2011 Christmas Hampers Now Ready To Order

We are now taking pre orders of our fantastic Burch & Purchese hampers for this coming Christmas. The collection of sweet treats make this a truly memorable gift for that special someone! We have two tiers of hamper on offer this year and each one will have a signed certificate from Darren Purchese explaining the contents and a uses for some of the products.

ORDER YOUR CHRISTMAS HAMPERS NOW

email - info@burchandpurchese.com 

phone - 03 9827 7060

or in store - 647 Chapel Street, South Yarra, 3141

AVAILABLE FOR COLLECTION FROM THE 1st OF DECEMBER 2011

Our trademark B&P gift boxes are crammed packed full of our most delicious and decadent creations

THE SWEET STUDIO CHRISTMAS GIFT BOX $120

CITY HONEY HONEYCOMB – 100 g

Try our wonderful homemade honeycomb made with honey from our very own roof top bees.

BURCH & PURCHESE GOLD BULLION BARS – PKT OF 6

Our famous salted caramel encased in dark Spanish chocolate finished with golden lustre

PISTACHIO, LEMON & WHITE CHOCOLATE PERSUADERS – PKT OF 12

The name says it all…this is a deliciously persuasive biscuit.

STRAWBERRY, MINT & WHITE CHOCOLATE RUBBLE – 150 g

Freeze dried strawberry & mint in Spanish white chocolate pieces….Christmas is here.

CANDIED SEEDS, NUTS & COCOA NIBS – 180 g

Delicious to eat on their own…..outstanding with fruit and yoghurt….’off the charts’ in salads

RASPBERRY & DRAMBUIE JAM – 250 g

Last summers raspberries with a generous tipple of Drambuie make the perfect holiday spread

CHRISTMAS PUDDING – 500 g

Our secret recipe pudding is going to turn heads this year

SALTED CARAMEL 250 g

One little jar – one hundred uses! Heat gently for a spectacular caramel sauce, roll through ice cream for an instant sundae or smear between layers of your favorite chocolate cake

CANDIED GINGER & DARK CHOCOLATE BAR – 100 g

Generous chunks of crystallised ginger

THE SWEET STUDIO EXTRAVAGAZA $160

CITY HONEY HONEYCOMB – 100 g

Try our wonderful homemade honeycomb made with honey from our very own roof top bees.

BURCH & PURCHESE GOLD BULLION BARS – PKT OF 6

Our famous salted caramel encased in dark Spanish chocolate finished with golden lustre

PISTACHIO, LEMON & WHITE CHOCOLATE PERSUADERS – PKT OF 12

The name says it all…this is a deliciously persuasive biscuit.

STRAWBERRY, MINT & WHITE CHOCOLATE RUBBLE – 150 g

Freeze dried strawberry & mint in Spanish white chocolate pieces….Christmas is here.

CANDIED SEEDS, NUTS & COCOA NIBS – 180 g

Delicious to eat on their own…..outstanding with fruit and yoghurt….’off the charts’ in salads

POPCORN & HONEYCOMB RUBBLE – 15O g

This scrumptious concoction is bound in milk chocolate…BEWARE it’s wickedly addictive.

RASPBERRY & DRAMBUIE JAM – 250 g

Last summers raspberries with a generous tipple of Drambuie make the perfect holiday spread

SWEET STUDIO BRITTLE – 175 g

Generous slabs od toffee & nut brittle dipped I dark chocolate

CHRISTMAS PUDDING – 500 g

Our secret recipe pudding is going to turn heads this year

SALTED CARAMEL 250 g

One little jar – one hundred uses! Heat gently for a spectacular caramel sauce, roll through ice cream for an instant sundae or smear between layers of your favorite chocolate cake

CANDIED GINGER & DARK CHOCOLATE BAR – 100 g

Generous chunks of crystallised ginger

SWEET STUDIO LOLLIPOPS x 2

White & dark chocolate lollipops studded with surprises

Darren Takes Part In Masterchef/Second Bite Dinner

Darren with George, Matt, Gary and the Victorian Premier Hon. Ted Baillieu

Darren's dessert

Visit www.secondbite.org for more info

Presenting the dessert course

85% of the dessert course was food saved from waste

All guests took away a gift from Sweet Studio

Main course is served

The menu

I was very flattered to be asked to take part in a prestigious fundraising dinner last month for a charity called Second Bite. Second bite are an organisation that reclaims and receives donations of food destined for landfill and they then pack up and distribute this to organisations that help the less fortunate. You can find out more about Second Bite by clicking here www.secondbite.org/about_us/

The dinner was held at the Sacred Heart mission on Grey St, St.Kilda here in Melbourne. The mission are one of the grateful recipients of perfectly good food donated by the Second Bite team and it provided the perfect setting for this event.

