Making dessert a showstopping centrepiece that guests can interact with provides a real talking point, giving your food the focus it deserves.
The really great thing about puddings is that you can let the imagination run wild and push the boat out – these days our clients expect the food to provide the wow factor and be exceptionally photogenic for all those must have social media moments.
As an award-winning experiential caterer delivering sensational food at glittering bashes from film premieres to high-profile fundraisers, Tonic specialises in creating puddings with real pedigree.
To whet your appetites, here are my top tips for making pud the star of the show:
1. Build a pudding wall
Create impact and drama by building a pudding wall. We have experimented with all kinds of structures to build a wall to satisfy the sweetest tooth but it’s not for the faint hearted.
Considerable investment is needed to make this kind of thing work but we found the most impressive to be a large and colourful perspex structure. Provide plenty of sauces and toppings which guests can dispense from taps to add the interactive aspect.
Sweet treats for the wall could include a variety of miniature puddings such as blueberry cheesecake slices, raspberry macarons, lemon posset pots, iced pistachio sponge or lemon drizzle squares to name but a few.
2. Experiment with flavours
Who says that just because it’s pudding that it has to be sweet? An increasing trend in the catering world is the creation of a subtle mixture of sweet and savoury.
At a recent event held to launch our new brand in the inspirational Wonderlab at The Science Museum, Tonic played with unusual flavours "cooked" on an anti-griddle to freeze these sweet and savoury flavours in lollipop form right in front of the guests.
Flavours that work spectacularly well together include green apple and tuna katsuobushi and Seville orange and salted duck skin.
3. Choose a theme for your food
To really knock their socks off use a season, colour or musical cue to immerse your guests in a carefully designed and orchestrated environment. This worked incredibly well for us at the Science Museum as we explored "The theory of food" and its multiple scientific themes.
Playing with the elements, we created cloud textured whipped coconut custard, as light-as-air, which could be accessorised by our guests with lime, rum and passion fruit atomisers, garnished with flavoured pearls and topped with homemade malted and aerated chocolate.
4. Make pudding an art form
When you want to make pudding the main attraction, what better way to draw attention to it than to make it into a bona fide piece of art. Create a visual spectacular with plenty of colour, layers and height.
But a word of warning – people don’t like artificial colours these days, so make the most of nature’s natural shades to create attention-grabbing sweet treats.
5. Layer
People love contrast and layering creates an unexpected crisp clarity and structure to your dessert.
At the summer party for the Royal Academy of Arts, Tonic took the vibrant shades of summer as inspiration. The summer inspired menu included a verrine stall adorned with highly colourful layered masterpieces, which the chefs took 10 hours to complete.
The carefully designed stall contained little pots of indulgence including coconut panna cotta, lime jelly topped with a mango mousse and a raspberry jelly with a matcha tea custard and pistachio topping.
Alastair Moir is director of experiential caterer Tonic, which will be providing the catering at the Event Awards.