The Good Rabbi's Blog

First, I was told that my dessert needed to be seasonal (i.e use seasonal fruits, etc.) and that I had to have at least four components present on the plate, not including fresh berries, fruit, etc. (unless the dessert was a fresh fruit plate of some sort). I've been through enough of these competencies and Iron Chef competitions to know that the secret to doing well on them is to keep it simple. While my classmates were doing more advanced desserts such as lava cakes, sorbets, etc. I decided to go with a standby classic that was modified to have my twist on it. Little did I know that my entire team (each of us were being judged individually) would wind up copying me in one way or another, so what I thought would be unique, wound up being fairly commonplace.

As some of you may remember, my introductory baking & pastry competency was a lavender crème brûlée. I thought that would be a fairly unique dessert and it wound up being quite tasty (it was the only dessert I made in that class that I actually ate). Initially, I was going to use rose water, but I've used rose water before, and I wanted to try something different. Since then, I've started seeing that dessert in cookbooks, on menus at restaurants, etc. It seems that my instructor, who also consults for a number of restaurants in the Bay area, liked the idea so much he passed on the thought to the restaurants here (he told me so), and I'm not so sure how it got into all those cookbooks, even though most of them use a different method than I did.

For my dessert competency in the advanced class, I chose to go with a classic New York cheesecake. The twist is, I brûléed the top of it, so in essence it was a cheesecake crème brûlée. I made a chocolate crumb crust for the cheesecake, and paired it with some chocolate tuile (which is basically a wafer that can be sculpted into different shapes and angles), some strawberry sauce, and some whipped cream. I thought this would be simple, yet elegant and refined.

On production day, I found out that three other people on my team had also decided to do a cheesecake. D'OHH! One of the people that didn't do a cheesecake, did a custard, and brûléed the top of it (D'OHH!). His dessert was a coconut overload (coconut custard on a macaroon, with coconut caramel sauce and coconut sorbet), but what can you expect from a guy that's done two pounds of mushrooms since we started the programme? I also even chose some cool rectangular plates from the restaurant in the school to use, not knowing that everyone else would do the same (double D'OHH!!).

In the end, the chef was late to judge our plates, and since I didn't do a sorbet, ice-cream, or lava cake like some of the others, I was in good shape. I cut the cheesecake (not the cheese) into a round, brûléed the top of it, and put some arced sculpted tuile directly into the side of the round. Using a squeeze bottle, I put the strawberry sauce into a little "squiggle," and at the other side of the plate (the rectangle), I fanned out a fresh strawberry, and placed a quenelle (small little football) of whipped cream on top of it. The result is the plate you see above.

In the end, despite the lack of creativity the rest of my team displayed (except for Ian and Lizzie, who quite frankly, are geniuses in my opinion), I earned very high marks. Simple, classic, seasonal, four components (cheesecake, tuile, sauce work, and whipped cream), and again, quite tasty. Photos of other desserts can be found in the Advanced Baking & Pastry album in my photo gallery.

Coming soon, Recipes! Lots of good stuff!