Masterchef Australia's Matt Preston, George Calombaris and Gary Mehigan were on board to take part and they asked of my assistance for the dessert course. The canapés were designed by Matt, the first course cooked by George and his team from The Press Club and main was cooked by Gary Mehigan and his team from Fenix. The brief from Second Bite was to ensure that as much food as possible cooked on the evening was food destined for landfill, this was to highlight the obscene amount of perfectly good food that goes to waste every year. I am happy to say that we filled the brief and a staggering 85% of all of the food served on the night would have gone to waste.

On a personal level, I was extremely impressed with the work that Second Bite do and the work that St.Kilda's Sacred Heart mission do to help those less fortunate than us and I am happy to say that 90% of the food I used in the dessert was saved from Second Bite.

I produced a dessert that seemed to be well received by the guests including the Victorian Premier himself and his charming wife. The dessert was Banana, Caramelised White Chocolate, Avocado, Coffee and Passionfruit. I must say thanks to my chocolate sponsors Chocovic for the generous donation of chocolate that only had two weeks left on the best before date.

The night produced a stunning result for Second Bite and enough money was raised to provide 200,000 meals to the local community. Here at Burch & Purchese we now donate any of our unsold cakes to Second Bite and we are confident that someone deserving appreciates our efforts.

Thanks to the following for helping make the night a success

George, Gary & Matt
Sacred Heart Mission St.Kilda - www.sacredheartmission.org/
Peter Jones Events (especially Eliza) - www.pjse.com.au/
Bright Young Things - www.brightyoungthings.net.au/
Donna Le Page Communications    
Chocovic - www.cocoaalliance.com/
Rachelle Davey Photography

Tickets On Sale Tuesday - Melbourne Food & Wine Festival 2012

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the always brilliant Melbourne Food & Wine Festival in March next year and to coincide with the release of presenters and tickets tomorrow (Tuesday 18th October), we were invited to an intimate gathering of friends. To see what happened and the big surprise given to us click on the video above.

Don't forget to check out the line up for the festival which is released tomorrow and look out for some amazing events from us here at Burch & Purchese Sweet Studio. We can't wait for March 2012 and pretty soon you'll see why!

Visit http://www.melbournefoodandwine.com.au/ tomorrow for more details.

'In The Mix' - New Recipe Book From Thermomix Featuring Darren Purchese

Monday 10th of October was the launch of the highly anticipated new book from Thermomix written by the extremely talented Dani Valent. The book features recipes from some of the best chefs here in Australia and worldwide and we have had a sneak peak and can say it is fantastic.

Here at Sweet Studio we use multiple Thermomix machines daily and could not live without them. To emphasise our continued support with Thermomix Darren Purchese happily contributed a dessert for the book along with an impressive roll call of chefs, food writers and bloggers.

Some of the chefs that have contributed are Melbourne's Ray Capaldi, George Calombaris, Matt Wilkinson and our own B&P manager extraordinaire Cath Claringbold.

International chefs include our Spanish friends Ramon Morato and Paco Roncero, UK chefs Sat Bains & James Petrie and loads more.

To get your hands on a copy it is retailing form $60 and available from www.thermomix.com.au or by calling 1800 004 838

Latest News & Products From Sweet Studio

Our NEW! Spring Racing Carnival 12 Dessert Hamper Pack

We have been working on new eclair flavours

Cocktail size desserts for weddings and other celebrations

Pigging out on your birthday

NEW! Dessert: Avocado, Mint, Cucumber, Apple, Yoghurt & Lime

Our new raspberry eclair

First, apologies for the absence of a post for the last few weeks. It has been very busy at Sweet Studio with lots of massive projects on the go for us.

We have been working on some new flavours for the cake cabinet and taking lots of new orders for the impending wedding season. We have also been working on a fantastic new hamper for Christmas and details will be posted here soon and to our database.

Spring is here! and we are excited by the change in season.  This years Spring Racing Carnival here in Melbourne is such a great festival and to mark the event we have come up with the ultimate accessory to be seen with at the races. Our 12 dessert hamper pack is sure to make the other racegoers green with envy. We are now taking orders for these packs and require just 24 hours notice to have them ready in time for you. Flavours are: banana, caramelised white chocolate & passion fruit; raspberry, lychee, honey & nut; violet, white chocolate, pine nut & lemon and; dark chocolate, pear & hazelnut. Email info@burchandpurchese.com for enquiries or orders.

