Cold temperatures can limit our produce choices, but citrus comes into season just in time to save the day. I’ve been featuring a variety of winter fruit pies for my column over at Serious Eats, including the Key Lime Pie pictured above, and the banana cream and lemon meringue pies below. Click through for full posts and recipes.

Banana Cream Pie

Lemon Meringue Pie

All photos by Lauren Weisenthal

A few weeks back, I did a post for my column Sweet Techniques over at Serious Eats about how to make orangettes. Even though I’m not a big fan of the chocolate on orange flavor combination (I think it has something to do with my aversion to those chocolate oranges that you see in the drugstores around Christmastime), I did enjoy the opportunity to temper chocolate for the first time in a while, and I love the look of the finished product. To make your own, check out my post over at SE.

All photos by Lauren Weisenthal

Leading up to Christmas, I’ve been doing some new techniques posts over at Serious Eats. There are some slideshows to help folks through the process of making a classic French yule log cake, the Bouche de Noel.

My favorite part of this cake is, of course, the mushroom meringues. I love Maida Heatter’s recipe in her Book of Great Desserts.

Speaking of Christmas candy, I also had a lot of fun messing around with recipes for torrone, the Italian nougat candy. Watch for that recipe over on Serious Eats on Monday. Merry, Happy!

Caramel Apple Pie

Bourbon Pumpkin Pie

Bacon Mince Meat Pie

Sweet Potato Pie

Cranberry Walnut Pie

I did a week of pies for Thanksgiving over at Serious Eats last week. Be sure to click through for the recipes!

Over at Serious Eats this week, I featured a couple of pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving. In the photo above you can check out the Pumpkin Mousse Pie, and below a Classic Pumpkin Pie. Both versions are similar in flavor, but the mousse pie has a much lighter consistency. Follow the links to the full article and recipes, and watch for a special edition of Pie of the Week – featuring five days of pie in a row! My rolling pin is getting pretty fatigued.

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, because I’ve been busy writing two columns over at Serious Eats for their Sweets blog. One is a column called Sweet Technique, where I talk about techniques in the pastry world and break them down step-by-step in photo slideshows. The other is called Pie of the Week, which is pretty much how it sounds. Here are some photos of the pies I’ve created for the blog so far:

Blueberry Pie

Chocolate Silk Pie

Creamsicle Pie

Sour Cherry Pie

Strawberry Rhubarb Pie

Sweet Cherry Pie

Peach Pie

Make-Your-Own-Sundae Pie

Pear and Frangipane Pie

Coconut Custard Pie

Plum Meringue Pie

Cheddar-Crusted Apple Pie

Pecan Pie

There’s one every week, so check them out each Thursday! And, there will be even more leading up to Thanksgiving!

Here’s what’s been going on:

- I’m getting married! In just under three weeks. I’ve been trying to play it cool and pretend that wedding planning is no big deal, but IT IS. I’m not having fun with it. It’s really not my bag. I just want the day to come already!

- (Probably more relevant to the blog) I’ve got a (full time) (paying) job at an awesome neighborhood restaurant. I’ve been put in charge of their pastry menu. It’s dizzying. It’s making me bonkers. It’s amazing. It’s exhausting. I can’t wait to tell you about it.

I’m not going to make any bold statements along the lines of “I promise to write” or “watch for the next post on Wednesday”. But know that I miss it here and I miss hearing from the people who take the time to read, and that, more likely than not, will have me coming back again more often, especially after life settles down a bit.

See you soon!

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.

I just have to reiterate, it’s so good to be back. Back to blogging (although still working through the issues that have caused all the pictures from the past six months to go missing), and also, back to Brooklyn, where I’m picking up shifts at my beloved Brooklyn restaurant while I look for my next internship opportunity. I’m delighted to report that for the first time, I’m getting paid for the work that I’m doing. Officially, one year after leaving my desk job and almost one year after starting at the French Culinary Institute, I’m cooking “professionally”.

