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

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.

The Jean-Georges Warm Chocolate Cake did not inspire a whole lot of excitement at first glance. I’m not one of those Cathy cartoon style “chocoholics” who’d, I imagine, swoon for desserts like this. I enjoy chocolate, but when it comes to selecting a dessert, I get way more excited about fruit, spice, or caramel. But, I wasn’t bored, because I learned a lot of cool new things with this dessert, and discovered some new loves of my own. For starters, the candied vanilla bean pod garnish is exactly my kind of thing. Vanilla Beans are, for me, one of the most sensual, complex ingredients – the very act of cutting one open and scraping the lush, oily seeds from the pod, the unbelievable fragrance… just wow. That takes me there. Do that, then take the pods, slice them thin, simmer them in simple syrup and roll them in granulated sugar so they shimmer, and you may begin to understand just what I love so much about this cooking stuff.

Equally delightful, the chocolate sauce also took me by surprise. Others that I’ve tried before called for corn syrup and liquor for texture and flavor, but this deceptively simple recipe has neither. Slow simmering coaxes out the most unbelievably thick and dark chocolate flavor that I ever could have hoped for. I’m resisting the urge to go stick a spoon in the leftovers right now.

Heaps of praise are also due for the chocolate crumble, which is essentially a cookie made from a dark, buttery dough…

…baked until crisp, and then pulverized in the food processor. In addition to lending contrast of texture, the crumble serves the purpose of cradling ice cream on the plate, preventing it from sliding away and colliding with the cake.

The vanilla bean ice cream recipe called for both invert sugar (which I made by cooking sugar, water, and lemon juice) and corn syrup, which some might balk at until they taste the creamy results. Iuzzini explains that invert sugar helps reduce ice crystallization and lends a softer mouth-feel and smoother texture, both of which are especially hard to achieve in my detached canister model home ice cream maker. I’m looking forward to using this technique whenever I make ice cream in the future.

With all of the accessories ready, all that remained was making the cake itself. For this recipe to be successful, it’s important to that you achieve proper volume when whipping the eggs and yolks with the sugar. Stand mixers make this extremely easy, and the cake batter can be piped into ramekins and stored in the fridge for up to 8 hours before baking.

Which makes it a great dessert for showy dinner parties, because once you have everything ready to go, you can entertain your guests, pop the cakes in the oven, plate, and serve, like nothing ever happened. They’ll all think you’re some kind of domestic god(dess).

Just to recap, the elements of the dessert: chocolate crumble, vanilla bean ice cream, candied vanilla bean, and the warm chocolate cake (not pictured).

So here’s where it becomes painfully apparent that I’m not up to the point in school where they teach us how to artfully plate anything. That swoosh of sauce  in the picture is try #4, and it still looks like a fifth grader did it. Also, the quenelle of ice cream is very very sad. Nothing like the museum-quality one in Johnny Iuzzini’s book, with the perfect points on either end. And, I had an unmolding issue with my cake, due to insufficient buttering of the ramekin. Despite the fact that by appearance, this is a plate that only a mother could love, it put a smile on my fiance’s face, and that’s all I ever really need.

Next up: Chocolate Soup

Interested in playing along? Click to get your copy of Dessert FourPlay: Sweet Quartets from a Four-Star Pastry Chef

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.

For those of you who are not familiar with the book, the desserts in Dessert FourPlay are organized into sets (tastings) of four different desserts, served together for a ridiculous experience of flavor, texture, and taste. Since I’m too strapped for time to tackle four at once, I’ve decided to focus on one or two of the component desserts each week. So imagine, if you will, this salad, sitting alongside lemongrass ice cream with dehydrated grapefruit, carbonated lime curd, and crispy tangerine sticks; a citrus almond sponge cake with margarita semifreddo; and a meyer lemon tart with chocolate creme chiboust and earl grey fluid gel – and you begin to get the idea, this ain’t your grandma’s cookbook.

The very first task that I completed was baking the brioche. I’m always down for trying a new brioche recipe, and Chef Iuzzini’s proved to be a delight: light, rich, and extremely buttery. This particular recipe employs thin slices of brioche, destined to become sweet croutons.

The most difficult step in the process was procuring the calamansi puree, a task that prompted some internet research. The names “calamansi” and “kalamansi” appear to be interchangeable for this lime-like citrus fruit that is popular in the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia. I tried Kalustyans (who carries fruit puree, but not this flavor) and Dual Specialty (which does not carry any purees at all), before finally scoring at SOS Chefs, just blocks from my apartment. I was less successful in finding micro shiso (or even the alternative, red shiso), and after trying Whole Foods followed by some Asian groceries in Chinatown, I decided that I’d try to find some small mint leaves to use instead, which is what is suggested as an acceptable substitute for shiso in the Alinea cookbook. Unfortunately, even the nicest mint I could find looked like it had been severely beaten, and it smelled like nothing at all. I couldn’t bring myself to use such a sad product, and so, I forged on, without it.

