Plated Desserts...Ooh La La!

This week's topic was "plated desserts" - i.e., desserts consisting of multiple components that are assembled into lovely layered creations...this is typically the type of "fancy dessert" you might get in a restaurant.  In addition to learning some new recipes and techniques, the big trick for this week was organization and planning - mastering how to get all of the components of each dessert ready and get it plated and presented in a beautiful manner - without something melting or falling apart.  Our chef instructor this week was Chef Richard - one of our favorites - a high-energy Australian who really puts alot of thought and effort into his classes.

We made five different recipes - and each of them consisted of multiple components...so we started the week out making some of the building blocks for our recipes...

mini baba's, soaked in an exotic (passion fruit, mango)  syrup

meringues...

...some of which turned out better than others...

Most of our plated desserts contained some sort of ice cream or sorbet, and, instead of the large ice cream churning machine we had used previously, we learned to use a smaller machine, the PacoJet, which is what you often find in restaurants since it can quickly churn small amounts of many types of ice cream...turning it from a frozen solid mass to a creamy, luscious treat...

By Friday, it was time to start putting it all together...again, the key here is organization - making sure you have all your components ready and prepped for plating.  We organized our work as a class - checking off each component as it was made and turning each of our work tables into a prep station/assembly line for one of the five dishes.

Here's a relatively easy but tasty dessert - Parfait Glace - a marble of frozen vanilla and dark chocolate mousses, frozen in a large square mold, cut into various sizes - each piece is then sandwiched between two thin layers of dark chocolate - garnished with a little more dark chocolate sauce, just for kicks...

 

...kind of like a fancy French Klondike bar...

...good to look at - and good to eat!!

Here's how it worked for one of more complex recipes -  Intense Chocolate.  First we molded chocolate mousse...

...then we coated the molded mousse with rich, dark chocolate....

...and we brought these pieces together with all of the other chocolate components that we had been working on  - molded chocolate shells, a rich chocolate creme, a baked chocolate crumble, mini chocolate financiers and, of course, chocolate sauce for garnishing...

...each of us had to work quickly to put all of these ingredients together...melting, piping, stacking, drizzling...

...until we had our Intense Chocolate creation plated and ready to go!

Intense Chocolate - a light chocolate financier is buried in a rich chocolate cream, topping this is a crunchy chocolate crumble, and then a sphere of chocolate mousse coated with dark chocolate..all of this sits in a bowl of dark chocolate and is garnished with even more chocolate - this is for the serious chocolate lover!

Some of our other desserts were remixes of classic French favorites...

A Baba Exotique - mini baba are soaked in a syrup of passion fruit, pineapple and mango, placed atop mounds of white chocolate/coconut whipped ganache, and then finished off with a mix of fresh pineapple and lime, lime sorbet and a swirl of exotic syrup, for good measure.

A Vacherin Exotique  - swirls of meringue are baked, then filled with a layer of exotic sorbet, a layer of exotic coulis, and then finished off with ribbons of chantilly cream and splashes of more exotic coulis.  As you can see, exotic flavors - mango, passion fruit, pineapple, coconut and banana --  are very popular in France!

This was definitely an exercise in planning - and also a race against the clock - getting our buffet ready before all of the ice creams and sorbets melted was quite the challenge.  Each of us was scurrying around, and, I must admit, there was quite a bit of chocolate sauce and exotic coulis splashed about - but, we made it!! Here's our buffet of plated desserts...Ooh La La!