Le sept – Un voyage dans le temps avec les annual awards of excellence

[The seventh - Time travel with the annual awards of excellence]

There is no way I could phrase the following in a pretty and grammatically-accurate way, so let’s get it out straight away. And please get over my use of exclamation marks.

Because, I have been qualified for the annual awards of excellence !

And I fell asleep yesterday night. And it felt good to sleep for ten hours. Without having to snooze ten times in between six am and 8 am.

In the process of establishing a special connection with my bed, I forgot to publish the post I had planned.

A lovely gift guide. Which will shortly make its way around here over the next few days. Because, right now, we have to discuss about weddings and countryside and rhubarb.

In fact, I thought you might like to have a peek at my application.
It totally feels out-of-season. And possibly is the less Christmassy thing you could ever come across. But I’m too excited not to talk about it.

I called my parents, I called my friends, I called my chef.
So consider this, a call from me to you.

For this country wedding, I wanted the dessert to recall fields of wild flowers and the fresh breeze of a late spring afternoon.

I created it with the location and season in mind. Starting from Yorkshire forced rhubarb – which is cultivated indoors by candlelight and couldn’t feel more appropriate for early April – I built layers that would highlight the beauty of such a delicious product by adding a deeper flavour, and a satisfying range of textures and mouth-feels.

A soft vanilla bavarois is surrounded by a crisp meringue, a stick of bright-pink poached rhubarb, a couple of violet jelly cubes, a quenelle of rhubarb sorbet and some sugar-coated violet flowers; as a free-interpretation of the usually summery Eton mess, eaten when the first strawberries are just starting to grow.

And then, I continued blah-blahing about how each component interacts with the others. But really, let’s hope this dessert brings me luck, because it’s going to be a tight six hours of work with: puff pastry, galette des rois, cheese straws, meringue, poached rhubarb, vanilla bavarois, violet jelly, carrot cake, cream cheese frosting, marzipan carrots, chocolate writing, and more.

Se you tonight for the actual 8th bauble. x