Another Day - A Few More Whims

Just posting photos to add to the collection added yesterday. Another day and a few more whims of plated deliciousness as well as three tarts made throughout the day.
Amazing how productive we are some days really !!
Enjoy and thanks for telling all your friends to stop by and sample the tasty treats. Spread the word and when we get 10,000 viewers i will start posting the recipes to go with all this stuff.
Have a delicious day

Chocolate tart with almond sponge, salted white chocolate, pistachio ganache and powdered pomegranate

Almond Chocolate Conceptual dessert

Salted Caramel and Chocolate Streusel tartlet served with Chocolate Fondant and Grau De Cacao Tuille

Almond and Raspberry tart with Vanilla Creme Chiboust

Banoffee Pie/ Tart Banoffee (graham cracker base, caramel creameux, fresh bananas, fresh mascarpone creme chantilly)

Coconut Chiffon Tart

Whims of Fancy - Plated Desserts

For the pastrychef there can be no greater fun than the plated dessert.
Like no time in the past thousand years have we seen such artistry in plated concepts than the past decade thanks to the likes of Heston Blummenthal and Ferran Adria, Pierre Herme and so on. Their philosophies and concepts make us all relook at visions, taste, texture and presentation.
As a close friend, mentor, Executive Chef and fellow food blog enthusiast, Paul Britton stated just yesterday,"I want the picture to reflect the dish, not just be a plate of food".
 Check out his food blog for amazing photos of the savory side of life, truly amazing stuff.   (http://paulbritton.blogspot.com/)

For those of you deciding eventually or not to become pastry chefs, let me tell you what an amazing career it is and secondly tell you that the different types of pastry chefs one can be within a singular trade name is amazing.
There are those who are first and foremost dedicated to training and elevating the trade, they are often career competition entrants or cooking school teachers, lecturers etc.
In the kitchen itself, there are those who work for restaurants and elevate the trade with momentary visions of splendor in the form of Plated desserts. There are Sugar Work specialists, sugar pulled, blown, cast you name it that can work it. There are chocolate specialists, petit four specialists, friandise, petit four sec, sucre, sale, etc etc.
There are you pastry chefs who simply do production in larger factories, pastry chefs for cafes and bistros who do a little of everything and hotel pastry chefs who work the kitchen , the budget and the crew as well.

I have had the pleasure of working almost every level over 30 years. I unashamedely state that I am a production chef. I love the thrill of organising a crew to produce amazing food and love the rush of so many different things being prepared all at the same time. I specialise in multi- tasking , and love it.
In 1980's I started in restaurants making plated desserts, I moved to hotels and eventually became a lecturer and did numerous competitions, Corporate pastry chef, private pastry chef, restaurant, hotel and consultant have all been in the titles on my business cards over the years.

Still to this day I love every aspect of the industry.
Plated desserts though hold a special place in my heart though. I enjoy them and I know they will be enjoyed. 25 years ago I remember putting a piece of rosemary onto a dish as garnish because we had run out of mint. I was summarily reamed out by my Executive Chef for mixing sweet and savoury and for not thinking. Today I adore rosemary in my desserts, perhaps because of that event.

Salted caramel and rosemary tartlet with rosemary and vanilla creme chiboust with a smear of italian meringue

My desserts DO NOT feature the espumas, and the airs, the clouds of aroma and the wafts of hand picked vanilla beans picked on the left side of the highest mountain tops of Kilamanjaro by certified eunics.

Perhaps if I worked in the truly high end restaurants and houses of fine gastronomy they would, but I don't.
As I stated before I am a production pastry chef.
And whilst I know that the airs, gravels and espumas can be done for thousands, I prefer to make simple, taste amazing. Thats the old school in me. I do not suggest that the others aren't fantastic, but I spent years on ships and the majority of what I do now is to try and work out a dish that can be produced in the kitchen foremost and sent to the plating area almost complete. The plating of such dishes should be achievable in under 5 elements. Touch a plate 5 times and times this by 1000 or 2000 plates and you need a lot of hands to complete service. Simple, fast, sexy, is a mantra I subscribe to.
Like I said there are so many different types of pastry chef in the world, and this is me. I like to work nice dishes but make them achievable for thousands in the fastest time frame possible.
We all have our need, space and requirement in this industry, thats what makes Pastry so amazing. We can all do the same trade, have the same skills, yet never work on the same type of projects throughout our career.

