The Season Finale of Top Chef: Just Desserts featured the final three chefs in a Meilleurs Ouvriers de France style competition.
Each chef had to create five delectable culinary delights:
- The Showpiece: A towering chocolate or sugar-based (edible) centerpiece.
- Entremet Cake: A multilayered mousse cake, the entremet should have layers that are evenly spaced. But the pastry chef doesn't know for sure how the cake comes out until it is cut.
- Savory Bread: Basically, a non-sweet bread. No pumpkin or banana bread here.
- Bonbons: Bonbons are chocolate coated bites of flavor.
- A Plated Desert: This desert had to be inspired by a loved one.
As a surprise twist three famous French dessert chefs (Jacques Torres, Sebastien Cannone and Stephane Treand) showed up to give the Top Chef finalists advice and assistance. There was a great moment when the Top Chef competitors realized that one of these world-class celebrity chefs was washing their dishes! Delicious surreal role-reversal.
On the second day the French chefs are gone, replaced by eliminated chefs from earlier in the Top Chef Just Desserts season. Sally Camacho chose fourth place Orlando Santos as her sous chef and immediately put him to work assembling her showpiece--a decision that may have cost her the win. But Camacho knew Santos was more accomplished in that area, and she had to remake her entremet cake when something went wrong.
Meanwhile Matthew Petersen threw caution to the wind, creating dishes he had never done before, and making his showpiece out of sugar rather than chocolate. Chris Hanmer crafted an intriguing industrial showcase but had a piece slide off right before the judges came by.
All the chefs got positive feedback from the celebrity chefs and judges, but it became quickly apparent that Petersen had fallen out of contention and it was down to Hanmer and Camacho. In Camacho's favor were her savory bread, the showcase and the technical difficulty of her entremet. Hanmer, on the other hand had the better bonbon and a tastier cake and he had done all the work on the showcase himself.
In the end, Chris Hanmer won out, becoming the reigning dessert chef of Top Chef: Just Desserts Season Two.
