Make like a banana...

...And SPLIT! Bahahaha.

Never in my life did I imagine that I'd be getting graded on the fanciness of my ice cream sundaes. The one above doesn't seem so impressive to me until I remember that we made everything by hand (three kinds of ice cream, two sauces sauces, whipped cream, candied nuts). I'm sure if J-wu could figure out how to maraschino cherries, we'd be doing that too.

Today we made gelato and fro yo. I decided immediately that I wanted to make mango frozen yogurt with raspberry puree swirled in, but my chef thought this sounded like a disgusting, overly tart combination. Clearly, he does not know that in a previous life, an embarrassing percentage of my paycheck that went directly to Pinkberry (there was one a couple blocks away from my office in NYC). When it comes to trendy frozen yogurt, you see, I'm something of a connoisseur. I ignored his advice and made it anyway.

It. Was. Delicious. I almost bought an ice cream machine on the way home so that I could make it for dinner. We couldn't even get it into the hardening cabinet because the whole class was eating it by the bowlful (including the chef). Alice: 1, Naysayers: 0.

Our gelato was tira misu flavored. Also a hit, but as I'm not a fan of the actual dessert, I didn't think it was so great. Some other groups made a s'mores gelato and a chocolate gelato with peanut butter mixed in. It's really cool to finally have a class where we can get creative! People have such great ideas.

We also spent a bunch of time working on sauces and garnishes. Another cool thing we made is tuiles, which are essentially fortune cookies. It's a really simple cookie dough that you can bend right when it gets out of the oven (that's how they fold the fortunes inside of fortune cookies).

I piped mine with chocolate stripes and curly q'd them around wooden spoons. Pretty nifty, huh?