Top Chef Just Desserts: Week Two

Quickfire Challenge: “When life gives you lemons make lemonade” - Margaret Braun, Pastry Chef, is this weeks Guest Judge. The chefs got 45 Minutes to make an amazing lemon dessert with the winner securing immunity in the elimination challenge

Jillian: I have to admit. I LOVE lemon desserts. I keep collecting lemon bar & lemon meringue pie recipes. My taste buds love the pop of tart and sweet that make you pucker! This challenge sure had my mouth watering!

Sara: I love lemon as well. 45 minutes is really not a lot of time, it seemed as though a lot of people didn’t get the results they wanted. I felt bad for Nelson who barely got his dish together. I was glad Matthew won, I am really starting to like him.

Jillian: I agree with you, I’m glad that we are starting to learn more about the contestants, I think I might actually get to like some people this year, instead of cheering for the lesser of two evils!

Elimination Challenge: To create a cake for 150 guests to celebrate the Disney Concert Hall (by Architect Frank Ghery), with each chef being responsible for 1 tier of the cake.

Teams:
#1 Matthew, Chris, Megan, Melissa
#2 Carlos, Rebecca, Sally
#3 Orlando, Nelson, Craig
#4 Amanda, Katzie, Van

Jillian: Surprise Surprise - Orlando says that “Cakes are my thing, Nelson is more architectural and Craig is the nit wit” - shocker you know he picked Craig hoping if they lost it would be obvious who would get eliminated.

Sara: Orlando is going to get kicked off because of his ego. He may have picked the team but he was not a great leader and was ready to throw a team member under the bus, before the competition even kicked off! Who does that?! I feel like Katzie is getting shafted on her teams so far. I really like her and see more potential then the challenges have allowed for her.

Jillian: Katzie...I don’t know how I feel about her yet, it seems like everyone is prejudiced against her because she works in a restaurant and I guess is relatively new to the dessert world. She seems to have some really nice ideas that are very different than the usual, like with her lemon dessert she made crepes then thinly sliced them into ribbons to resemble pasta and her whole dish looked like something savory while being a delicate dessert.

So back to the Elimination Challenge, which was your favorite/least favorite cake?

Sara: I loved the cake that Chris’s team made. It meshed together well, and looked great. I was not a fan of the cake Orlando’s team made. It was so disjointed! None of it looked like it was made to go together. What you about?

Jillian: I agree about Orlando’s teams cake, there was no unity there, but my least favorite was Amanda, Katzie and Van’s cake, not only was it disjointed but it was just technically sloppy, and it seems the judges and I were on the same wavelength as they sent Van home.

My favorite by far was Chris’s teams cake, as someone who works in the Architecture field and loves cake I thought it was a beautiful representation of the concert hall with the musical notes on the sheets that flowed away from the cake in the cascading pattern similar to the facade of the building. All the layers worked together and it was one cake, not four separate cakes placed together.

Sara: And my favorite moment of the night was a quote by Amanda, “This cake is heavy as a pile of poop.” Can’t wait for next weeks episode!

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