March 7, 2010
This post is an installment from the ongoing Dessert FourPlay project, in which I prepare and write about all of the desserts in Dessert FourPlay: Sweet Quartets from a Four-Star Pastry Chef
by Johnny Iuzzini. For more on this project, click here.
Oh. My. God. I just loved making this so much. First off, there is the doughnut component. As in, the dessert item that brings my two favorite culinary worlds together – bread and pastry, and throws in my favorite guilty pleasure – fried dough rolled in some sort of sweet granulated substance, just for good measure. Then there’s the subtle, mellow, slightly sweet and oh, so creamy cheese filling. And, the bright flavor from confit of meyer lemon. Yes, this is sunshine and light and guilt and cheese (!) all on one plate.
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March 1, 2010
We’re in the home stretch of winter, but it sure doesn’t feel like that here in New York, with another foot of snow getting dumped down just before the weekend. And while I can debate forever with the snow lovers, weighing the virtues and the pitfalls of having such a large amount of snow around, setting aside the tiny window of city beautification, no one can argue that it sucks when the sewers get clogged, causing mass confusion for each street crossing on every corner. Bah! humbug! to that. Even folks rocking those country-chic Hunters I’m seeing everywhere can’t escape from the lakes of slush unsplashed.
Why do I rant on about this? Well, in spite of the slushy walking conditions, I had promises to keep and dinner to make for two semi-celebrity guests: Paul, the incredibly gifted designer who is responsible for giving this site its face, and his lovely wife Jen. When selecting the menu, this recipe spoke to my favorite fun fact about the couple – they met, unbelievably, on spring break in Cancun, and ten years later, they’re one of the happiest couples you’re ever likely to meet. Rum and coke ice cream? Tropical caramelized bananas? Perfect, no? But back to the slush – this recipe had some doozies on the shopping list, so there I was, running around from store to store, covered in slush.
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February 24, 2010
Since I love the whole concept of soup for dessert, I was looking forward to trying out this concoction. The creamy, dark chocolate soup (not to be confused with the much-coveted cartons of sweet chocolate-y bliss that we remember from grade school) topped with a foam made from Devonshire (Devon) cream, and whimsical cocoa puffs enrobed in milk chocolate did not disappoint. So let’s get down to it, shall we?
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February 15, 2010
So yesterday was Valentine’s Day. Was it just me, or did it seem like people made more of a fuss about it than usual this year? My feelings on this Hallmark holiday can best be described as love/hate. One the one hand, all that pink and red crap, the blatant consumerism masquerading as love, and the starry-eyed, cooing couples who seem to think that grotesque displays of PDA are suddenly acceptable… all of that is completely off-putting. On the other hand, I have some great memories of nights inspired by Valentine’s Day backlash; wine-fueled all-girls dinner parties, slasher movie marathons, defiant nights out in the Village with every unattached friend I’d ever had. This year, the fact that Brian and I cooked a decadent dinner of caviar potatoes and cracked a bottle of amarone had nothing to do with the fact that it happened to be Valentine’s Day, and everything to do with us seizing the opportunity to spend a nice night at home together – something our schedules haven’t permitted us to do since New Year’s Day.
When I selected two chocolate desserts (this, and also, the Chocolate Soup – post coming soon) for the Dessert FourPlay project this week, it much less a coincidence: I did it, unabashedly, as a tribute to the holiday that I so love to hate. When I set out to blog the whole book, I knew that I would eventually have to make this, the most “conventional” dessert, at some point. What I hadn’t anticipated, however, was how much I would enjoy doing it. But enough of my blathering.
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February 9, 2010
I am so excited to be posting installment #1 of the Dessert FourPlay project! It took me a while to decide which recipe would make the best opener, but after narrowing it down by season and deciding that I wanted to save chocolate for next week’s valentine’s day post, I decided to focus on the light and bright flavors of the citrus salad. It seemed like an appropriate starter.
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December 17, 2009
Whenever I put a variety of cookies together, I try really hard to include something for every kind of cookie taste. For example, I always include some kind of buttery and crumbly sable, something uber-chocolate, something gooey, something jammy and fruity, and something nutty and spiced. I’m never short on ideas for these categories, but I always freeze when it comes to bars. I love including a bar cookie, no question, but with the dizzying variety, from cheesecakes to lemon bars to brownies, it’s almost another food category entirely and I just can’t decide.
This year was no exception, and an exhaustive research session with my stacks of cookbooks only left me feeling more bewildered. That’s when I decided to combine two of my favorite recipes of all time, this one, and this one (which resulted in EVK recently being featured on Saveur.com). The cookie love-child that resulted was absolutely worth my angst.
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December 4, 2009
This Thanksgiving, for the first time in my thirty year long pie-eating career, I had a pumpkin pie breakthrough. Each year of my life someone has baked one and I always partake, unable to resist what I’d imagined and build up in my mind as a creamy, airy manifestation of pure pumpkin flavor. And year after year, I’m met with disappointing first bites that are some variation of overly-spiced, too-sweet, oily, or lumpy-textured pies (many of which are made by otherwise great cooks). And so, I’d come to accept that what I hoped pumpkin pie to be was not actually what it was.
But for Thanksgiving this year, the pumpkin pie gods were smiling down on me. As the only guest at the table who has logged over two months in pastry school and done some time in a real restaurant kitchen, I was put in charge of desserts. In my role as pastry chef of Thanksgiving, I seized the opportunity to create the pumpkin pie of my dreams, with the help of this book
.
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November 27, 2009
It never ceases to amaze me just how fast the biggest meals go rushing by before our very eyes. As cooks we spend days, even weeks choosing our menu, shopping for our ingredients, and stocking our fridges to the gills with containers filled with our raw materials. We cook and cook our hearts out until the last guest has taken his seat at the table, the last bowl of soup placed upon the serving plate.
And then, for one exquisite moment, not a word is spoken and the only sound that can be heard is that of silver brushing against china. For those of us who love entertaining, this is the payoff for all of our toils.
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November 24, 2009
Last year at this time, I was fretting over the crusts for my Thanksgiving pies. Would they be as flaky as they were tasty? Would they live up to the high standards of my soon-to-be mother in law’s beautifully set table? And, the ever-popular, who the heck has time for all this nonsense anyway?
During that time, when my fascination with making pie evolved into a love for doing it, I also started to appreciate why so many people would rather just not even bother.
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November 6, 2009
I spend a lot of time mulling over the following question: If [insert friend's name here] were a cake, what kind of cake would [he/she] be?
Those of us who enjoy baking celebration cakes understand the weighty significance of this question, with its myriad of factors to be weighed. Taste is an obvious one, our goal being to avoid flavors that exercise the recipient’s gag reflex and focus squarely on those that cause he or she to roll around and salivate like a dog.
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