Here are yesterdays plated desserts. I wish you could have tasted them !!

Fauborg Pave with Argmanac soaked apricots and apricot, peach, apple, raisin and white vinegar chutney

Spiced chilli chocolate ganache with chocolate fondant, caramel chocolate macaroon, onion ring and chives

Chocolate almond perspective

Caramel Chiffon tartlet with green tea and guava coulis and draped white chocolate lattice

For my friend Jason gavin, the 2011 Plate of ten Chocolates.     Ball of four chocolates(4) (Caramel chocolate mousse, brownie,dark chocolate and glaze) on a carre chocolat with puffed rice(5), three chocolate soils (8)(caramelised white chocolate, chocolate sable and spiced chilli chocolate crush) with a chocolate sauce(9) and grau de cacao tuille(10).

Lychee and Kumaradeen delice with salted white chocolate shards with caramelised white chocolate and acacia honey

MARCH, MARCH, MARCH…. I LOVE MARCH

Wow, what a month. I love March.

First of all thanks to those who have already congratulated me on the big win of the year. And for those who do not know, ARABIAN DREAMS, our teams little book made here in the tiny nation island of Bahrain, had been awarded BEST ARABIC TITLE COOKBOOK IN THE WORLD….. yes IN THE WORLD...by the Gourmand Cookbook Awards at the Cookbook Fair in Paris on March 3rd.

BEST ARABIC TITLE COOKBOOK...........IN THE WORLD

My team are thrilled with the win, for it truly justifies in ourselves anyway the time and effort we spent on testing the recipes, baking for the pictures and most important …EATING.. all the dishes that went into this amazing achievement of a book.

As I have written before, this was book 15 for me, but truly this baby was my proudest. Amazing that when you dream up a concept, believe in it 1000% and then carry it through financially and all, what an amazing labor of love can really create.

Now lets try and find someone who will print ARABIAN DREAMS in ARABIC so the real people we produced this for, can truly enjoy it.

On March 6^th A very dear friend of mine had a birthday and even I must say, I was shocked at the beauty of the birthday gift received.

On March 11^th I’ll be flying to Dubai to appear at the Emirates Literary Festival and signing copies of ARABIAN DREAMS…..did I mention it was also crowned ONE OF THE TOP 57 COOKBOOKS IN THE WORLD.

Following my  showing up and signing copies for avid readers, ( I do pray someone turns up) I’m then off to Paris. My favorite city on the planet, unashamedly from a pastry perspective. I’ll be working during my time there. Firstly being a student myself at the Bellouet Conseil and then visiting my favorite equipment, literary and ingredient haunts and bringing all that goodness back with me.

I’ll be returning at the end of the month , but let me state that On March 27^th I’ll be turning 42 years of age.

Proud 42 year old chef with his teams cookbook ARABIAN DREAMS (wait till you see our next book- if you think this was amazing......)

So you can see why I love March so badly. Its going to be a party month for me.

I’ll be posting photos from Dubai, Paris and of the birthday so please stay tuned and I hope I can tempt you into the kitchen with some of the amazing photos.

Remember people, in the words of Hard Rock café, “LOVE ALL-SERVE ALL”  

Chocolate and Pistachio tart...mmmh mmmh mmmmmmm

CUBE DUBAI...chocolate chocolate and more chocolate...YUM

A Horse is a Horse, Of Course! of Course!

I have come to two conclusions today. The first, that anyone who Blogs on a daily basis, either does it as there primary job, has no job or is independently wealthy. I just don't get the time to BLOG everyday!!
I have stuff to write, dreams to fulfill, a paying job to do! So after just three Blogs, I'm going weekly. lucky I started a Blog and not a newspaper Eh!!
Oh, the second conclusion was that , as expected, I am not a natural artist. My horses head looking still more like a pony than a horse.
Judge for yourself.....

Arabian Horse cake

Anyway, it still looked pretty good and hopefully the recipient thinks so too.