It’s reassuring that there are some constants shared by my two restaurants so far, as the chefs at both the ritzy, Michelin-starred Manhattan restaurant and the humble Brooklyn kitchen grabbed onto the big summer season opener, rhubarb, with gusto. (At the former, a certain very famous executive chef burst into the pastry kitchen one morning and demanded “zee sexy rhubarb!” for a spring photoshoot – these are the moments to which we unpaid students cling) And while I’ve waited until it was almost too late in the waning rhubarb season, I couldn’t resist the urge to pay homage to the vegetable I’ve come to love as one of the greatest pastry ingredients of all time.

There are several rhubarb recipes in the book, but I selected this one because of the unique ways it showcases the rhubarb, first as a vehicle for acidity and sweetness in the form of a pickle, and also a mellow version, full of earthy wine-poached flavors. The best thing for me about both kinds was the pleasant opportunity to eat rhubarb nearly raw and still crispy.

It all starts with a simple panna cotta, something I’ve come to regard as the cheat of all desserts. We’ve been serving one in Brooklyn for the past few weeks and when I come to it on the to do list, I can feel myself mentally relax, because it’s virtually impossible to mess up, even in large quantities for restaurant service. The key to panna cotta, as with all recipes where there are only a few ingredients, is using those of the highest quality available. I used Ronnybrook cream and Vermont Creamery fromage blanc. I did a double take at the grocers when I saw it was labeled “O% fat”, but a quick consult on the iPhone assured me fromage blanc it is supposed to be fat free, except in cases where fat is added back in for flavor.

I prepped the rhubarb by washing and peeling it,

and cutting it into batons.

I combined sherry vinegar, rice vinegar, honey, grenadine, salt and star anise in a saucepan, and brought the mixture to a boil. After it had cooled a bit, I poured it over the batons of rhubarb and allowed them to pickle. I did the same with a flambeed mixture of wine, port, and sugar, allowing the hot liquid to poach the rhubarb. These batons came out a little softer than the pickles, but still a bit crispy, which I liked a lot.

I also made a sheet pan of crispy phyllo. It was a lot like the stuff I made for this recipe, except this time I used honey and almond flour instead of simple syrup and peanut flour. I’m in love with crispy phyllo. I dare you to not snack away at a tray of it once its come out of the oven.

I cut some blackberries in half. It’s so nice to have berries back in stores, even if they do come from California.

After chilling the panna cotta overnight, I removed it from the loaf pan where I’d put it to set and carefully sliced it into rectangles.

Here is my mis en place: fromage blanc panna cotta, halved blackberries, port poached rhubarb, rhubarb pickles, and crispy almond phyllo.

And the verdict? Almost a slam dunk. I loved the pickles on their own, but I thought the whole batons were too much pickle for one bite. They overpowered. I would dice them next time before using. I thought the port-poached batons were great just as they were. The panna cotta, a dessert that I’ve never been wild about, was one of the best I’ve ever tasted and had great texture. Thanks the smoothness of fromage blanc there is great, tangy flavor with absolutely no textural interference with the creaminess, which usually bugs me in buttermilk panna cottas. The crispy phyllo added lots of great crunch and held up well to the juices from the rhubarb batons.

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.

These photos are almost two months old. That’s about the length of time I’ve been experiencing problems with my website that have kept me from being able to post.

Directly after my big I’M BACK!!! announcement, I began having problems related to a server crashing that continue to plague the site even now. For a while there I was worried that I’d never see the EVK logo again, but thanks to the tech team, it’s back. There are still problems; if you scroll down, you’ll probably notice that I’m missing four whole pages worth of photos. I’m not going to keep talking about it because it makes me emotional, but in a few weeks I hope to have all of those photos back up on the site.

But more to the point, a long long time ago, in my humble kitchen in the East Village of New York City, I make this frozen treat from Dessert FourPlay While citrus was still having its turn at being in season. It was timely, given that I was just learning how to make parfaits in school that very same week.

