- Hi, my name is Gianna and I am 10 years old.
And today, I'm having two chefs
compete to make my dream dish.
(coins clanging) (cash register dings)
(intense music)
- [Katie and Claudette] Hello!
- How are you?
- Good, how are you? - I'm good!
I'm Claudette.
- And I'm Katie.
- Nice to meet you!
- We heard that you like leprechauns.
- I like gold, too!
- 'Atta girl.
(laughter)
- So, what do you think a leprechaun eats?
- Maybe like, little shoe prints,
and like, a rainbow with gold clouds!
- Can you draw what you imagine?
- [Gianna] She's gonna have a rainbow.
- So she's drawing this rainbow,
and I'm now thinking,
"Oh, sugar, sweets, cake,"
and so I'm getting excited.
- Gotta have them gold clouds!
- Them gold clouds.
(laughter)
- It's gotta have some clovers.
Gotta stay healthy.
- [Katie] Right, gotta eat your greens.
- [Claudette] Yeah, greens.
What is that?
- [Katie] It's like a figure 8 clover.
- [Gianna] Nothing ever happened!
- Okay, color it, color it.
Green means vegetables, and this is my chance
to put healthy things on the plate.
- When she started drawing the clovers,
I was like, "This is my wheel house,"
I can cook with green stuff.
And then the bomb drops.
- Do you like vegetables?
- I only like carrots.
That's mostly it.
- Oh, no, she is a picky eater.
- What else would the leprechaun eat besides this?
- Sounds weird, but moss.
[Claudette And Katie] Moss!
- More greens.
She wants clovers, and grass,
but she hates all vegetables.
- Then we're gonna have some footprints.
[Claudette] Footprints?
Is that like, a lot of fiber?
What's a footprint?
What's it made out of?
- It's made out of the bottom of someone's shoe.
- Can you eat a footprint, is my question.
So like, a rubbery texture.
(laughing)
- Gotta have some of them gold coins.
- Apparently the leprechaun had plenty of gold
and was trying to spread the wealth.
- What's your favorite meal of the day?
- Dinner.
- What's your favorite kind of dinner?
What dinners do you like?
- Honey chicken.
- I don't remember being that poise when I was a kid.
- Gianna is super cool.
She is a great artist, she draws so well.
I'm very impressed.
I could not draw that well at age 10.
- So, thank you so much for showing us everything
that your leprechaun would eat.
And, we're super excited.
We'll see where we go from here with your dream dish.
- Thank you!
- I'm excited!
(relaxing music)
- So here's my plan.
I'm going to make a leprechaun landscape.
So I'm going to make the base terrain
a giant sugar cookie.
I'm going to cover the terrain with green
graham cracker moss.
For the shamrocks, I'm gonna make a simple
sugar cookie dyed green.
The footprints are going to be melted dark chocolate.
For the coins, I'm melting white chocolate
and then dusting it with gold dust.
And finally, for the rainbow and the clouds,
I'm making marshmallow from scratch
and dye it all the colors of the rainbow.
- I'm going to go for a fully balanced
leprechaun meal.
- I'm gonna start with a
mossy base of toasted coconut.
For the shamrocks, I'm gonna make green quesadillas.
The gold coins are going to be made of
honey chicken medallions.
I'm gonna spin some sugar into clouds,
and top it off with a fruit rainbow cheesecake.
(upbeat drum music)
- What are you starting with, what are you doing?
- Cookie.
- Cookie?
- I'm gonna go 3D.
- This is all a cookie?
- Yeah!
- Okay, so the whole thing is basically edible.
- [Claudette] Yeah.
- Great, that's really impressive.
(laughter)
- I watched every Top Chef season,
so I'm very familiar with Claudette,
and I'm very intimidated by Claudette.
- I'm just gonna make like a simple sugar cookie.
Creaming the butter and then sugar.
Then I'm moving on to the flour
and tablespoon of vanilla extract.
Crossing my fingers that
what I think it's going to look like
is what it's going to look like.
- I'm doing my crust.
Very simple crust.
We've got 5 graham crackers here.
I'm gonna do it in the food processor
just so it gets really fine and sticks together better.
- So Katie tells me that
she's making a no-bake cheesecake.
I've never had a no-bake cheesecake.
So I was interested, but skeptical.
Now, the no-bake cheesecake.
- Yes.
- Riddle me that, Batman, 'cause I have never
actually made a no-bake cheesecake.
- It's popular on Pintrest.
I do powdered sugar
and some whipped cream,
so that kinda helps stabilize it.
I'm gonna cream this cream cheese,
and then I'm gonna be adding in--
(whirring noise)
So now I've put in powdered sugar
and some vanilla extract
and we're putting in a little sour cream.
- Dough's looking great,
now I need to free-form it into my terrain
with peaks and valleys.
