Sunday, June 3, 2012

Not-so-little dessert catering job

A dear church friend had asked me about few weeks ago if I can do catering for her daughter's graduation party.  They wanted to do a dessert buffet and it sounded pretty exciting, so I said "yes!"  ...Except it turned out that they were planning on about 50 people showing up!  Right away, I knew that this was not going to be your ordinary "dessert for 50" kinda thing.  If it was going to be a dessert buffet, it's going to require about 5 (at least 3) kinds of desserts. 
Wow.  Five varieties of desserts for fifty.
She ended up ordering 30 fruit tartlets, 50 eclairs, 50 cream puffs (half vanilla, half strawberry cream), 30 raspberry cheesecake squares, and 60 cookies (three kinds: chocolate chip, snickerdoodles, and sugar).  At first, I wasn't too worried--it was a lot of food, but I can pull it off, I thought.  She wanted it delivered by 4:30PM on Thursday.
I made the cookie dough on Tuesday, portioned them out, and froze them (the trick learned at Les Mads).  I also made and baked the cheesecake crust, and prepared the tart dough and put it in the fridge to chill overnight.
Wednesday was one busy day.  I baked the choux for the eclairs and the cream puffs, and ended up using the entire two batches.  While they were baking, I made double batches of the pastry cream for the tarts and the eclairs.  I was having trouble with the tart shells--they turned out very fragile, and kept breaking one after another.  By the time I finished them, it was 7PM and I still had a cheesecake to bake.  But cheesecake was easy--it was done and in the fridge by midnight.
Thurday morning,  I baked off all the cookies, cut the cheesecake, and made the chocolate glaze for the eclairs.
Around noon, the "fun" began...

I started filling the eclairs.  The choux turned out pretty crisp, but the moisture from the filling will soften them up a bit.  But here, I noticed that I was running low on the pastry cream--and I've yet to fill the tarts!
I started filling the tarts--which didn't require as much filling as eclairs--and to my delight, discovered that I had just enough for everything.  And by 'just enough' I only had about half a cup of the pastry cream leftover.  I glazed all the eclairs and arranged them on a sheet pan, to let the glaze set.  In the meantime...
While Mom was cutting the round choux in half, I whipped the heavy cream, and flavored half of it with strawberry jam.  I piped the filling into the shells--which turned out pretty small, even for a "mini-size".  Next time I'll make them a little bigger...
The whole assembly line.  While I was arranging the fruits on the tarts and snapping photos, Mom was carefully putting each eclairs into baking cups. 

By the time we were done assembling and packaging everything, it was a little past 4:30PM.  Good thing our friends live only two miles away!  We managed to deliver everything safely!

Cream puffs, half with vanilla, half with strawberry whipped cream.


Raspberry swirl cheesecake, cut into 30 squares.

And last, but definitely not the least, 60 assorted cookies (the soft & chewy kind): Chocolate Chip, Snickerdoodle, and Sugar.

*phew*  That was crazy but fun!  ....I doubt I'll do it again though :P

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