And the Winner is…Australia!!!!
A new team has finally ended the reign of three time cup champions, Singapore. The Australian team was crowned the 2012 winner of the Asian Pastry Cup at the end of an exciting, tense and emotional two day competition. The teams from Malaysia and Singapore were awarded the second and third prizes respectively as hundreds of supporters cheered them on. New contender to the competition, New Zealand, rounded off the top four teams that will be heading to Lyon, France for the World Pastry Cup in 2013.
It has been a massive two years of planning with 100s of hours of training, but we have done it, with Team Pastry Australia (Jian Yao, Dean Gibson, Damikka Hatharasinghe, Justin Yu and Andre Sandison) placing first and also being given best sugar piece and the media award for best tasting at the 2012 Asian Pastry Cup.
It has been a huge logistical exercise including building a replica competition space, packing it up and freighting 360kgs of specialised and fabricated equipment to Singapore to take on the 11 Asian countries over two days of competition,
The word from the organisers prior to the Cup was that Australia seemed unorganised and were placed outside the top three. Singapore was again favourite to win as it had never been beaten since the competition’s inception in 2004.
As all Australians know however, you never underestimate the under dog. In just 1.5 hours we had unpacked our equipment and set up our comp kitchen – much to everyone’s surprise.
Certainly organization is such a big part of being a competitive team. Both Jian and myself used our 2010 effort and experience to emulate the efficiency of the Singapore team, we knew we would have to be more Singapore than Singapore to be Asian Champions.
And so it came to the competition, over the next eight hours we did encounter some problems such as with the blast freezer, but we had anticipated this and allowed for extra time in our program.
However the most stressful time of the eight hour competition was after seven hours and 35 minutes when the main chocolate explosion on Justin’s piece broke off and smashed on the floor. This was at a time that we had three MOF pastry chefs and most of the international jury watching us and I thought for sure we’d lost our chance to take gold.
True to the form though, both Justin and Andre were able to recover and Justin simply cleaned up the broken chocolate and started to build another, while Andre set up all the fish tanks for the presentation. I can tell you that those professionals were amazed at this recovery. Soon, even more cameras and pastry chefs came over to see Justin finish his piece with just 45 seconds left. After eight hours of competition it came down to under a minute – very cool.
As team coach I am so proud of Justin and Andre, it was amazing to see these boys test themselves at an international standard and even sweeter to hold up that gold on the podium and do what they said could not be done, beat Singapore in Singapore!
We never would have achieved this if it were not for our manager Jain Yao. He has been a mentor for me over the past two years and his drive, personality, integrity and commitment to this team is to be acknowledged. It is this same selfless attitude in Dammika and the rest of the team that has resulted in us becoming a champion team rather than a team of champions.
Team Pastry Australia would like to thank our sponsors for your commitment and support, it has been a great journey and even a better story, you are all part of this historical victory for Australia.