Make it mountain-esque.
- I am a little concerned that this is not gonna set
in time for the big reveal
which will be like, a very runny mess.
- We're gonna--
- Just keep it in the springform pan.
- Here ya go, child!
(laughing)
- I just hope that she likes whatever, you know?
Doesn't spit anything out.
(record scratching noise)
Oh, that happened.
(dramatic music)
- Low blow.
- I really did not mean to.
- Low blow.
- Claudette, I'm so--
- Remember I said I was going to help you?
- No!
Okay, so I have my cream cheese mixture
in my springform pan
and I'm gonna go put this in the freezer
and hope that it sets in time.
- So for the clovers on the recipe
I'm gonna make some clover cookies,
which is basically the same
sugar cookie recipe, I'm just gonna half it
and color this one green.
I don't know why I'm doing this the complete hard way.
Like, I didn't bring a rolling pin.
- Oh no, let's get you a rolling pin!
- Rookie city!
- Could you roll it with-- - This is going to be
very complicated.
- Do you want this apple cider vinegar?
- Oh, you know.
You know, I like you.
- Coming in the clutch.
- Okay, so I have my green cookie dough.
It'll get darker as it bakes, I hope.
So, I'm paying attention to her drawing
to make it as like her drawing as I can
with these shamrocks,
so I'm grabbing my knife and carving out
what looks like a three-leaf clover.
So it's really not a four-leaf clover.
- No, it is a three-leaf clover.
- Maybe she has luck with three leaves and not four.
Okay, so the first big part of the project is done.
Now we can go to rainbow.
- So, I'm gonna be making honey chicken
for the gold coins.
I'm not shaping them like coins, no.
It's gonna be like a gold nugget.
Do leprechauns collect gold nuggets?
(laughing) Claudette, stop staring at me!
So I'm gonna make a batter for it
that'll marinate it for a bit
that I would've done with orange chicken.
So far I've added flour, and I've added
corn starch, and I'm gonna do some salt
and some pepper.
I'm adding an egg now because it'll be
a little bit of a binder in there.
It's gonna be a pancake kind of looking batter.
This coconut is for the grass.
I am gonna add some food coloring to it.
I'm gonna toast it, so that it's kind of like a
you know, like a coconut shrimp situation.
(laughing) You understand!
- [Claudette] Yeah, yeah, yeah!
- I'm gonna put this on the sheet.
Oh, it looks like broccoli.
It's going in the oven.
- For my marshmallow, the first thing I'm doing
is blooming the gelatin.
This is my first time using titanium.
- What does that even mean?
- Totally backfire.
Sheet gelatin is named by metals,
so you have silver, gold, bronze, and titanium.
They have like, strengths.
Which makes like a tougher marshmallow, or
like a fluffier marshmallow.
This could go either way.
Next, I have to get my pot going
with water, sugar and corn syrup
and separating my egg whites for the mixer
with a whisk attachment.
(whirring noises)
Marshmallows just basically stabilize meringue.
- The moss is looking a little darker
than I thought it was going to.
It's looking a little creepy.
I'm a little worried that it's not going to
look as magical as her drawing.
It's more like a graveyard now.
(laughing)
Than an Irish landscape, an Ireland landscape.
So now I'm gonna make my shoes.
I'm gonna make them with some chocolates.
Uh, and basically I'm just gonna cut them
in sort of a shoe shape.
These shoes are clunkers.
(laughing) They are bad.
They look like-- - [Claudette] Twix!
(laughing)
Like a leprechaun ate a Twix and then dropped it.
For the gold fluffy clouds at the end of her rainbows,
I'm going to scoop marshmallow into a bowl
and hope they look like a cumulus cloud.
The good thing of marshmallows
once it's stiff, I can actually carve it
to look like a cloud as long as I have the volume.
So now I'm gonna do my colors.
I feel like this is going to be like a blooper,
like this is when things go south.
Like our narrator,
"And this is when Claudette got incredibly confident
"and turned out she was wrong."
So I've piped the first arch of the rainbow
and that's my pink.
Oh, it's already hardening.
Ah!
I gotta pipe really fast.
I think the colors I'm pretty confident in.
What I'm not confident in is the textures.
It starts going from this smooth marshmallow
to scrambled eggs real fast.
This looks so gross.
- [Narrator] And this is when Claudette got
incredibly confident.
It turns out she was wrong.
- Next I'm gonna be making shamrock quesadillas!
Fun!
She didn't say she likes quesadillas.
Who cares?
Kids love quesadillas, right?
Like all kids?
So, you can't go wrong.
Basically I'm gonna take these,
I'm gonna make the quesadilla,
and then I'm gonna cut out once it cools
some shamrock shapes.
I have a cheese problem.
I love cheese so much.
The quesadilla is looking good.
I'm gonna let this guy cool down.
