February Wine Dinner- Step by Step

Adam hosts frequent Wine Dinners at the restaurant, where he pairs each course with a special wine the compliments the dish. He conceptualized this dessert, and I executed the majority of it, and we worked together on the plating. It's so wonderfully refreshing to have someone else really care about the dessert station and put so much effort into co-creating something wonderful.


We started with a base of my Almond Cake. Adam had an idea of making them into triangles and having them arranged in a certain way. When he attempted to stand the one triangle up, it kept falling over. Easy fix! I cut a notch in the piece that was laying down to make a brace and fit the second piece into it. Teamwork! Ginger Streusel was then placed in the groove between the cakes to make a nonslip, flavorful base for a light Grand Marnier Mousse. The plate was garnished with Blueberry Thyme Glass and Candied Red and Yellow Beet Paint.

Making the Blueberry Thyme glass was a new venture for me. I cooked the sugar syrup to the hard crack stage and added in a blueberry paste I had made previously. I added some blue food coloring to intensify the color, and then poured it out an a silpat and it was sprinkled with Thyme. Adam and I both had visions of a single, dramatic piece of glass sticking up between the slices of cake, but this just didn't happen for two reasons.

First, I poured the sugar a little too thick. Next time I will definitely make it thinner and more delicate. Second, I think if I had actual glass cutting tools, I believe I could make some amazing designs with sugar glass by scoring it and using glass nippers to break away the pieces in an organized fashion.

Because it was so thick, even though I scored it while it was still a little warm, it did not follow the lines when I broke it apart. It instead broke into thick, small chunks. Here is a picture of a chunk held up to the light so you can see the color of it.

I decided to robot coupe some of the glass to get some chunks to sprinkle on the plate. The robot coupe turned it into a powder. Then I decided to use a different attachment on my food processor to see what other texture I could achieve. I loved the slightly larger chunks this produced. It gave the plate a really pretty color profile, as well as a nice texture contrast.

When the dishwasher tasted the glass, he said that it tasted like cotton candy. DING! Oh my goodness, WE HAVE A COTTON CANDY MACHINE!!! I broke it out and used some of the chunks to produce a Blueberry Thyme Cotton Candy! (We ended up using this technique to top a mini cheesecake on a trio a couple weeks later that ended up being a big hit.)

The dessert was an overall success and the guests were, apparently, scraping the paint off the plate.