Grey Matter Concept

Caramelised banana, frozen raspberry, and white chocolate truffle

Food Preparation/Creation

The longest part of the prep is the caramelisation of the banana pieces. After cutting the banana into small pieces, I rolled them on a bowl of caster sugar and use chopstick to pick it up and put it on the open flame to burn the sugar until it caramelised. And I have to do it one by one. I wish I had a butane flame blower to do this – much much quicker. Then I let them cool before I put them into the verrine.

The rest is really easy. A couple of pieces of raspberry and then the white choc truffle. I had this white choc truffle that my wife made as part of her French Pattisserie class (how convenient). Then I top it up it a mini mint leaves from my herb pot.

That all sound easy, but I did have to assemble the verrine twice. If you’ve dealt with frozen raspberry before, you’ll know that it doesn’t stay frozen too long. Adding on top of that, I was shooting on one the hottest day in Sydney that time (the temperature peaks at 41 degree Celcius that day). So what happened was I did my first verrine fine and beautiful with the truffle pop out a little bit higher than the verrine glass. As I prepare the scene and the props, etc the truffle has sunk to half the height of the verrine glass. The raspberry layer just get squashed as the raspberries reach the room temperature and become really soft. I decided to keep going and finalise my props before I make the second version. Gotta be quick with frozen stuff. That’s one of the hard part in shooting food stuff.

The Shooting

As with the props, I choose to put a cup of black coffee on the background along with a relatively sizeable sugar container. I wanted to convey the dinner mood at the dessert time. The sugar container sort of reinforce the “sweetness” of the dessert – at the same time balanced out by a black coffee, giving a bit of that coffee-bitter taste so that the overal scene is not to “sweet”.

I also deliberately choose black coloured coffee cup so it almost “blends” in with the dark background and doesn’t become distracting. With the big sugar container, I wasn’t quite sure about it initially because I thought it could be distracting because it’s going to look like a big bright blob at the background. But it kinda turned out ok I think. Maybe the neutral colour with some blurred writings on it makes it work. It sort of draw your eye away a bit from the verrine so forcing your eyes to explore the entire frame a bit more instead of just fixated on the verrine glass.

Camera is really at low angle this time to accentuate the height of the verrine. Also, with low angle, the layer is more visible as is, ie not “squashed” because of the high angle perspective. I did play a bit with exposure to make sure that the frozen ice layer on the raspberry is correctly exposed.

I covered the surface with black cloth to create the low key shot. Soft light is positioned at the usual 10 o’clock direction. Big reflector from 4 o’clock direction elevated quite high so it doesn’t produce a reflection on the glass. I also choose to use portrait orientation because I thought it goes better with the shape of the verrine.

Camera settings are 100mm at F5.6 1/4 second at ISO100.

Observation

A bit of reflection of coffee cup on the glass – again I left it as is. A spot highlight appears on the bottom right of the glass, casting a bright spotlight on the dark surface. I find it quite interesting. Obviously it comes from the softbox and get refracted that way. I’m still trying to get my feel on the type of the verrine glass that’s suitable for dessert or savoury. Some says tall verrines are good for savoury whereas low wide verrines are good for dessert. I deliberately make it the otherway around this time. What’s your take?