College students set to compete in national Young Pastry Chef finals

Two students at The Manchester College have made it to the final eight of The Chef’s Forum National Young Pastry Chef of the Year competition.

Two students from The Manchester College’s Industry Excellence Academy for Hospitality and Catering have made it through to the finals of a prestigious patisserie competition.

Taylor-Jade Frendo, a Level 3 Technical Patisserie student and Annie Carter, who is on the Level 2 course, are through to the final eight of The Chef’s Forum Young Pastry Chef of the Year competition, seeing off hundreds of entrants across two previous rounds.

They’ll now travel to the Grand Final at West London College on Tuesday 15 June, where they will have four-and-a-half hours to make an entremets, a multi-layered, mousse-based cake.

They will be judged by some of the industry’s biggest names such as Jamie Houghton, President of the UK Pastry Team, Daniel Pearse from The Savoy and Luke Frost of Valrhona Chocolate

To get this far, they had to produce a unique, modern dish that showed off their skills, such as tempered chocolate work. The dish had numerous technical aspects and had to fit withing all the requirements requested by the judges. Hundreds of entrants were then whittled down to just 20 for the semi-finals.

Then, for their place in the Grand Final, Annie and Taylor-Jade had to fully produce the entremets that they plan to make in front of the judges in London.

Annie`s is a strawberry entremets, made up of multiple layers of strawberry japonaise meringue, lemon sponge, strawberry mousse and strawberry jelly, coated in a red mirror glace and decorated with a chocolate ring and strawberries.

Taylor`s entry is a white chocolate, ginger and lime entremets, with layers of ginger sponge, white chocolate mousse and lime jelly on top of a chocolate biscuit base, glaced in a white chocolate ganache and finished with tempered chocolate decoration and candied limes slices.

They also had to submit their reasoning for choosing those dishes, detailed diagrams, costs, recipes, a time plan of their work and working photos. The 20 semi-finalists were then reduced to eight finalists, who will now compete for the title of Young Pastry Chef of the Year.

Mark Cooper, a Patisserie and Confectionary tutor at The Manchester College, who will be travelling to the Grand Final with Taylor and Annie, said: “It’s always good to enter students into competitions as it stretches and challenges them, and gives them an understanding of how the industry looks. It also allows them to meet peers from other colleges and express themselves on a competition stage.

I am proud of what both Taylor and Annie have achieved. They have had to put extra sessions in at College to train and all their hard work is paying off.

"Getting to the finals is a massive bonus and sets a great example of what students can achieve here with us on our courses. With some luck hard work, I am sure that they will do well.”

We wish Taylor-Jade and Annie the best of luck for The Grand Final. You can find out more about The Manchester College’s Industry Excellence Academy for Hospitality & Catering and apply today.