When I set it onto the main piece and moved on to work on other tasks, the chocolate flower fell and some of the petals broke off. Near the competition’s last five minutes, I was finishing up the sculpture and was ready to attach the chocolate flower to it. There were things we couldn’t control, like room temperature, which became an issue because chocolate’s quite sensitive. The other thing was that there’s a difference between practising in controlled, comfortable environments in Singapore and executing your ideas in another country, where both the kitchen space and equipment are unfamiliar. I reassured him that things were going well and that we were working on time. One minor challenge was Terence’s age – he’s 23 this year and this is his first competition, an international one at that! He got a bit nervous along the way, which I foresaw. WHAT WERE SOME CHALLENGES YOU FACED WORKING TOGETHER? The entremet and plated dessert went through a similar fine-tuning process, so all of this together took us three months of intensively developing the products we wanted to make before rehearsing for the competition itself. So, a lot of time went into sketching it, sculpting it with chocolate and fine-tuning the angle, the way the genie looked, how it smiled and so on. HOW DID YOU AND YOUR TEAM PREPARE FOR THE COMPETITION?įor the chocolate sculpture, I had to sketch it out into the shape I wanted – which was Genie from the 1992 Disney film, Aladdin. It’s because of all of the support we got from organisations like the Singapore Chefs’ Association and Singapore Pastry Alliance that I’m further humbled by the win, as it wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Only a small percentage of the win is my input, which would be going through rounds of practice and all that. I was humbled and honoured to qualify for it, as well as to represent Singapore and, specifically, ITE. HOW DID YOU FEEL WHEN YOU LEARNED THAT YOU QUALIFIED FOR THE FINALS? Before joining ITE as a lecturer, I started off working in Grand Hyatt Singapore for three years and became an assistant pastry chef at JW Marriott for about two years.Īfter deciding that teaching was my calling, I ventured into the cooking education sector about three to four years ago and have never looked back since. I’ve been in the pastry and baking scene for close to ten years now. TELL US A BIT MORE ABOUT YOURSELF AND HOW YOU GOT HERE.

Cna test genie