Aluminum Chef

A few weeks ago our class was challenged with an aluminum chef competition. It featured a secret ingredient, and we had 3 ½ hours to make a plated dessert that featured that secret ingredient. We were also given a market basket that included two items that we had to include in our dessert. The competition was called aluminum chef, because we have not graduated to the iron chef level. The secret ingredient was peanuts! My partner and I also had Asian pears and honey in our market basket. Pictured below is the dessert that we made for the aluminum chef challenge. We created a Peanut Butter Ice cream Sandwich with honey poached Asian pears with a honey sauce. The ice cream was made with ground peanuts that had most of their fat removed, we also swirled sweetened peanut butter throughout the ice cream. We made gingersnap cookies for the sandwich. To assemble the sandwich we placed a layer of the honey poached Asian pears on one cookie, and topped it with the ice-cream and another cookie. The peanut butter ice-cream was awesome! We did not win because our dessert was hard to eat with a fork due to the crisp cookies. The dessert would have been more successful if we had plated it to encourage the customer to pick up the ice-cream sandwich and eat it with their hands. We could have done this by standing the sandwich upright or wrapping the sandwich with parchment paper. It was a fun and exciting challenge!