Tropical Flavors

I know, I know. I haven't updated my blog in a month. Let's just sum it up by saying that the past four weeks have been exceptionally busy, and when I have been lucky to have some down time, I've chosen to honor the tv junkie side of my personality and veg out in front of the tv rather than post. Have no fear, I have lots to share, so I plan to post a ton of updates over the next few days.

This post takes us back a good month, to my Petit Fours class on March 11. The theme for the day was tropical flavors. For class, we divided the workload. My group worked on Rice Pudding with Roasted Pineapple. We began by roasting the pineapple with light and dark brown sugars, peppercorns, salt, vanilla beans, and dark rum. We then made the rice pudding using arborio rice and coconut. We dipped small slices of pineapple in the leftovers from roasting which we reduced into a thicker sauce. We then dipped this into toasted coconut.



Another group made macadamia toffee sticky bars, which were cut and dipped in dark chocolate:



The last group made mini tarts which had a passion fruit curd with vanilla bean chantilly cream and an assortment of fruits like kiwi, mango, and strawberry.



We then worked with each of the products and created small platters, like we normally do in this class.