A month ago my fiend and I saw this little poster at school saying that we could participate in a cooking or patisserie competition. We had to give in a recipe to the teachers, the theme of the competiton this year was the "Bicentenario" of Chile so we had to make something tradicional but in the same way different. So here we go looking for tipical Chilean desserts, and we got really into the "Chirimoya Feliz".
"Chirimoya Feliz" is quite simple to make actually, it's only pieces of chirimoya with orange juice. So we had the idea of having 3 different texture in a cup or in culinary words a verrine but still using the same ingredients.
As first semesters we thought, we might as well give in our recipe see how it goes, but we never knew that we were going to be picked. I don't know how many recipes the teachers received but they could only choose 3, we were super excited and nervous at the same time as we were competing with people of 3rd an 4th semester.
Back to the preparation of our dessert. We practised quite a lot to see what would be the best combination for the 3rd layer and finally came to the decision that coffe was a pretty nice combination. We also asked advised to our teacher on the different extures we could apply. As we don't have the same skills as the other students which are more advanced we decided to stay quite simple. Basically the first layer starting from the bottom was a orange and passion fruit jelly, the 2nd a chirimoya compote and finally the last layer was a coffee plavoured merengue.
So here's the final result....
The day of the competition arrived and it was really stressing as when I got to school my partner was just getting out of bed so I had to start preparing everything, but then realised that the school had forgot to buy the Chirimoya which to be honest was the most important ingredient, the only thing they had was chirimoya pulp, they could have gone and bought some from the supermarket but they would have been to hard and with no taste at all so the pulp was better than nothing. The pulp was in fact the only problem we had during the day, we heated it was we would have with the chirimoya flesh but compared with it it was much more runny so we were panicking a little bit, thankfully teh school had called some of the older student which had already left the school to come and help us, which saved our day. The person that helped us even helped us make orange confit which was a new skill for us.
Presenting our dessert to the jury was nerve racking, it is exactly as you can see on TV, thank god we didn't have a Gordon Ramsay in front of us, I would have actually cried... They didn't say much and kept a neutral face.
In the end we got 3rd place but we were proud of ourselves to have come this far and the teacher congratulated us too. Overall it was an awsome expirience and opportunity. Here's a little photo of us when we got our prices and medals :).
