Culinary Demonstration with Emily Ellyn – Epcot International Food & Wine Festival 2014

This Epcot Food & Wine Experience took place on Wednesday, October 22, 2014

This was Walter’s first ever Culinary Demonstration. We expected beef but instead discovered that we were going to get chocolate! Again, the protein was changed but this time it morphed into sweets – wow.

So, Emily Ellyn (from Orlando) is going to be our chef today. We heard while waiting in line that she did a great job at the 3:00 Culinary Demo and we remembered her from Next Food Network Star (we had hoped she’d win) – so we were thinking that Walter would have a good time along with us. I’ll cut the suspense, he did.

When I saw “chocolate tea cake” on the standing board in the Festival Center, I was expecting what we call tea cakes in the South, a sort of sugar cookie. When Nick told me it was real cake (he had gone up to the stage and taken photos while Walter and I got settled) and I saw that there was tea in the cake, I got a bit more intrigued.

The culinary demonstrations always start with the host greeting everyone and the wine representative talking about the wine. John Ekin, the host, happened to ask if anyone has been to any other events at Food & Wine, I said “Tequila Lunch”…. He then asked who had been and how many times. Guess what, we won that contest (ha ha ha)… After that, he just called our table the Tequila Table whenever we had questions and such.

Rosa Regale – well, it seems that everyone just loves this wine. It smells like roses. It’s pretty and pink and sparkling. Honestly, we aren’t that impressed. Walter (the non-drinker) smelled his before turning it over to us to drink – his comment? “Smells like booze”

I got a lot of alcohol and citrus on the nose and Nick said “not much of anything”

It’s said that this wine was enjoyed by Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. The warm days and cool nights in the Piedmont of Italy lead to good acidity and residual sugar. It pairs well with spicy foods and Sharon said that it holds hands with chocolate. John Ekin said that he could actually taste the grapes which is a rare character in wines.

The wine was okay to our palates, not bad, not great either. Walter observed “their glasses are more full than ours!”

Walter observed “Emily’s glass is REALLY full”

Emily’s been cooking since she was three years old. She made scrambled eggs and burnt the hell out of her mom’s countertop when she put the hot pan directly on the counter. She said that she thinks her parents have recently replaced the burnt countertop.

When she was testing the recipe for today, she noticed that she’d forgotten the butter! It was still on the counter and the cake was already in the oven! So she pulled the cake out of the oven, scraped the batter into a bowl and added the butter. Poured it back into the pan and popped it into the oven! Yay! Cake saved. Oops… the butter was for the icing. So the cake came out rather flat – like a brownie – tasted fine but wasn’t what she was going for.

A few interesting tidbits…

• Don’t use bubbly wine or beer in cake, put it on the stove at a very low temperature and stir the bubbles out
• Emily has two masters degrees and is completing her PhD – you go girl!
• Walter ASKED to have his picture made with Emily Ellyn – if you know Walter, you know how strange that is – he really enjoyed her personality and the demonstration
• When we went up to say hello and tell Emily how good her real cake was – she was really friendly and outgoing, I think if we’d have invited her to join us for a margarita, she’d have followed right out of there (she called Nick “Tequila Baby”)

After this demo, I’ll be keeping my eyes open on Emily’s twitter (@Emily_Ellyn) and her webpage (emilyellyn.com) for other appearances that we can attend.