I diced a very thin slice of brioche and allowed it to stale on the counter, then I tossed it with good olive oil, a pinch of salt, and a sprinkle of granulated sugar and toasted it in the oven at the same time as some black and white sesame seeds.

I let some gelatin bloom in cold water before adding it to a saucepan of simple syrup. I very carefully circulated the pan over a low flame just until the gelatin had melted, with the warning from my Pastry I  chef echoing in my head “DO NOT heat gelatin over 100 degrees, or your mousse will smell like a barn!”. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’m just as happy never really knowing for sure.

To the gelatin solution, I added lime zest and the calamansi puree.

I had decided not to taste the calamansi until it was part of the final dessert, just so I could be surprised. It smelled amazing – like the lovechild of a lime and a tangerine, and it was all I could do to wait while the gelatin set up.

While I was waiting, I kept myself occupied by cutting supremes of blood orange and clementine.

Once the calamansi gel had set, I cut it into “noodles”.

Dessert components: blood orange and clementine supremes, toasted sesame seeds, sweet and salty brioche croutons (warning: addictive), and calamansi “noodles”. Missing components: micro shiso.

The verdict: Just WOW. It’s been kind of a dark week for me, our cat Nico is very sick, the weather has been cold and isolating, and a whole crack team (get it? crack team? Plumbers? heh) can’t seem to figure out how to fix the heat in my apartment. This dessert is like an uplifting, sunny day on a plate, an homage to citrus flavors as they are. The presentation is gorgeous, it reminds me of stained glass in natural light. The first bite was an explosion of perfect citrus, subtly sweet and tangy, accented by a hint of caramel crunch from the croutons. The best part is when the “noodles” start melting on the tounge, coating it with a sweet/tart layer to compliment the firm flesh of the citrus perfectly. Calamansi is truly unique, like a lime but sweeter, with a hint of good, solid bitterness. The leftover puree is destined to find its place in the best pisco margarita this kitchen has ever seen.

As for the leftover gelatin, I couldn’t resist the book’s suggestion to add gin “for a killer “jell-o” shot. Salute!

Interested in playing along? Click to get your copy of Dessert FourPlay: Sweet Quartets from a Four-Star Pastry Chef

So I scored that internship at the fancy Manhattan restaurant (thank you to readers for your kind words via comments and email), and tomorrow I’ll be working my last shift in the Brooklyn kitchen where I’ve come to feel at home. The next three months will be filled with some very serious schooling that I hope will help me take my cooking to another level and expose me to techniques that I’ll never learn in school. As excited as I am about all of this, lately I’ve been feeling a bit glum about leaving Brooklyn behind, for two reasons: I’m going to miss the company of the chefs and cooks who gently mentored me and made work fun, and, most of all, I’ll miss the satisfaction that comes from creating something from start to finish. You see, for a pastry cook (or intern), the biggest difference between working at a high-quality, rustic style restaurant and working in high pressure, fine dining is that at the former you are involved in the entire plate – the cake, the ganache, the swoop of sauce, and the candied garnish that goes on top. In fine dining, where one plate may have 20 components, multiplied by the number of items on the menu, I may have my hands in a few tiny pieces of the finished product, but I’ll never be able to look at something and say “yeah, I made that.”

That’s not to say that there’s no satisfaction in creating the prefect shard of candied kumquat to sit atop a plated masterpiece – there totally is, and there’s no better way to learn to do something really well than having to do nothing but it, for hours on end. But, being a girl who wants it all, I’ve decided to take on a project to experience the art of making intricate, higher-tech desserts, from soup to nuts. Admittedly, this pursuit feels a bit trite in the shadows of Julie & Julia and the beautiful opus that  is Alinea At Home, but I hope that I’ll walk away with some important lessons learned.

The book on which I’ve set my sights is Dessert FourPlay, a cookbook of sophisticated, high-tech, psychedelic recipes from the imagination of renowned pastry chef Johnny Iuzzini. The project will sacrifice some founding tenents of the East Village Kitchen, especially the one about avoiding hard-to-find ingredients, while upholding others; the dessert courses are organized by season and designed to celebrate Mother Nature’s latest and greatest.

So here’s what I’m thinking. I’m going to take on one of Chef Iuzzini’s recipes per week, or two, if I’m feeling ambitious or have dinner party guests to impress. I’m not going to set a timeframe for the project, if I come to the end of one season before the next has begun, I don’t want to feel pressure to use inferior strawberries shipped from thousands of miles away just to stay on schedule and adhere to an arbitrary deadline, when I can wait a few weeks and use amazing ones from the farmer’s market instead.

And, if I cook something that I really love that’s not from the book, I’ll be sure to write about it here, just as I have always done. The blog is not changing permanently, this project just reflects where my head’s at, which is pretty much the point of having a blog in the first place. I understand that I risk losing a lot of my regular readers who will surely feel that they were lured here with enticing recipes for a bait-and-switch, but I hope they forgive me as I get this off my chest. Please join me dear readers, because damn, it’s gonna be a blast!