You may look at this dessert and wonder what I’ve done with all of the layers that we Americans know and love in our parfaits. The French take on the parfait (a frozen concoction made by folding Italian meringue (meringue made by whipping egg whites with 250 degree sugar syrup), into a carefully heated milk/egg/sugar/flavor concoction, then folding that into whipped cream and freezing) is nothing short of spectacular. In fact, I think its the best answer to the question, “Do I really need an ice cream maker to make ice cream?” The parfait is a light, delightfully creamy answer for those lacking ice cream machines.

The parfait is served with a sauce made with verjus ( a light vinegar made from the juice of green grapes), ginger, simple syrup, and two of my favorite ingredients in the whole world: lemongrass, and kaffir lime leaves. I tried a version using verjus, which I found here, and another version using a very light white balsamic vinegar that I found at Trader Joes. There was only a marginal difference between the two sauces.

Lemongrass is available at Whole Foods, and I found Kaffir lime leaves in the freezers of both Kalustyans and Dual Specialty in New York, which leads me to believe that they are probably available at most any Indian specialty foods store.

The sauce was perfect: bright, fresh, and acidic. It was the perfect balance to the parfait.

I allowed the parfait to freeze overnight before unmolding. In the meantime, I ground up packaged graham crackers and made the graham cracker sablè, which is basically a crispy butter cookie that replaces a lot of the usual AP flour with graham cracker crumbs. I neglected to take pictures, and I was not happy with how this part of the recipe turned out. The cookies were tough, not crispy. They tasted really egg-y. And I hadn’t loved the idea of grinding up a processed food product and then baking it right back into a cookie. When I do this again, I would use a homemade graham cracker recipe instead. Martha Stewart’s Cookies has a great one for crispy grahams that hold up to toasted marshmallows and parfaits without getting a soggy like the traditional graham cracker crusts that I usually associate with key lime pie.

There was one other issue that is worth mentioning about this recipe: I struggled with seasonality when making it. To get key limes in season required making the recipe in the early spring, a time when getting good plums in NYC is just not an option. I sacrificed plum quality because I was more interested in getting peak key lime flavor, and ended up with dry, flavorless plums to cut and shape into rosebuds on top of the parfait. In the future, I think I’d make a substitution here, perhaps using fresh grapefruit or pineapple. The aesthetic was pretty gorgeous, though. and despite my setback with the sablè, the parfait and sauce were so wonderful that it was worth all of the effort.

Up next:  Fromage Blanc Panna Cotta~Rhubarb Two Ways~Crispy Almond Phyllo

So, what do I have to say for myself?

My devoted readers may recall, three months ago, I began working as an intern in the pastry kitchen of a big, fancy, highly-acclaimed Manhattan restaurant. For a while I sucessfully balanced my internship with class at the French Culinary Institute, some freelance projects, planning my wedding, and even some (paid!!!) shifts back at my beloved Brooklyn restaurant. Then, all of a sudden, I just couldn’t get it all done. The fun ingredient scavenger hunts became a drain, heck, standing on my two feet for one minute longer than necessary became a drain, and soon, I stopped cooking at home all together. Making fancy desserts at home was probably the last thing I wanted to be doing, given that I was spending most of my waking hours working in other peoples’ kitchens doing just that.

Now I’m back, baby!

I just finished my internship at the fancy Manhattan restaurant and I’m taking a week, or maybe two, to reflect on where I want to go next. I’m using my free time to get back into my own kitchen to work on some exciting projects, one of which is the resurrection of the Dessert FourPlay project.

We may have missed blogging through the best days of the citrus season, but I saw rhubarb at the Union Square Greenmarket last Saturday, a sign of good things soon to come. Making its debut in the spring, rhubarb is the gateway drug of our local produce, an amazing dessert component in and of itself, and a sign that soon enough we’ll be enjoying berries and stone fruits from farms upstate. Chef Johnny Iuzzini has it all covered, and I hope that you won’t miss a moment of the bounty.

Next up: Key Lime Parfait ~ Graham Cracker Sable