed to convince our substitute teacher on Thursday to let her make chiffon cupcakes.  We kept asking her why she was making them and she just said, "for the class" so we're like uh, they're for us?  Unlikely.  She didn't wind up finishing them until we were finished cleaning up the rest of the kitchen and they didn't look all that appetizing either.  So there we are...everyone else wants to go home, and she just puts them right on the rack along with her dirty pans and walks out of the kitchen!  I'm standing there checking off the end of the day jobs that everyone is responsible for and our sub comes in and is like, "someone has got to clean these pans, where did these cupcakes come from?"  So maybe she didn't really ask if she could make them?  I guess it doesn't matter in the end, I sure as hell wasn't going to clean those pans for her.  I told him whose they were and I guess she must have eventually gone back in and cleaned them up, but I swear I saw her walk back into the building with a cupcake carrier as I was getting ready to leave.  Ridiculous.  It's completely obvious what she was doing...she wanted to make cupcakes for someone else but didn't want to use her own money to buy ingredients so she made them at school, even though she had a lot of other actual assigned work to do, which is evident by the fact that she finished up so late!   Arghh!!!  I just keep reminding myself that in two weeks I won't have to deal with her anymore, and hope that will carry me through till internship time.

Now as promised, here are some classic Mark to BB lines for the end of the day:

- As she's sweeping up the kitchen floor at the end of the day, "Don't mess up that broom, remember it's your ride home."
- As she's unleashing her crazy loud, scary laugh, "BB (actual name removed to protect the insane)! Use your inside cackle!"