The end of Daylight Saving time meant an extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning - yay!!! We finally left the room to walk to Epcot at about 9:15, and as we walked out to the boardwalk, who should we see strolling by but the Koma family! They were also going to Epcot, so we all walked together, and heard about their fabulous dinner at Victoria and Albert's the night before.
They went to Test Track while we went to the Festival Center and checked in for our Sweet Sundays session. Deb attended Sweet Sundays about a month ago, and posted her review HERE. She found it a little difficult to face three desserts so early in the day - but I don't have that problem. :-) Sweet Sundays is one of my favorite Food and Wine Events - this is the third year that we've done it. (And I was very happy when they also brought the event to Disney's California Food and Wine Festival earlier this year!)
This event is held in the Chef's Showplace, the same place the Culinary demonstrations take place. In previous years it has been at the former Odyssey restaurant, which I think was a little nicer, but I was pleasantly surprised at how well the event worked here. I was concerned there might be a lot of noise from other things going on in the Festival Center but that was not an issue. At the Odyssey they had used round tables, which actually wasted quite a bit of space - the 18 rectangular tables, each seating six, were a much more efficient use of space.
Pam Smith, the official host of the various Food and Wine events, welcomed us and we toasted with a glass of Martini and Rossi Prosecco. We had water and juice at our place settings, and our servers brought us coffee or tea. Table by table they sent us out to the two breakfast buffet stations that were set up just outside - both stations were identical.
It was called a "light breakfast buffet", but it was quite a bit of food. There was a very nice fruit plate, and then several kinds of breakfast pastries - danishes, chocolate chip muffins and banana nut bread. The best thing, though was the baked sweet potato doughnuts, though they were really more like mini-muffins. Moist and really good.
There were also breakfast potatoes with leeks.
There were two fritattas: four cheese and sun-dried tomato and spinach, and also chicken and apple sausages.
Also French Toast sticks:
They gave us about 30 minutes to eat and then introduced our guest pastry chef: Geraldine Randalsome from Geraldine's Creative Cutters in Ontario, Canada. She was an interesting speaker - rather a wry sense of humor, and apparently she's infamous with her employees for doing things more by intuition than by following a recipe. Which is actually very interesting for a pastry chef - baking is much more chemistry than anything else, and modifying ingredients even slightly can sometimes lead to a baking disaster.
The first thing she made was the Creme Brulee Macaroon. Disney, as they usually do, they had provided the recipes to us so that we could follow along and make notes. First she made the macaroon cookie base. When you think "macaroon" you think "coconut", right??? Wrong...this was made with ground hazelnuts - not a flake of coconut to be found! She and Pam Smith demonstrated how to pipe the batter into circles on a silicon baking sheet. She said that refrigerating the cookies for about 30 minutes before baking produces a lighter cookie.
I should mention - we were seated toward the back of the room, but they had several large flat panel screens on both sides of the room so we could get a closer look at what was going on.
The creme brulee was a typical creme brulee, except that she uses vanilla paste instead of vanilla extract, which gives a much more intense vanilla flavor. The creme brulee was also unmolded on top of the cookie instead of being served in a ramekin - that's quite different. But she assured us that if you use plenty of butter to coat whatever you bake the brulee in that it will come out fine.
The plates were garnished with a chocolate hazelnut syrup, which was yummy. This was Lee's favorite of the three desserts. I liked the macaroon cookie part the best, and those are something I will probably make myself in the future.
The Mango Ginger Cheesecake was next. I have to admit I looked at the title of this one and thought: "Eh", but it ended up being my favorite. It's an unbaked cheesecake made with cream cheese, cream, and mango puree, and thickened with gelatin. Then you split that in half and add melted white chocolate to one half and melted dark chocolate to the other.
The "wow" factor of this dessert is that it was cone shaped, with three layers: the white chocolate mango mousse, the chocolate mango mousse, and a layer of ginger cookie crumbs on the bottom. She did this using a plastic mold, but showed us how it could be done by making cones out of parchment paper.
