Tasting Journey - Special Edition X

What's Special Edition X? Well, today I attended a dessert making class. It's not exactly trying out new restaurants, but I wanted to blog about it anyway because it still involved tasting food, and to make it even more advanced, learning how to make it!

Today, along with 9 other dessert addicts, we learned to make 4 amazing desserts: tiramisu, panna cotta, flourless chocolate torte, New York cheesecake.  To throw in a bonus, we were also taught how to macerate strawberries into a quick dessert dish.

The instructor, apparently, was an ex-chief of an Italian restaurant located in the Vancouver downtown West-end.  According to the event host, this restaurant makes A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. tiramisu.  Just this dish alone is worth attending the class. The other 3 dishes were all considered added bonus.

As this is not a "formal" cooking class (FYI - rentals for a commercial kitchen classroom costs $600-$800/hr), we were in an old building equipped with ovens and utensils that are probably near my parent's age.  I guess as long as we pack down the techniques, it doesn't really matter how crappy and old the equipment is.  As long as we are able to replicate the dish... as long as...

The class was essentially a demonstration class where the instructor showed us the creation of these dishes step-by-step.  In this short 4-hour session, I continually felt a 懐かしい (click the link if you don't understand Japanese) vibe; a nostalgic reminder of my university days where we spent hours in the laboratory carrying out experiments...It was like being a student all over again, watching the TA demonstrating what to do, and how to properly execute it.

tiramisu

maceration dessert

Being someone who tends to like to improvise (which doesn't usually work in the world of baking), I noted down as much information as my pencil could write.  It has been a long time since I had had to take notes like a student, so I can't really say that my notes were with quality nor whether it included all the necessary details to create the dish.  I guess we will never know until the day, the judgment day, when it comes for me to replicate this dish...

Panna Cotta with topping

flourless chocolate torte

In general, I would say that the 4 dishes all seemed quite straight forward, and has a wide tolerance to variation.  This is merely my analogy from the instructor not calling out exactly how much he added, but rather "more or less", an attitude that I usually carry when I bake (and hence the frequent failure in baking, haha...).  With the magic touch of a chief, the four dishes all turned out quite well.  The only thing was that since most of these required time to set, they did not aesthetically appear presentable.  Nonetheless, the tastes were there, and techniques were learned.