Pineapple and Cheese on a stick anyone?

It's Friday and there's one week to go before the Diploma Course finishes so it was back up the motorways again this afternoon to fight with the queues of traffic heading west into Wales - why does everyone want to get into Wales, and why always on a Friday?
Today were had the pleasure of Phil and James - preparing canapes for lunch was to be the task, in groups of 4 with a tight deadline of 1pm.  By then our 10 canapes had to be prepared, cooked and plated ready for service.  Before we even started on the canapes we had to prepare scallops, an apple tart tatin, caramel sauce and a saffron foam - the pea puree we could leave until after lunch.
Laura was our gang master or team leader and our team included Jan, Kate and myself - we had to prepare 12 of each of the following canapes, smoked salmon pinwheels, mini puff pastry tarts, sausage and mustard mash, rare beef fillet and mini yorkshire pudings, parmesan biscuits, blue cheese and sesame biscuits, oriental chicken skewers, cheese straws, breadtartlets with med. veg and quails eggs and a toasted rabbit rillette -  a veritable feast.  So after 15 minutes of planning and allocating tasks we set about the slicing and rolling and dicing and marinating, bringing it all together on time!  Admittedly I had some easy jobs to do and I did suggest that as an extra, we could do pineapple and cheese on a cocktail stick - well, they did say let your imagination run wild!

We also had a change of partner today for our scallop work and tart tatin.  Local lady Jo and I teamed up.  Jo lives on Dartmoor and is about to emigrate to New Zealand with her boyfriend and open a cafe in Queenstown.  She is also a single figure handicap golfer so I can get some good tips on my swing path in between cooking!

With lunch over it was back to our scallops and apple tart - the scallops were fried, the pea puree made and the saffron froth frothed all very successfully - howver our tart tatin did cause us s bit of a problem.  When turning it out of the frying pan onto our plate, the pastry came out but the fruit satyed in the pan!  James came to the rescue and with a little butter in the pan, a quick reheat and our tart was in perfect shape.  Raymond Blanc apparently had once told James not to mess around with tart tartin when James made him a parsnip, pear and blue cheese tatin!  Obviously no sense of humour!

Scallops on the menu as a starter - £17.50

The rescued apple tart tatin!

I still have my Burns night speech to write yet for tommorrow but first a gourmet supper of sausages, beans and chips, brown sauce with a chilled glass of Chardonnay!

Looking forward to the final week.........