Caribbean buffet

In pastry this week, we teamed up with another class who works on "real" food and put on a Caribbean themed buffet. All those items that I have talked about in previous posts that I didn't have photos of appeared on this buffet. We had the mango torte:


the caraibe torte, the charlottes, coffee rum parfaits, and chocolate hazelnut marquise:

We also had some eclairs:

and some raspberry mousse:


We also had a flambe station where they made flambe bananas with the ice creams we had prepared and a fry station that was making churros. This is the flambe station:



I was on the sorbet station. We made some fruit skewers with mango, papaya, and pinapple and grilled them ahead of time. We also made some decorative flower cutouts of plantains and grilled them, as well. Then during service they were warmed on a griddle. I did most of the talking during service and it went something like this:

"Would you like some sorbet today?"

"Hmmm...what is it?"

"We start off with an edible meringue cup with a tropical coulis topped with one of our sorbets. You have a choice of coconut, mojito, or mango. Then we top it off with a grilled fruit skewer."

"Mmmmmm...sounds wonderful! I'll try the ______ sorbet."

"Great choice! Enjoy!"

This was our table:



The grilled fruit skewers:


This is the plated sorbet in the edible meringue cup topped with mango sorbet and following that is me posing with the sorbet scoop.




This was a really fun experience and I really enjoyed participating in it. I loved the creativity we were allowed to express during this. We weren't given step by step instructions, just basic guidelines. We had to work together as a team to produce our final product and make decisions on how our table was going to be set up and how we were going to plate our items. I was in a new group this week and she specifically put one student and I together because she thought we would work well in the creativity department. She was right. He was able to finish my thoughts and we were able to just DO instead of hemming and hawing over everything. It was also nice to still be with someone who cared about the end result and professionalism in service. IE- he shook hands with someone and immediately changed his glove.



I have made it through week nine! Only two more weeks to go in this quarter. This next week is mostly review and then the next week are the finals! At this point, I still have an "A" in all three of my classes. Studying will be a huge priority this next week after taking this last week as a breather. I'm ready! I checked out two DVD's from the school library on the different food borne illnesses and will be watching it many times in hopes of cementing them in my head before the ServSafe exam.