Block 10: Week 2 - Desserts

Dessert station was kinda fun. We made pavlova with berries, sticky toffee pudding, chocolate marquise with caramel espresso ice cream, and lemon souffle pudding.

We also get to make a special each day. My special was the apple pear thing, though for school, I called it a tart, even though it wasn't made in a tart shell. I made individual ones for service, but I ended up with a lot of ingredients leftover, so I made an extra big one for the class. Though it turns out that chef liked the big one better because he thought there was too much crust on the individual ones. But I liked the small ones because the crust is my favourite part. I served it with cinnamon ice cream, which was delicious.

Service was pretty easy, especially after the week on entrees. The desserts are all made in the morning, so when someone orders, it's basically just plating, which doesn't take much time at all. We had a couple of parties come in this week - one had chocolate marquise and the other had the sticky toffee pudding, and both parties went smoothly.

There was quite a bit of frustration this week too. One guy in my group is so hard to work with. The food he makes is SO terrible. He made apple crumble as his special, but he didn't even put butter or sugar into the crumble. He also made two batches of the chocolate marquise this week, both of which were not sellable. Also, since I'm the leader, I don't switch stations on Tuesday with the rest of the group. So my first day on dessert station, I didn't really have all the information that my group did, but the two people I trust in my group were helping at a function and weren't there to show me what they had learned the day before.

Training the new group was also a frustrating day. The people in the group I train are ok, but they don't really work together as a group at all. They are also a bit lazy. So I spent most of my day working with them, trying to get them up to speed on all things entree, and any free time I had, I had to try to pop over to the dessert station to find out as much as I could. We went out for some drinks after school and I think it's the last time we're going to Malones. A couple of us also went and saw Gnomeo and Juliet.

Friday, A and I went to 131 for G's birthday. I haven't been there much this year, so it was a bit awkward going there. But it got much more awkward when they essentially asked us to leave because they had another reservation coming in. One of G's friends took exception to this and went on a rampage, demanding that they pay our bill. I hate confrontation to begin with, and this one was worse because I'm kind of friends with the owner. It wasn't really a pleasant ending to the evening.

On Wednesday, after a reflective lunch at Subway, I had my interview for Hawksworth, the new restaurant I mentioned last week. The chef de cuisine is relatively young and seems pretty awesome. The interview went ok, but I'm not sure I sold myself very well. He's supposed to get back to me next week after contacting my references. Nervous.

Next week - appetizers.