So, I've made one quesadilla,
but I need to cut out three shamrocks,
and if I mess up any of them, I don't really
have room to make another, so I've gotta get it right.
Hey!
Oh, it's falling apart.
Shhhhh!
(laughing)
He looks all right!
Second is so much better.
I'm getting better each time.
The third one doesn't look that great,
but it kinda looks like it's gonna give me a hug.
It's got really wide clovers?
Leaves?
What are these things?
- Now I'm gonna work on my garnishes.
My coins and my footprints.
So, I'm melting the white chocolate over
a double boiler.
So, I'm trying to control the temperature,
the water, the melt, all at the same time.
It's like a circus act.
When you're doing chocolate,
you're tempering chocolate,
you want to seed in hard chocolate
and it's going to
basically re-crystallize it
so you don't get this soft, mushy chocolate.
So, now I'm gonna spoon my coins onto parchment
and hope that when the temperature
comes all the way down,
they harden and then that can brush in with the gold.
Now, I'm gonna melt my dark chocolate
and that's gonna be for my footprints.
I hope she's got a lot of homework to do
after she's done with this.
She's going to be amped.
I'm piping the pads and the little dots.
It doesn't look like a traditional footprint,
so I'm just winging it to what the picture looks like.
- I got my oil at 350
and I'm gonna put my chicken in to fry.
- So, now I'm gonna basically make my moss.
Some graham crackers.
(upbeat classical music)
Now I'm gonna add in the green food coloring
into the graham cracker and hopefully dye
the whole thing green.
I'm a little skeptical that the dye is going to
dye it completely green,
but, I'm actually pleasantly surprised
it does look like moss in nature.
I think I won the battle of the moss
because it looked more fluffy,
the way moss looks over rocks.
Here's my terr-are.
The good thing is it's still warm,
so I'm gonna like, make actual like, valleys
a little bit deeper.
So, my next step, I have some butter
that I melted and I am going to sprinkle the moss
all over the cookie.
And hope that it looks like moss.
I can see a leprechaun frolicking through here.
- Okay, my chicken is looking good.
I'm gonna take it out with my spider.
I know that the honey chicken
doesn't look like coins
so Katie, back in the day, would've made
like, sugar coins or chocolate coins,
but I want to make what she asked for,
and she loves honey,
and honey's kind of golden.
I'm not worried about it.
I want her to like what she eats,
so that's all I focused on today is like,
she likes honey chicken.
I'm gonna add my chicken in
and it doesn't look as golden and light
as I was expecting,
but I think Gianna's smart enough
and hopefully she's gonna understand
what I was going for.
- So here are my clouds.
When I reveal the marshmallow out of the bowl,
it looks like a blob of marshmallow.
So I probably should have sifted my powdered sugar
'cause it made like, little lumps
and kinda texture.
I'm thinking if I can kind of carve it?
If you look at big cumulus clouds,
they're just kinda like these
cotton balls stuck together.
Drama, right?
We want drama, we want height.
She did say that these were gold
so I'm going to brush gold luster dust on it.
Whenever you're dealing with anything sugar,
soft, pliable.
When you lift it, there's a sort of
knot in your stomach that you get
'cause it could just completely fall apart.
I mean, I just gotta go for it, right?
- [Katie] Yeah.
That's just gonna have to be,
this is our reality.
- [Katie] It's definitely thickened up
more than I planned.
Does this look as elegant as I would have liked?
No.
But it's gonna taste good, I hope.
It's, you know, it's rustic!
So I look over, and Claudette is
just making this majestic
rainbow.
It's beautiful, it has all these colors,
and I might be in trouble.
It looks like this set.
- Oh, look at that!
- Hey!
I'm shocked.
- [Claudette] We have clovers.
- [Katie] Those are cute!
- Trying to get some height somewhere,
so maybe if I can stand these clovers up.
- Right now I'm gonna make my fruit rainbow
and the first thing I'm gonna do is raspberries.
I feel like a race against time right now
because the heat in this room.
So we're going pineapple.
Now I'm gonna put on my kiwis.
- I'm just gonna paint these little gold coins gold.
Now I'm gonna place my gold coins
like if my leprechaun just gave
no care in the world to where they were going.
But it also helps me kind of hide my little
imperfections in some of the stuff.
Again, I'm trying to get all the height
and drama that I can get.
So, if I don't win for taste, I win for-
- Drama?
- [Claudette] For drama.
- I need more drama in my dish.
I wasn't even thinking about drama!
My rainbow doesn't look dramatic.
- It absolutely does!
- It looks cute.
It looks better than most things on my plate.
(laughs)
Ready for the last thing!
(yells)
I'm gonna spin sugar!
When you're doing spin sugar, you're basically
making a caramel.
So, it's just sugar, water, and some corn syrup.
Where's that spatula?
