CREATIVE: Bayview Wairakei Resort pastry chef Induruwage Lakmal Anuradha claimed the title of Pastry Chef of the Year at the New Zealand Hospitality Championships.
CREATIVE: Bayview Wairakei Resort pastry chef Induruwage Lakmal Anuradha claimed the title of Pastry Chef of the Year at the New Zealand Hospitality Championships.
Induruwage Lakmal Anuradha - known as Anu - was going to be a butcher.
But his plans for a career in the butchery trade were shattered when he found working with meat boring. Instead, his artistic talent led him to a different food-related career, this time as a pastry chef.
Now, 14 years later, the Bayview Wairakei Resort pastry chef has just won the title of Pastry Chef of the Year at the New Zealand Hospitality Championships at the Auckland Showgrounds on July 29 and 30.
Anu was awarded a cup plus two golds and a silver medal. Marks were combined to make him the overall winner.
The competition had three challenges: a chocolate showpiece, petits fours (small bite-size desserts), both made ahead of time and transported to the competition, and four plated desserts prepared in front of the judges in just an hour.
Anu's chocolate showpiece was on the theme of New Zealand honey, and he spent hours before the competition painstakingly making chocolate flowers, chocolate honeycombs, chocolate beehives and chocolate bees, which he then transported to Auckland to assemble.
Wairakei Resort executive chef Ajay Zalte said the chocolate showpiece was a work of fine art.
Anu's entry in the petits fours section of the competition.
"It's very technical and he did a lot of curls and small chocolate moulding which needs quite fine hands so it's quite fiddly and took three or four days to put it together."
The petits fours were also prepared beforehand with Anu producing a chocolate marquise, a chocolate raspberry truffle, a a caramel fudge cylinder and a pistachio cheesecake.
The live plated desserts had to incorporate mango, so Anu came up with a dessert consisting of mango cheese delight, chocolate almond crumble, strawberry jelly, Italian meringue, and sugar art and sugar crust components.
Anu, who trained and worked in Sri Lanka and has also worked in Dubai, has been at Bayview Wairakei Resort for two and a half years. He competed in the New Zealand Hospitality Championships in 2015 and won a gold and a silver medal but this year his sights were set on taking the overall title against the 10 other competitors.
In the two months lead-up, Anu practised as much he could, putting in three to four hours a day, mostly in his own time and on his days off.
Ajay, who is a judge at the championships but excused himself from judging the pastry chef category, practiced with him and the taste testing was assigned to hotel and kitchen staff.
"He knew he had to get something on the plate which had the wow factor and his plate looked very nice," Ajay says.
"For a pastry chef it's quite exciting to win that title once in their career because it's such a technical thing. It's like the rugby World Cup of pastry cheffing."
As the hotel's pastry chef Anu is responsible for every sweet thing from the hotel kitchens, from morning tea scones to cakes and desserts, and his favourite projects are fancy cakes.
"You have to be quite creative because every day you can do different things and we can create things and that's what I like."