We have been in talks as well with Melbourne Food & Wine Festival  about a couple of really exciting events during next years highly anticipated 20th Anniversary festival. The details will be revealed next month here and on the Melbourne Food & Wine site and the tickets are also due for release to the public in October.

In all things are going great here on Chapel Street and we hope you can find the time to pop down and try one of our new eclairs or our new creation pictured above, (second from bottom).

Thanks and see you soon.

We now stock Fresh As. retail packs

After so many of our customers have enquired about the availability of freeze dried fruits we are now pleased to announce that we stock a retail range from the excellent Fresh As. We have been using these unique ingredients in our dessert range for some time and find them an amazing addition to our signature textured creations. If you want to try your hand at 'pimping up your pud' then pop down to Chapel Street and we will be happy to help.
Fresh As. http://fresh-as.com/

New Signage

Now you can find us a little more easily! This week we got to work on a more prominent display for our sweet studio after a few comments from new customers that they had trouble locating us. The old facade has been painted over and a more defined logo painted on the exterior. We have also added a huge blade sign which will be lit at night. We are also in talks with the council about some seats for the outside of our store as Spring has now arrived and the days are becoming warmer and lighter. We hope you can stop by sometime, you can find us at 647 Chapel Street, South Yarra 3141.

Burch & Purchese Use The Foodpairing Technology From Belgium

 

This is to follow on from our post of 1st August 2011:  http://burchandpurchese.blogspot.com/2011/08/whats-been-happening-at-sweet-studio.html of the latest news at Sweet Studio and including a bespoke cake design for a client. We have been in dialogue with the creators of the fantastic Foodpairing website in Belgium who posted one of their excellent Foodpairing trees on the flavours chosen for the cake. Foodpairing is a technology created by Bernard Lahousse whereby individual ingredients are subject to scientific testing at Firmenich and the University of Leuven. For more information of the process and thought behind this essential tool for chefs read here http://www.foodpairing.com/en/the-science-behind/. Bernard and his team got to work on compiling a breakdown of one of the ingredients in the cake to test our food pairing ability here at Sweet Studio. We are pleased to say that our ingredient matches were spot on and we also received favourable feedback from our client. We are impressed with the thorough investigation of ingredients from Foodpairing and are currently in talks to use their ingredient database to help with the design of new cakes and desserts for our range as well as using the tool in assisting us design and create special bespoke celebration cakes for our clients. Here at Sweet Studio we are extremely excited by the possibilities of working with Foodpairing and we hope to bring the information closer to our readers in the form of future demonstrations or events to be held here which will showcase the excellent work compiled by our friends in Belgium. Please check out the blog post from Foodpairing here on our Orange, White Chocolate & Gin cake http://foodpairing.blogspot.com/2011/08/foodpairing-view-on-cake-by-burch.html
Keep checking here for updates on our new relationship with Foodpairing and you can view or register for their database here http://foodpairing.com
NOTE: We are working on size integration for interactive Foodpairing trees to be included in this blog but for now please check the very bottom of this blog for an example of an interactive food pairing tree on cooked pumpkin. Have fun creating your own unique dishes/creations.

Reverse 'Fried Egg' Using Polyscience Anti-Griddle

We are having a bit of fun in Sweet Studio this weekend playing with our new Anti-Griddle from Polyscience. We have made a new dessert based on the eggs and bacon idea and it is available this weekend in store. The Anti-Griddle is a cool piece of technology which has a surface which cools to around -30C. It allows us to instantly freeze or chill small quantities of food which is convenient for so many applications it is hard to list. On this occasion we made a Swiss meringue of egg white and sugar and whisked until stiff peaks, we then let the meringue down with a solution of coconut puree, vanilla, ascorbic sugar syrup and fresh lime juice. This mixture was stabilised with gelatine and reserved for use at room temperature. We made a mango curd as per a normal curd recipe but used reduced mango puree for an accentuated flavour. This curd/yolk was piped onto the griddle as in the image and then we poured the coconut lime mixture over the top. What happened was a sort of reverse 'frying' of the egg. The curd hardened and the coconut ran away slightly before setting due to the low temperature. We left it to sit for a minute before sliding it off with a palette knife. The perfect sunny side up! For the dessert special on today and tomorrow we made a vanilla infused custard and soaked toast shape pieces of brioche. This was then fried in clarified butter before being glazed with icing sugar. Once cooled the egg sits on top of the toast and is garnished with our own maple cured bacon and a raspberry & tomato ketchup! As we write this blog, we have had greta interest from this and lots of people have asked about the technique, hence  us compiling this information now. It shows that it is an exciting time to be in the kitchen with so many great technologies being introduced all of the time. This Anti-Griddle is so versatile, we have been using it for chocolate work, mini dessert canapés and now this. If you are in Australia and you want more information on this piece of equipment, you need to contact the official distributor Sous Vide Australia, our contact there is Dale Prentice and he will be happy to help you with your enquiries.

