Page 67 of Chef's Kiss at the Chalet
I opened the door and felt the inside. It wasn’t nearly hot enough. I shook the pan and watched my cream cheese filling jiggle back at me.
“Shit!” I hissed under my breath.
“What’s wrong?” Mia whispered, leaning across the near table.
“My oven wasn’t on. How did that happen? I was pretty sure it was warm when I put the pie in.”
Mia came around to the back of the station and traced the power cord to the surge protector, where two red lights indicated that the breaker had tripped.
“It shut off,” she said. “What now?”
“I don’t have enough time to preheat the oven again and get it baked. It needs every bit of the hour to cool and set up.”
I didn’t have a backup plan for my plated dessert element. It was gingerbread cheesecake or bust.
“I don’t suppose you have any ideas for a dessert you don’t have to bake,” she said.
“Wait!” I laughed to myself. “Duh! That’s exactly it.”
Mia stared at me, confused. “What did I miss?”
“No-bake cheesecake.”
“What’s the difference?” she asked, watching me scurry around my station to see if I had enough remaining ingredients to make a go at another batch.
“Eggs, basically. Take out the eggs and you don’t have to heat any part of it.”
The trick was giving it enough time to set up in the blast chiller instead.
I’d used all my gingersnap cookies in the first crust, but I did have the gingerbread scraps from my construction slabs. Adding some extra sugar, butter, and warming spices, with a bit of orange zest and lemon juice, would revive the crumb into something delicious. Then it was just a matter of mixing up another batch of filling, this time minus the eggs. I’d also need to burn off the alcohol from the rum first.
Mia could only watch as I poured the last of my rum into a pan and lit it on fire. The audience reacted with shouts of awe as they suddenly leaned away from my station.
“Watch out, folks,” the announcer cautioned. “We better keep those fire extinguishers standing by. Things are really heating up in here, huh?”
I popped the rum into the blast chiller for a few minutes while I mixed up the components for my second cheesecake attempt. I then added the rum, mixed the filling a bit more to combine, and applied both my crust and filling to a spring-form pan. That went into the blast chiller, with a fervent, desperate wish for things to work this time.
“How are we doing?” Charles had reappeared at the station.
“Only slightly panicking.” I didn’t have a moment to glance up at him while I rushed to get the final components on the plywood base.
“Where are Bea and Delilah?” he asked.
“No idea.”
Even running around my station, I could sense the palpable tension on the other side of the tables, where Charles and Mia were standing conspicuously far apart.
“Hi, Mia,” he said at one point while I placed a hat on Santa and put little fondant candles in the windows. “Long time no see.”
“Uh-huh,” was her only response.
“This is it, bakers. Get those final touches on there.” The announcer’s voice again broke through the commotion of the crowd. “Make it festive. Make it delicious. This is the final countdown to the end of the Thanksgiving Throwdown.”
In the last few minutes, I didn’t have time to think, only react. This was the most delicate part of the construction so far. I pulled out all of the stabilizing supports to let the structure stand on its own. There were audible gasps and exhales as each of us, every baker down the line, began to pull the training wheels away. I heard more than a few groans and yelps of disaster, which meant someone had just seen their gingerbread dreams dashed, but I couldn’t spare so much as a peek. There was only time enough to stage my showpiece and . . .
“The cheesecake!” Mia yelled frantically.
I grabbed my dessert and tested it with a toothpick. The texture seemed right. Not too firm, but not too soft. I decorated it with piped whipped cream, cranberries, and caramelized orange slices. I set out three plates for the judges, where I would serve the slices when they arrived.
