Pastry queen Ashleigh ‘devastated’ after MasterChef dessert disaster – but lands on her feet
THIS innocent looking dessert “devastated” Ashleigh Bareham as she was eliminated from MasterChef.
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ELIMINATED in a “devastating” dessert disaster MasterChef’s Ashleigh Bareham is today all smiles after landing her dream job at Om Nom in Melbourne alongside top pastry chef Christy Tania.
It’s a far cry from the tears and heartbreak of the “Passion Flower” dessert elimination (which was shot in March), one of the toughest seen this season. With 12 elements and 31 steps, creator Darren Purchese rated the dish as “9.9 out of 10” in terms of difficulty.
“I think it was definitely 9.9 out of 10 and maybe even a little bit more!” eliminated top eight contestant Bareham told NewsCorp Australia. “I was devastated to go and would have loved to stay but I was actually happy with how I went in the kitchen.
“It could have been much worse!”
Billie McKay barely broke a sweat as she blitzed the competition with an almost perfect recreation of the dish, while the night’s underdog Jessica Arnott struggled throughout before surprising everyone with a great dish.
The decision came down to Matthew Hopcraft and Bareham who were both missing elements including mint oil and spraying colour on their “petals”. But unusually the decision wasn’t based on flavour with Bareham, 24, eliminated because her “flower” failed to open – a key part of the theatre of the dish.
One of the best pastry chefs in the competition, she blamed her departure on accidentally picking up the wrong size mould for the chocolate “collar” that was supposed to melt, allowing the petals to fall.
“In the last few minutes I grabbed the wrong size mould and the petals didn’t sit properly in the collar,” she said. “We’d been blown away when the petals opened when we first saw the dish, so I knew I was in pretty big trouble at that point.
“I was fine to start with, and familiar with all the elements … then you start running out of time, things start going wrong and it turns into a disaster.”
While her mum Trudi’s battle with rheumatoid arthritis had weighed on her mind during other challenges, she said it hadn’t negatively affected her during the final elimination.
“That day I was emotional [about her mother] and feeling homesick but it gave me the drive to keep fighting,” she said.
Bareham says her high points include winning immunity by beating professional pastry chef Jim McDougall and impressing her idol Heston Blumenthal with one of her desserts.
The former childcare worker from Buderim, Queensland, also obviously impressed mentor Christy Tania during the recent Windsor Hotel high tea challenge, because when she approached the dessert expert for work experience, Tania surprised her with a job offer.
Bareham relocated to Melbourne last week to take up a position as a trainee pastry chef and started work on Thursday.
“Christy is lovely, and it’s so amazing to have her there by my side teaching me all these incredible things,” she said. “It’s beyond my wildest dreams of what I could’ve imagined to come out of MasterChef. It’s my dream job.”
The job is the first step in her long term goal of opening a dessert bar with her mum Trudi and sister Georgia – though it probably won’t be in Melbourne.
“Maybe I’ll open it up there [Queensland], I’m missing the sunshine a little bit – it’s cold in Melbourne!”
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