Senior year of college, fall semester. The residence hall NW and I lived in hosted a secret-ingredient competition that involved baking. We entered, and drew the ingredient…cream cheese. Both of us hate cream cheese in our desserts, so we were disappointed, to say the least. We only had two hours to come up with the final product, so we quickly scoured the web for something to pull together with our unfavorable ingredient. We came across a recipe for pate a choux, passed over it, and tried to find something else. I mean, French pastry? For the first time, in a competition? It couldn’t turn out well. We almost decided on cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing, but at the last minute decided to go all out with the pate a choux.
We sifted, we mixed, we piped, we flattened out the peaks in the dough with our fingers, we baked…and the dough rose beautifully. There was a gorgeous cavern in the middle of the dough for us to fill with cream cheese pudding that we made. We put the pudding in a Ziploc bag and squeezed it into the dough. We melted chocolate and cream to make a ganache. We threw together a raspberry coulis. We added fresh berries to the plate. And voila!
In the end, we got second place (and never received the Shaws gift card we were promised!) due to having boring plating. The winners made some delicious apple cupcakes with really cute decorations made of caramel pieces, but we still think ours tasted better and took more skill to make. Hopefully we’ll have more competitions like that in the future. Maybe…a throwdown?!
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