Pastry chefs finally get their due with Beyond Sweet tasting, Top Chef love

In the tide of new celeb chefs and creative cooking, the crucial element that seemed to be left out was dessert — the vital contribution of the pastry chef.

But the sweets gurus are finally having their day — they've even earned their own version of Top Chef. And in Houston they took center stage for Beyond Sweet, an afternoon tasting at Ralph Smith's lush photography Studio organized by Rebecca Masson to benefit Lucky Dog Rescue.

Ryan Pera, recently of The Grove and partner in the forthcoming Revival Market, started the six-course interlude with a perfectly balanced pumpkin and guanciale ravioli with sweet hints of Gulf lump crab. Following Pera was private chef Tracie Hartman's twice-baked Paragon cheese soufflé with walnut, pear and arugula salad — rich, moist and with just enough salt in the cheese to balance the sweetness.

Uchi's Philip Speer came in from Austin to show off his exquisite and inventive dessert style. The center of the plate was a tart grapefruit sorbet, surrounded by a slather of caramelized white chocolate, dried and ground olives that resembled salt and a dehydrated rosemary meringue that looked like styrofoam from a distance. Combined all these elements created a taste that was at once tart, bitter, and sweet and both satisfying and fascinating.

Organizer Rebecca Masson contributed a play on the childhood favorite of apples and peanut butter, with apple sorbet, a peanut butter bar, macerated apples and fluffy peanut dust.

Canopy's Shannon Smith went for more traditional sweet, with a chocolate cream tart with hazelnut praline, frangelico caramel and nutella sorbet. It was the first dish to truly embrace the sweetness that we associate with pastry chefs and dessert, but its lightness kept it from being overpowering.

Finally Chris Leung, the pastry chef at Bootsie's Heritage Cafe and the upcoming Connate, created a dish of coriander, manjari jelly, manjari cremeux, candied cornbread and a sour cream.

The tickets for the exclusive event — along with silent auction experiences from Uchi, Yelapa Playa Mexicana, Canopy, Haven, BRC Gastropub among others — netted Lucky Dog over $7,000 to help animals find loving homes.