SUCCESS!

My first successful plated dessert! I went for REALLY simple and still used the entire 4 1/2 hours we had to make it. Chef Pam helped me with the plating, but the basic idea was mine. The ice cream isn't in here - this is just the sample plate so that they know how to plate it. But the ice cream definitely turned out - it's very bourbon-y though. Although most people said "It's very nutmeg-y." I thought the bourbon was more overpowering. Either way - it's eggnog, lol.

The chocolate cigars were made by Chef Pam with the chocolate group. When we have chocolate garnishes, you just order them from the chocolate group and they make them for you.

The cookies are just sugared ginger snaps basically. The middle one is dusted with icing sugar.

The snowflake is just a dusting of cocoa powder mixed with icing sugar. I cut out a stencil and dusted using that.

Overall, a very successful dessert! Hopefully people order it!!


And since I blogged about my cheese tasting and my wine tasting I figured I'd better blog about chocolate tasting!! We did chocolate tasting in class - so I HAD to do it. (Totally forced :P )

We tasted only dark chocolate. There are 3 kinds of chocolate - dark chocolate, milk chocolate, and white chocolate. Dark chocolate is made from pure cocoa beans. Milk chocolate has milk solids added and white chocolate is made from just the cocoa butter.

We went from 55% dark chocolate up to 75% dark chocolate. The percentage is the amount of cocoa in it - this means that there's less sugar. I think what made this really interesting was that we were truly TASTING them. Letting them sit on our tongue and melt - moving them around our tongues so that you caught all the flavours. And let me tell you...dark chocolate can be DISGUSTING. Some of them are very fruity - almost like wine in my opinion. Others are sort of smoky. It's really interesting.

Anyway - chocolate tasting was not as great as I had hoped/expected/assumed. But it sure was interesting!!