Oh, they served us a glass of Martini & Rossi Asti Spumante with this one.
By this time she was running very short on time (only 15 minutes left), so the actual demonstration of the third dessert, Cranberry Pecan Tart, was pretty short. This is her improvement on pecan pie, which she doesn't really care for because it's too sweet and gooey. This is still plenty sweet, but adding fresh cranberries does cut the sweetness.
I did not think she was quite as good a teacher as some of the other chefs I've seen at this event - she tended to jump around a lot and was not very methodical, so I found it somewhat hard to follow what she was doing. But I learned a couple of things, and I'm sure I'll be making the macaroons and maybe the cheesecake in the future.
We got out of there a little after noon - the staff quickly got to work as soon as people left the tables because they had to get them ready for the first Culinary/Wine Demonstration of the day, which was at 1:00! And we had tickets for that, also. We needed to get outside and walk around a little bit, though. Lots more people in the park, but still not too bad. It had warmed up a lot, though.
Back at the Festival Center we were seated for the cooking demo by Walter Staib. He's a German chef, but he oversees the City Tavern in Philadelphia, which is owned by the U.S. Government because of its historical significance - apparently Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the like used to hang out there while they were fomenting rebellion. :-) His specialty is using recipes and cooking techniques from the 18th century - though of course the cooking techniques have to be somewhat modernized! He actually has a new PBS series titled A Taste of History which is just starting its run. In it he goes to historic kitchens and cooks with authentic techniques over open hearth fires. He actually prepared a meal in the kitchen at Monticello - the first time that kitchen has been used in about 40 years.
For this demo he made salmon cakes with remoulade - which he had made (and we had sampled) at the Party for the Senses the night before. It was one of our favorites. In the 18th century this was a very economical dish, since it was made with scraps of salmon and stale bread. It was served on a bed of herbed barley - they didn't have ready access to rice in the 18th century, so barley was the starchy grain of choice.
These demos also have a wine pairing with them, though the wine serving is very small - maybe an ounce? With the salmon we had the Louis Jadot Rose. It was really good, but a larger serving would have been even better!
We actually had a couple of hours back in our room before going back to the Festival Center for the next demo. This one started with The Mystery of the Missing Chef. Apparently they were looking for him backstage so that they could get the demo started, and then they discovered that he was sitting out in the audience visiting with guests and didn't realize that they were looking for him! After they found him he came and sat at our table, which was in the front of the room. His name is Christopher Prosperi, and he's the chef at Metro Bis in Simsbury, CT. Really a delightful presenter - kind of silly and irreverent and really a lot of fun.
He was telling us about his addiction to crock pots (he has 9!), and how he was annoyed at how the cord kept getting in the way - so he cut a hole in the table for the cord!!! The men in the audience (Lee included) thought that was a fine idea, while the women agreed with his wife that he had ruined the table.
He also demonstrated the same dish he had made for the Party for the Senses - a shrimp and gazpacho shooter. There's a lot of chopping involved, but he told us that if you don't have sous chefs like he does, then the chopper that you see on infomercials actually works! He used one of his new favorite ingredients in this - tomato vodka. He passed around a small bowl of it so we could smell it - it really does smell like fresh tomatoes!
The small wine sample for this demo was the Biltmore Century White. It was really good and cut the spiciness of the gazpacho.. The bottle is etched and quite lovely in and of itself - I took this picture of the bottle of red wine that they had in the wine shop, which shows the detail a little better.
The next demo was ratatouille - he grilled the vegetables before chopping them. On our table we had noticed a small container of something black that smelled kind of like ash from a fire. This was actually smoked sea salt, and he told us to add just a little bit to the ratatouille. It was really good!
So after Sweet Sundays, the salmon cake, and then the gazpacho and ratatouille you'd think we wouldn't really need to do much Eating Around the World that night, would you? But we did - though we took almost two full laps around World Showcase in the process. But I talked about all of that in Day 4.
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