Spring Luncheon

Last week we had the opportunity to cater a luncheon for a local book club in Salt Lake. The event was held at a beautiful home near the University of Utah, and the weather cooperated enough to hold the event outside.

We served fresh handmade rolls, a berry-mango salad with chicken, warm corn chowder and our unique double chocolate charlottes.

"You made this?"

As the ladies were arriving they gawked at all the food- especially the charlottes. Some were surprised to learn that we handmade every bit of their food: from fresh rolls that were made that morning in our kitchen (not bought from a store!), to the small butterfly tuiles that garnished the dessert. It was fun to tell these ladies that we don't cut corners on the preparation of our food. We like to serve the very best!

I love everything about this dessert: the patterned cake, the white chocolate ganache, and the butterfly tuile! Beautiful!

We sure had a wonderful time catering your luncheon!

Quintero Wedding: Luncheon

When Lou went to Culinary school at UVU she became the "Momma Hen" to some of her colleges who were in their early 20's; it has all the perks of watching them "grow up" without out the task of actually parenting them. One of them, Sarah, got married last week and we were so glad when she asked us to cater her wedding.

Sarah had the luncheon and reception at the Fox Hollow Golf Course in American Fork. For the luncheon we served handmade chicken fetuccini, multi-grain rolls, asparagus, a fresh green salad and double chocolate charlottes. Everyone loved the food and kept coming back for seconds.

Everything is ready and piping hot for the guests!

We made these charlottes to match Sarah's colors. They were darling!

On the buffet we accented with candles and this cute yellow and orange ribbon

We had two guests who required lactose and gluten free meals. For their dessert we made this cranberry orange sorbet.

The two culinary buddies. Isn't the bride gorgeous?

Congratulations and best wishes to Nick and Sarah!

Charlottes- a work of art

It seems that in the culinary world there is an (un)spoken competition to make the latest and greatest tasty mouthful. Our Charlottes are something we're very proud of.

Take a small glimpse into the making of these impressive desserts:

First, you start with a stencil. With a silpat mat underneath, a layer of pastry decorating paste is spread over the stencil. The stencil is removed, and the pattern stays on the silpat mat.

After freezing the stencil, we made one Jaconde Sponge recipe, which is a thin cake with almond flour. The batter gets spread over the colored pattern and baked for a couple of minutes. After cooling, we turned over the pan and out comes the Jaconde Sponge with a bright pattern.

We have several different stencils and color possibilities so each dessert can be unique

We then trimed the edges of the cake, and measured out strips for our ring molds.

Here we have our cake cut to the right size for our molds.

Before putting in the cake, a very important step is to line the ring molds with acetate strips. This makes it come out of the mold much easier.

We line the molds with the patterened cake. It's an involved process that takes a lot of fine tuning.

After the rings are lined with our patterened cake, we start to fill it up. This Charlotte was a multi-layered cake: we put in our milk chocolate layer first, put it in the freezer to harden, and repeated the process with the white chocolate layer.

After the second layer hardened, we put on a shiny dark chocolate ganache, let it harden, then took the molds off, garnished the top and Voila! a beautiful Charlotte is born.