Go gourmet for Xmas with Uptown Treats

Annalisa Patience, self-taught dessert chef and owner of Uptown Treats dessert bakery, loves ponche de crème.

She doesn’t care for ginger beer. Ham and turkey, she’s had her share. But ponche de crème is her favourite thing about her favourite time of year.

It was this love for ponche de crème which led to the birth of her new Christmas dish – ponche de crème brulee.

“I love everything about ponche de crème. I love the flavour, the spices, and the alcohol. It is a lot like eggnog but I don’t think they use the same spices. I asked myself, 'how I can make something that no one has really tasted before?'” Patience said in an interview with Business Day, at her kitchen on Mendez Drive, Petit Valley. “Crème brulee is so creamy, and that caramelised sugar at the top is what makes it special. So I thought why not do it with ponche de crème.”

The process is the same as making a crème brulee – with heated heavy cream, egg yolks, sugar and other ingredients whisked together, then baked and crowned with caramelised sugar. But the true innovation to the dessert comes when Patience adds the ingredients from her family recipe of ponche de crème. To add a little punch to her ponche, she used single barrel rum as a base liqueur.

“It is not to get you drunk, but just to get that flavour and that feel when you drink ponche de crème,” she said.

Although tries not to make too many dishes with the Yuletide drink, each year she tries to find a way to use it. Last year, she did ponche de crème cheesecake.

The Trini spin on crème brulee is one of three of her premier Christmas dishes. She also does a Yule log, filled with whipped cream cheese which she made from scratch, a light, spongy cake for the roll and a chocolate ganache – a whipped filling of chocolate and cream. Her pumpkin spice cheesecake is also a popular and unique treat despite not being a traditional Trini Christmas dish with a mixture of homemade pumpkin spice, cinnamon, nutmeg and a gingerbread crust. And her mini magic pavlovas satisfy any sweet tooth with whipped cream, berry compote (a cooked mixture of sugar spices and fruit) and candied orange vanilla cranberries. She even has brioche buns for those who do not like the sogginess which comes when you put sauces on traditional hops bread or hamburger buns.

Each dish is an innovative, creative spin on the original dessert. In fact, Patience said in everything she does, she tries to find an innovative and creative way to make it a little gourmet.

“I can’t even make a hot dog in a traditional way. I always try to find a difference,” she said.

Patience always had a love for the culinary arts, especially desserts, and while gaining her bachelor's degree in business, human resource and marketing, she would practise making pastries. Even as an account executive at Magna Rewards, she practised her passion, "stealing" tips and ideas and taking notes from cooking shows like Food Network's Chopped. But in 2016, an opportunity came her way that would change the course of her life and turn her passion into her business.

“The former owner of Uptown Treats was migrating and she asked if I was interested in the business.

“At that time I did Jamaican-style patties and pows. I thought it would be a great opportunity to not just expand with my cakes and desserts, I thought it was a great opportunity overall. I started with the patties and the pows and as time went on the list got longer in terms of what my abilities were.”

Patience’s bakery is not the usual kind, where one could walk into a brick-and-mortar store and pick out a cake or pastry. She sells products to retail stores and groceries, but most of her sales, she said, comes from orders, and many are placed on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. She depends on awareness of her page to attract customers, and word-of-mouth for her customer base to grow. But that was until covid19 came along.

Like many other businesses, the pandemic ground Patience’s business to a halt. But thanks to her business and marketing backgrounds she was able to innovate.

“Everyone shut down,” she said. “In the beginning I was thinking what I was going to do. But my business background helped me in terms of strategising for the year. I had to do a whole new business plan. I had to do something that was totally different to what I was doing before.

“My marketing background came in when I realised I needed another platform to inform people about my business,” she added. “I had everything – the name, the products and everything else – now it was just a matter of juggling my time between sales and building my website.”

She said while building the website was difficult, with the help of friends versed in website management and IT, she was able to create a site the same way she made her dishes – from scratch.

“(Building a website) is a lot in terms of the amount of information you need. You need to link things together as well, like if you need to make online payments. Sometimes you forget to take photos just for the website, because people are visual, especially when it comes to food, and seeing it works better than telling people about it.”

She said having a website is important especially after her experience as a business owner in 2020.

“Everything is online now,” she said. “Because of covid19 nobody wants to go and get something. I don’t really want to do it, I do most of my stuff online. Everything I need to do, whether it is to pay a bill or whatever, everything is online for me.”

Without the same culinary background as others in the industry, Patience did a lot of testing and trial and error with the extra time she had. She came up with a brand new menu of frozen microwavable dishes. She did frozen Jamaican patties which she had always done since she first took on the business and added beef pies to her menu, but her innovative spirit also led to her putting her own gourmet spin on other dishes like sausage rolls and quiche.

“The frozen quiche and the frozen sausage rolls were born out of the need to innovate for 2020. Now, it is one of my top sellers,” she said.

The quiche, like all of her dishes, mixes the ingredients of a traditional quiche recipe like milk, cream and eggs, with her own innovative and gourmet flair, adding salmon and basil. For her sausage rolls, she makes the filling herself, using ground meat and seasoning it, then piping it into a roll, then cutting and freezing them for sale.

Each of the dishes, she said, would only need to be heated for 15 to 20 minutes and are ready to eat.

“At that time a lot of kids were home and parents were searching for things that would be easy to warm up and easy to serve. I got a lot of great feedback from it. I wish I had some to show you, but they are all sold out.”

With a new menu, a website launching at the beginning of 2021 and a whole new list of experiences, Patience hopes next year will be better for her business. But, she said, the most important thing she learned from 2020 is to never give up on your passion and dreams.

“Being an entrepreneur has its ups and downs,” she said. “There are times where you ask yourself if you made the right decision, but you can’t give up on the things that you love just because of circumstance. You have to find a way to push forward.

“This has become a passion for me. Even in the hardest of times, I still sat back and said this is something I loved doing. So I will never give up.”