So the other things we made today were some glass desserts using glasses I purchased in September in Thailand and carefully carried home with me in hand luggage. They are gorgeous, like the dessert is floating in mid air, but they are far too fragile to use for hotels or restaurants so we have scrapped the idea of using them commercially.

We used a passionfruit gellee base, a Lemon creme centre and chocolate mousse top. The sweetness of the top layer allows the other two to be more and more tart as you get down to the base. A delicious enlivening taste sensation.

I have also been wanting to use Basil as a major flavor in a dessert for sometime and so the LEMON BASIL DELICE with Passionfruit Glaze was born. The flavor is so pungent that every mouthful combines basil, Tart lemon mousse and passionfruit glaze in every single bite. I knew it would be nice, but actually it was sensational.

When the taste is so spectacular, there is no need for much garnish and so the basil leaf and the dried slice of lemon states exactly what the dish contains and needs nothing else.

Basil Citrus Delice with Passionfruit Glaze

I have lots of writing commitments for the now, so lucky there are not many people watching this blog yet, coz, for the next week its going to go silent. I need to work , cook and write and then I'll tantalise your taste buds yet again.

Next birthday cake scheduled for Feb 24th for a charming little three year old girl. Hello Kitty is the theme so lets hope it looks better than my horse. Of Course! Of Course!

Blogs, Twits, Tweets and G Men. Oh! and delicious pastries.

Amazing what a day can entail.
In 24 hours I have gone from never having blogged, to having learnt to blog to having posted my first blog. I created a gmail account (who knew that admitting only having a hotmail account labelled you as a dinosaur anyway) and I also created a twitter account. Amazing really because when I grew up, G MAIL was stuff received in the post by G MEN ( a term for the FBI) and I remember being told that a Twit was a pregnant gold fish (which it isn't, but I believed it for a decade).
So now Im a Twit, that Tweets.
Old dog, new tricks, proof yet again that the sayings of my mother where wrong.
So today, in the kitchen consisted of a us working on a simple lunch, a dinner and a birthday cake, all just in a days work. None of these desserts will feature in upcoming books we are working on, but some are for future endeavours.
The funny thing about working on cruise ships is that while you are on them, you just want to get off. But after a short time off, you just want back on. I am guessing the same can be said about owning your own business. DIP ME IN CHOCOLATE was a great success in , Vancouver, Canada when I had the business in the late 1990’s. I was eventually glad to get out after working for days weeks and months without a break.
Time heals old wounds and the healing process must be complete, because now I just want to have my own business again. It will this time be based on the cuisine of the Middle East. I am passionate about this region of the world and its cuisine.

Something that may not seem quite so obvious when you see the birthday cake I made today as it took on a French feel. Thankfully if nothing else, the years on cruise ships gave me a template for the Eiffel Tower. Some things you always thank yourself for never throwing away.

Tomorrow we will see if I have the art of the "HORSE" within me.( I wish there was a horse template) Yep I have been asked to do a cake featuring one of the animals and I am scared to the core. The last time I made a horse was during  a lecture in the 90's , it was a margarine carving and it looked more artistic pony than horse. Tomorrow's cake will be under more intense scrutiny so my horse skills better have aged as well as I have. How hard can a horse's head truly be to create? Failing that, I simply won't publish the photo I guess. Time will tell.

The desserts we created today were a Buche Safran, Saffron mousse with Saffron glaze and a core of honey mousse wrapped in Agali Sponge( a traditional Savoy sponge recipe enhanced with rosewater, saffron and “lauwz” or small Arabic almonds). Accompanying in the morning was a Lychee Panna Cotta with Pomegranate Glaze.

Buche Safran

Lychee Panna Cotta with Pomegranate Glaze and Fresh Pomegranate

After lunch we made Pierre Hermes recipe for Plaisir Sucre, a Cube Chocolat , Pistache with its towering display of green (white chocolate) spheres and Abricotine Almondine a delicious combination of chocolate brownie, chocolate creameux, apricots and almond mousse. I wish there had been more to enjoy the deliciousness of the finished products, but what can I say other than , trust me, they were all delicious.

Plaisir Sucre

Pistache 

Cube Chocolat

Abricotine Almondine

Until next time, a Bientot, Au Revoir, and see you soon!!! I wonder what tomorrow will bring us all!!