Dec. 25-29

New Year's Eve Dinner

On this occasion I had the great opportunity of designing and crafting some speciality desserts for a five course meal at Gillies Restaurant in Blacksburg. The designs featured four different desserts, complete with garnishes, sauces, and decorative sugar-working.

The days leading up to New Year's Eve were spent thinking of ideas about speciality desserts that would have finesse and create excitement for the guests. I was going for shock value and flavors that would be delicious and cohesive.

Dessert 1: Almond Genoise cake

The first idea I had came from a concept I had been working on since early September. I wanted to create a sculptural caramel sugar swirl surrounding a very thin and long rectangular cake. Very early in the semester I began experimenting with the material properties of caramelized sugar at the hard crack candy stage. I took molten sugar and heated it to 300 degrees Fahrenheit and then brushed it over a strip of parchment paper. I allowed it to set up enough to not drip, but not enough to be completely cooled. Then I curled it around a 2 inch diameter PVC pipe. I taped it down to allow it to cool for a minute or two, and then I gently slid it off the pipe and curled the paper off, revealing the sugar swirl.

Once completely cooled, this shape could hold its form for weeks as long as it was placed into an airtight container. I knew this would be a good option for the dinner, because I could make the sugar swirls far in advance and keep them safe until it came time to assemble the final desserts.

While I was thinking about designs for the center, I knew that I wanted to work with almond, because it makes a light and lovely cake flavor, usually tasting moist while not being strong and over-powering. And since this dinner was to take place on New Year's Eve, champagne was definitely going to be a flavor I wanted to incorporate. I decided to make a raspberry and champagne buttercream to be the link that joined the sweet and nutty almond cake.

I wanted the cake to have many thin layers so there was ample opportunity to bring the flavor of the frosting together with the cake. This left me to think about how I could get a very controlled rise on the cake layers beacuse the entire cake had to be no taller than 1 inch in height to allow room for fresh raspberries to rest on top of the cake and still fit inside of the 2 in diameter curl. I chose to use a genoise cake as the only leavening agent would be the whipped egg whites inside the batter and I could very precisely spread out the batter to the exact thickness I wanted without having to level off the cake. In order to keep the moist cake flavor I had envisioned on these very thin layers, I decided to create a syrup to brush on the cake after it came out of the oven.

Here is the final product:

If you want to see the recipes for this dessert check out these links:

Almond Genoise Cake

Raspberry Champagne Buttercream

Almond Sugar Swirl

Dessert 2: Vegan Pistachio Pyramid Cake

This dessert design consisted of

If you want to see the recipes for this dessert check out these links:

Dessert 3: Gluten-Free Honey Pie with Pecan Crust

If you want to see the recipes for this dessert check out these links:

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