The Judge's Table

Today was such a fun day! It was chocolate day, so honestly how can that not be fun?! I ate a ridiculous amount of chocolate today by the way...

Our task today was to finish our petit fours from yesterday by tempering chocolate for dipping. We were encouraged to use our creativity with our decorations and to put together a final plate with our group for the final judging of our petit fours competition!

My group started out by making a truffle ganache for our champagne truffles. Once the ganache was prepared, we had to cool it so that it reached a thick enough consistency to pipe. After piping and cooling the ganache, we rolled each peice and coated it in the tempered chocolate and our choice of topping (cocoa powder, chopped nuts, or cocoa nibs).

We all worked really hard today trying to get as creative as possible and beautifying all of our small treats. The adrenaline was flowing as we worked on a time limit to present our dishes to Chef at exactly 4:30. The final presentations on the "judge's table" is shown above. Every group did such an amazing job! Each group even had a story for the plates, explaining what kind of party or situation the the plate was served in. Here is my group's plate:

Our story: The plate was designed for a large family party. There are a lot of different selections on the plate so that we can hand it off to the wait staff and they can pass around the petit fours to all of the guests. We made sure to really fill the plate because Grandma was coming to the party and she likes to stuff some extra cookies in her purse ;)

Unfortunately, we didn't win.. the plate in the lower left corner won! Chef decided to give us all extra points on our exam because he was really impressed with all of our plates.

I left class with an insane sugar rush and a huge smile on my face. I've really enjoyed class the past couple of week.. I'm loving pastry A LOT more than I expected to!

Just set my alarm for 5:30 am (eek!) ..better get to bed NOW!