Plating Desserts of the Day

Today, like old times, I mostly looked after the dessert station and a little bit of prep work, and only took care of a few orders on the starter section. I began with preparing the cream for my dessert of the day again – this time putting it into a piping bag instead of using the cream canister, as I would need that for scones and many desserts later. And just in time too, as I quickly got three orders for scones and cream. Then I began working on my next dessert of the day – we were going to serve the lemon tart again until it ran out, then switch over to an apple pie dessert. I made a caramel sauce for it, as chef liked the idea, and it turned out quite nicely. After making sure pastry was all set to go and putting together a family break and girls’ getaway welcome package, I began some prep work for the starter section – cutting up salmon, preparing prawns and crab claws, etc. 

Overall today was not very busy, and orders came in large bursts, and then it would be quiet again. There were more dessert orders than other days of the week, but still not overly busy. It made the afternoon pass more slowly. The head chef said he was going to quiz me on their handbook of procedures, which he must have given me two months ago and had said he would quiz me then, but really he ended up doing more explaining than quizzing. We tried to trace back some chicken we had cooked and cooled here back to the delivery record. Easier when it isn’t the end of a month and all the records had already been filed away. I baked up some scones. Then I began all the cleaning and organizing work – vacpacing items, condensing and cleaning the fridge, labelling, etc. Then I was cleaning down the entire back area of the kitchen, which we do not use at night once we have finished most of the prep work, and one of the cooks got me to wash a bunch of salad even though I was already busy, prep is not supposed to be done after 6:00p.m. according to chef’s orders, I had already cleaned the area, and we already had plenty of salad washed and salad spoils quite quickly. I’m getting kind of tired of doing this cook’s odd prep jobs. 

One of my apple pie platings. Can you guess which one I plated first?

In the evening my dessert of the day lemon tart sold out, and it was time to put the apple pie on. Chef had left the plating design up to me, but had left me with some ideas and wanted to see how it went. It involved a slice of apple pie, a sugar cone, caramel sauce, lime cream, rum and raisin ice cream, crumble, mint leaves, and toasted almonds. I went with one design, and after sending two out, chef told me he didn’t like it at all, that my design was overdone, it was too spaced out, it was too 90’s style, and that aspects of it were retarded and stupid. So for my next plate I went more with his suggestion, and although he had already left, I can say that I did not like the second design as much. Oh well, to each their own. I find this chef to be very picky with his plating and stuff, and changes it all the time but personally I don’t care for a lot of his ideas myself. At 9:00p.m., we shut the gas off and stopped taking orders. However, this means people who just ordered mains can still order desserts when they finish, so I was still doing orders as the others were cleaning. One of the waiters even asked me to make him a sandwich, then told me it was spot on later. So the other two cooks left when they finished cleaning, and I had to wait alone and ask the servers if there were any more dessert orders. My final order came in at 10:10p.m. I didn’t mind this, but I would have waited for the others and helped them, but I was deserted in the kitchen. As I was waiting for the order to come in, I had nothing else to do because all cleaning was done and I could not prep anything at that hour, so I took the trolley where we had thrown all our dirty stuff, and helped organize it for the dishwasher. Technically we are supposed to throw out all our garbage and put our tea towels in the hamper, scrape food into the compost, and only put dishes on the trolley, but we are all guilty of just piling everything up in a hurry, myself included, so I helped out the single dishwasher who was there tonight while I waited. 

Another one of my apple pie platings. Can you guess which one chef really didn't like?