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.