Chocolate Desserts

The focus of last week's classes was chocolate, and we fully executed two desserts. Each dessert contained a component that required the tempering of dark chocolate, so I had a chance to practice a new technique for this process.

The first dessert was a Roasted Strawberry Napoleon. This dessert required us to make slow roasted strawberries, dark chocolate plaques, chocolate shortbread, strawberry gelee, passion fruit cream, and strawberry paper.



This was a complicated dessert in terms of the time required to execute each of the components, so I was a little disappointed that I wasn't overly crazy about the dessert as a whole.

The second dessert was a play on coffee and doughnuts. We made chocolate cake doughnuts and a mocha milkshake, which was plated in a coffee cup. The plating for this dessert required us to pipe chocolate on the plate and then fill in the circles with raspberry sauce. The mocha shake was garnished with chocolate curls and cinnamon meringue sticks, and the entire plate was garnished with raspberries.