- [Claudette] Interesting that you put your
spatula in right away.
- Was that bad, was that--
Is that bad?
- I wouldn't have put the spatula back in.
- When someone who's been on Top Chef
tells you not to stir your sugar,
you don't do it,
and I will never do it again.
- Sugar is hygroscopic, children.
Sugar absorbs any moisture around it,
so it will do it by itself.
You don't have to actually mix it.
- This is at 275 right now.
Um, I basically have one shot at this.
So I'm gonna do it!
This is gonna get everywhere, guys, sorry.
They're clouds!
They're not as golden as I wanted them,
and like, I think I should have let it go like,
a little darker, but then you run the risk of it
going to the hard candies, so.
They're clouds.
(upbeat music)
There we go!
Cheesecake rainbows on, clouds are done,
I am done.
Yours looks great.
- You feeling good?
- I'm feeling, yeah!
High five! - No panic.
You want me to drop it?
- No, sorry, never mind!
- Mental high five. - Go!
Let's go see what Gianna thinks.
(Upbeat classical music)
- So this is my second time on the show.
What I learned the first time is
don't go at it like a chef.
Go at it like a kid.
And I wanted the wow factor.
I wanted her to gasp.
I really am into this dish.
It's not something that is chef-forward.
It's something that's playful.
My two favorite parts are the shamrocks
and the gold coins,
and I really think that Gianna's
going to like them, too.
- I'm feeling really good about my dish.
I think she's gonna love the cheesecake
with the fruit on top.
I think she's absolutely gonna love
the honey chicken with the crunchy toasted
coconut under it.
The flavors are there, it is a really yummy
dish and I'm excited for her to try it.
- A dish for my coins!
(coins clanking) (cash register chings)
Ooh!
That looks fancy!
These must be the clovers.
My honey chicken, they remembered.
These are like the little shoe things.
- She knew that those weird, clunky things
were shoe prints!
(fork clanging on plate)
- That was satisfying.
That's amazing.
It's like a fruity, crunchy, sweet like,
piece of cake.
I love it.
- Yes!
- So, she ate some of the cheesecake,
and then she ate some more.
And then she ate some more!
That's when I feel the trouble.
- I've seen this before!
I think it's like when you take like sugar and roll it.
- I can't believe Gianna knows
how to spin sugar.
Like how, has she done this before?
Is she doing it a lot?
- Feels like a cloud.
Hm.
I like it.
My honey chicken.
I believe it's supposed to be the gold piece.
- I am thrilled.
(relaxing classical music)
- Perfect as always.
- Perfect as always!
- It's coconut.
I like it.
(quesadilla crunches)
Not really digging that.
I don't really like the shamrocks.
I like everything else,
except for the shamrocks.
- Oh, she is not liking the quesadilla.
Dare I say hates it.
- I like quesadillas, but just--
Doesn't, yeah.
- I like everything on the dish.
I like the rainbow the best.
(plate clanking against table)
Now this looks fancy!
I love the rainbow.
The clouds, I can definitely see that.
The footprints, I feel like they just--
Oopsies.
I feel like they--
(laughs)
I feel like they look like dots,
not really footprints.
- That's exactly how she drew them.
- Okay.
- I think it's a shortbread lemon cookie.
It has a little bit of lemon in it.
- Nope, no lemon.
- I like it!
- Gianna loves the coins.
- This is a marshmallow.
Perfect as always.
- She's loving how sweet Claudette's dish is
and that's making me concerned.
- Shamrock time.
These don't really have any taste.
- So she's throwing a little shade on my shamrock cookies.
(laughs)
- That's the beauty of being a kid,
is you can use your hands.
Even if I don't win,
I at least made it fun for her.
- More marshmallow.
These are all different colors,
but they all taste the same.
- My flavor strategy might be working.
- I really liked this
lemon cookie-crumble thing (unintelligible).
Lemon cookie thing (unintelligible).
And I like this coin.
Out of everything,
I didn't really like this cookie.
- I have absolutely no confidence in my dish.
Just because of how many bites she took
out of Katie's.
- I don't wanna jinx it,
but I think I might win this time.
(happy jingle)
Hello!
- Hello, whoa!
- How was it?
- It was great, I loved it.
Sugar.
(laughter)
- So, if you have choose,
which one did you like better?
The rainbow fruit cake,
or the pastel rainbow?
- The pastel rainbow.
- That was me!
(laughter and applause)
I never win anything!
- This is rewarded to you.
- Ta-Da!
This was huge.
- I'm happy that Claudette won
'cause she's lost before,
and, so, anyone that's lost before,
I do want them to get a win.
Including myself.
- I thought Katie had it in the bag.
But I'll take this.
- Every time I lose, I learn something.
I'm coming back to win next time.
- Them gold!
(coins clanging) (cash register chings)
(upbeat classical music)