Page 64 of Chef's Kiss at the Chalet
“I’ve also decided to sponsor a contestant this year,” Tom said. “My event space just happened to have a guest chef from Paris this week.”
“What a coincidence,” Mia groaned.
“Two minutes, contestants,” the voice over the loudspeaker warned. “All non-participants, please clear the competition area.”
“Why don’t we make things a little more interesting?” Tom suggested. “A side wager maybe?”
“What’d you have in mind?” Mia said, taking an aggressive stance with her hands on her hips.
“How about if I win, you and your friends attend my grand opening tomorrow?” he suggested.
“And if we win, you leave town forever,” Mia shot back.
“Or, you all have dinner on me. Anywhere you like. My treat.”
Bea and Delilah shrugged. I knew from experience the chef’s tasting menu at the mountaintop restaurant where Charles took me ran upwards of two hundred dollars per person. We could certainly do some damage there.
“Deal,” I said. Because maybe I was selfishly looking forward to going back. And because I knew it meant everything to Mia to put this guy in his place.
“Final warning,” the voice announced. “We are about to begin. Please clear the competition area.”
Mia and Tom shook on it.
“Good luck,” he said, striding away like he’d just swindled us out of our life savings.
“Now you really have to win,” Mia told me, hands on my shoulders. “I can’t spend a whole night around that guy. Don’t let me down.”
“I’ve got this.”
Pastry was my safe space. I could bake with my eyes closed. If you ignored that little altitude hiccup with the croissants. The challenge here would be in the construction. I hadn’t been able to make any test batches before the competition, so I was operating on gut instinct and some online research. The display portion of the gingerbread wouldn’t be eaten, so we were free to make it more functional than delicious. Instead, only certain tasting elements incorporated into the final design would be sampled. Plus, a plated dessert piece that had to be made mostly of gingerbread, but was open to interpretation.
When the horn blew for the start of the six-hour cook, I waved goodbye to the girls and got to work. I started by mixing up several large batches of my gingerbread base. In my stand mixers, I creamed together butter and sugar until fluffy. While those worked, I sifted together my dry ingredients: flour, ginger, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt. Then, to the mixers, I dropped in my eggs and molasses.
“The annual Maplewood Creek Thanksgiving Throwdown is now officially underway, as our ten bakers start whipping up their gingerbread masterpieces. It’ll be a long day of pastry and perspiration here, folks. So, settle in. Grab some cocoa. Get a snack. And cheer on our intrepid contestants.”
I mostly tuned out the announcer’s voice as they periodically bantered with the audience.
Next came the dry ingredients. At several stations I saw explosions of flour shoot into the air in great puffs of white. The audience hollered, reacting to the sudden chaos. I chuckled to myself at their rookie mistake, stopping my mixers before I added the dry ingredients, then starting again on a low setting and placing a towel over the bowls to prevent all the flour from leaping out.
I transferred the first two batches of dough from the mixers to plastic wrap, and formed them into large balls that I put in the blast chiller, while I repeated the process several more times. Once those were cooled, I cleared off some workspace and laid out a large roll of parchment paper sprinkled with flour. There, I rolled out my batter in several cookie sheet-sized slabs, meticulously measuring for identical thickness, and popped them into the preheated ovens at 350 degrees.
As I worked, I glanced down the line at the other contestants. We were all at roughly the same stage in our bake, each of us following a nearly identical game plan to get our construction batches churned out as quickly as possible, with little variation from the classic recipe.
Until I brought out my ring molds.
“Contestant number ten seems to have taken an unusual approach here on the end, folks,” the unseen announcer said. “Doesn’t look like we should expect the typical little brown box from this chef.”
Spectators began to gather around my station, whispering in curiosity as they watched me cut my rolled batter into long, tall strips, then form those around the outside of the upright ring molds. Several of those went on another set of cookie sheets and into the oven, molds included.
“Five hours remain of this baking battle, and we are still just getting started,” the announcer’s voice noted.
That was the first hour gone.
While my initial batches of baked gingerbread slabs cooled, I began on a few augmented batches. My plan was to play with different ingredients to produce a batter in varying shades, from blond to a deep chocolate brown. These would be accent pieces and didn’t need to be as sturdy, so I was less concerned about how the differing formulations would affect the stability.
After yet more batches of gingerbread went into the ovens, I shifted my focus to the fun bit—the decor. That meant getting saucepans heated on the convection burners to prepare my glass candy. I added white granulated sugar to water, along with corn syrup, a pinch of cream of tartar, and food coloring to produce various beautiful shades of blue, red, green, and yellow. When the mixtures were heated to 300 degrees and had a liquid consistency, I poured each color into various molds positioned on silicone mats that were then set aside to cool and harden.
“And just like that, two hours have flown by,” the announcer roared. “If you’ve been with us from the start, it’s probably time to stroll on over to some of our sponsor booths for some holiday giveaways. There are games for the kids and lots of fun holiday swag, too. And if you’re just joining us, I’d love if someone could scrounge me up one of those funnel cakes I see everyone eating.”
