Celebrity Pastry Week At Villa De Palmar Loreto Slideshow
When anyone mentions Loreto, many people confuse it with Laredo, Texas. Loreto, a city on Mexico's Baja California Peninsula, is a small town with fewer than 15,000 people. Unlike other popular Mexican vacation destinations, the land is undeveloped and uncommercialized. Until recently the city's only international airline service was from Los Angeles on a small Alaska Airlines plane.
Hosted by Jonathan Bennett (known for his roles in the film Mean Girls and Food Network's Cupcake Wars) and featuring celebrity pastry chefs Johnny Iuzzini and Devin Alexander, the trio led a week full of cooking lessons and made exclusive dishes for the extravaganza. Click through the gallery to find out more about the Celebrity Pastry Week!
Each of the celebrity chefs demonstrated how to make mouth-watering desserts during poolside demonstrations. The chefs made exclusive pastries to accompany special dinners at each of the resort's gourmet restaurants, with fun commentary from Jonathan Bennett, who is known for his breakout role in Mean Girls and hosts Cupcake Wars on the Food Network.
Awarded "Pastry Chef of the Year" by the James Beard Foundation, Johnny Iuzzini is a constant fixture on numerous television shows such as Top Chef, Cutthroat Kitchen, and Iron Chef America, to name a few. Iuzzini showed the crowd how to make fresh Mexican churros during his poolside demonstration and even put Jonathan Bennett to the test!
Iuzzini's spin on a Mexican churro was a crowd-favorite. He put host Jonathan Bennett to work and made him assist in the churro making.
Chef Johnny Iuzzini and host Jonathan Bennett pose together with a finished cake at the end of a demonstration. The audience loved the sweets.
Bravo's Top Chef: Just Desserts head judge Johnny Iuzzini made two desserts for an exclusive five-course dinner at the Villa de Palmar Loreto's Danzante Restaurant. His first dessert was a flourless chocolate meringue cake with vanilla ice cream.
One of the other foodie events during Celebrity Pastry Week included a teatime party with chefs Johnny Iuzzini (from Top Chef: Just Desserts) and Devin Alexander (from The Biggest Loser). The chefs filled buffet tables with various delectable desserts.
A photo of one of the many tables of pastries and sweets that Devin Alexander and Johnny Iuzzini made for the event!
Devin Alexander, known from NBC's weight-loss competition The Biggest Loser, prepared a low-fat rich chocolate cake to accompany a three-course dinner at Casa Mia, Villa de Palmar Loreto's Italian-inspired alfresco dining option. Alexander is the author of eight cookbooks, including the New York Times bestselling Biggest Loser Cookbook series, Fast Food Fix, I Can't Believe It's Not Fattening!, and The Most Decadent Diet Ever! The cake tasted like a cross between a chocolate lava cake and a crème brûlée. Called the Chocolate Not Only In Your Dreams Cake, the rich cake had six grams of fiber and was only 200 calories.
Johnny Iuzzini poses with the banana fritters that he made as part of the tea party event during Celebrity Pastry Week. Iuzzini made a handful of pastries, drank tea, and chatted with a room filled with fans.
Chefs Johnny Iuzzini and Devin Alexander goof off after the weeklong foodie festivities at the Villa de Palmar Loreto.
Awarded "Pastry Chef of the Year" by the James Beard Foundation, chef Johnny Iuzzini is a constant fixture on numerous television shows such as Top Chef, Cutthroat Kitchen, and Iron Chef America, to name a few. Last month, Iuzzini launched his own chocolate company. He handles the entire chocolate making process himself, including the sorting, roasting, winnowing, pre-refining, refining, conching, molding and packing by hand.
A list of some of the events that were part of Celebrity Pastry Week! Villa de Palmar Loreto is constantly putting on events for their guests to enjoy. To see the upcoming events they have planned, visit their website.