What's Been Happening At Sweet Studio

A specially designed birthday cake with an alcoholic surprise.

Lots of cool birthday cakes commissioned by clients for our team to create.

We stayed on the theme of gin and had a bit of fun with this special in our cake cabinet.

Our new 'Smoked Chocolate, Coffee, Aniseed & Lemon' creation is really popular at the moment and a staff favourite.

We are close to updating our raspberry & champagne dessert - details to follow soon. 

Chef Mazza creates a scary centre piece for a birthday cake.

Lots happening here at the Studio, we have been very busy with lots of cool cake commissions as well as updating a few of our desserts in our large and individual cake range. Chef Mazza created a scary haunted castle centre piece for a child's birthday the other week which seemed to go down a storm.
We have refined and are happy with our coffee, smoked chocolate, aniseed & lemon individual cake and are reworking our raspberry, lychee creation to include more fruit. The top two images are of a fantastic creation for a client who's brief was that the cake should contain alcohol and that it should be orange in appearance. Layers of lemon cream were sandwiched between yoghurt sponge and topped with a gin & tonic jelly. This was all encased in a silky smooth white chocolate & vanilla mousse and sprayed in orange flavoured chocolate. Cool little marshmallows sat on top and once bitten into revealed a soft set gin & tonic jelly. Other projects that are happening here in the studio are: the introduction of new desserts (to follow), working on a special jewellry themed event for a big client, increasing numbers of bespoke cakes commissioned by our wonderful clients/customers and work started on a massive project of which the details will be revealed here very soon. We have also sent out our first newsletter to our database and if you would like to be added then email info@burchandpurchese.com or click here to subscribe http://us2.forward-to-friend1.com/forward?u=12c2f06686378aa052e128bc7&id=530e3f267f&e=af392ad9bd
We will try to keep you updated as regularly as possible and thank you for reading.

Chocolate Lego For "Art Of The Brick"

Really cool exhibits at "Art of the Brick"

Our own giant chocolate blocks (chlocks?) of Lego

Chef Razza spraying away

Set up inside the exhibit - opening night

Lemon & raspberry bricks

These proved to be too popular to keep up with production

T-Rex

Very clever stuff

Aussie icons in Lego too at the Melbourne exhibit

Even Warnie was impressed

New York based artist Nathan Sawaya creates amazing art from the versatile Lego brick. Recently his phenomenal exhibition "Art Of The Brick"came to Melbourne and we were asked to design and create a chocolate Lego installation to mark the events opening.

As a consequence of this event some pieces of chocolate Lego found it's way into our cake cabinet and they proved to be BIG hit with our customers. Well due to production issues (ie. sticking individual jelly pieces on by hand - made us go dizzy!) we are stopping the Lego for now. It WILL return though at some stage and we will let you know when it comes back in the Studio.

For now enjoy the images above and we will endeavour to get the Lego back ASAP, thanks so much to all of those who have enquired and apologies to all of those who missed out.

You can still catch "Art Of The Brick" here in Melbourne though and you should if you can because it is great fun for all the family.

Starlight 5 Chefs Dinner Images 16.06.11

Just a quick post to let you all have a look at some of the images from a very successful and rewarding 5 Chefs Dinner for Starlight Australia last month. Ian and Darren worked hard on impressing the 500 guests in attendance with their dessert "White Chocolate & Vanilla Mousse, Spiced Pineapple Jam and Yoghurt". Huge sums of money were raised for this extremely worthwhile charity and it was a humble experience to help in a small way to improving some lives. We hope to be asked again and applaud the event organisers and the very talented bunch of chefs also in attendance that night. Well done Shane Delia, Frank Camorra, Dan Hunter & Jason Camillo it was great to work with you all.