Adventures In Pastry: Daily Dessert
At school we have different stations in the kitchens. Two of them are for restaurant service, and as part of the dessert station you have to design a daily special. For those that don't really care or aren't interested, Chef will tell you what to do or just get you to serve one of the school's desserts.
For my first daily special, I first started with the theme of yuzu and
built upwards using complementing flavours. Yuzu pairs well with green tea, but I didn't want to use matcha. So I decided to go with Jasmine Tea instead, and remembered back to when I had a "Tokyo Fog" latte which was Jasmine Tea instead of Earl Grey Tea. It was a very pleasant drink, so I used that idea and turned it into a Jasmine Tea ice cream!
I wanted to showcase the yuzu in a way that would let it stand out but not be a sauce, so I used the yuzu as a curd element for a pavé as well as integrating yuzu marmalade into the cake layers. Hazelnut was also a good pairing for yuzu, so I used praline grains in the cake and as a crunchy element for the plate.
The Jasmine ice cream was really refreshing, but I also wanted a light and summer theme to the plate, so I added a jelly element based on Jasmine Tea and Lychee. The Lychee also was a part of the supporting elements for the dessert by being a glaze for the cake as well as lychee pieces on the plate. White chocolate tapioca maltodextrin served as a base for the ice cream to sit on.
Overall I felt that the flavour combinations turned out how I wanted them too, though I originally wanted to have a lychee mousse element in the pavé. However, we didn't have any lychee purée available at the time so I had to make do without. The bottom layer for the pavé didn't quite turn out how I thought it would, but at the end of the day it worked out quite well. I really like how the Jasmine Ice Cream turned out, and I think everyone enjoyed it. The lychee and tea jelly was a little too light on the sweet side, so I know in the future to take into account how the chilling really tones down the sweetness.
I think the biggest thing I needed to improve on for this was the presentation. It definitely could have been more refined! I'm hoping to achieve something better for my next dessert!
