My first (brief) cookbook review was posted on Serious Eats today, about an exciting and complicated dessert book called Demolition Desserts.

The chef makes multi-element dessert plates and is one of the best established practitioners of the no-holds-barred, any ingredient is fair game, odd pairings are good, let’s-use-science-in-dessert-construction branch of pastry.

I made a batch of s’mores brownies which despite calling for homemade graham crackers and homemade marshmallows is one of the simpler recipes therein. Got them out of the house as quickly as possible as their overwhelming, cloying sweetness in no way diminished my capacity to eat them one after the other. I don’t even like marshmallows. 

Less sweet and delightfully spicy is the chipotle gingerbread, an excellent dessert when paired with autumn fruit and whipped cream.

I visited the Doughnut Plant in anticipation of this very important day, and am now heading to work feeling jangled by sugar and bloatado from eating sweets first thing in the morning. 

On the left, coconut yeast doughnut; on the right, tres leches cake donut.  Subtle cream filling present in both. 

I did not finish both but I will not lie, I ate more than a bite of each.

Recently my friends The Transplanters moved out to sunny LA.  Before they left we had a final visit in which I shared some cheesecake that I had made in class.  They really liked it and so I’m posting the super-easy recipe here in hopes that they make said mascarpone cheesecake, and think of smelly old New York and their loved ones that miss them. 

And while I’m writitng about cheesecake…the use of “cheesecake” as a term referring to a general aesthetic of creamy, rich sexiness or specific pinup art allegedly has its origin in 1912, when an New York Journal photographer captured a little more of an actress in one of his photos than he had expected.  Calling to mind the most wonderful thing he could imagine, he declared this display of legs ”real cheesecake!”

Today we practiced plating desserts, going through days worth of refrigerated mousses and cakes and sauces and creams.  For 3 hours we glopped things together on plates and then fobbed them off on other classes or crammed them in our own greedy mouths.  Afterwards we cleaned out the fridge, packed up any leftovers, and reviewed for Monday’s final pastry exam.

Dessert makes many people happy.  I don’t get it, but I know it is true - my best friend lights up at the idea of a sweet at the end of a meal, and a good dining experience for her is incomplete without it.  If and when I own my own restaurant, I will have to serve dessert as so many people enjoy it. I learned a thing or two in this mod that will help me in this endeavor.  But I’ll keep it much simpler than what we did in class today.

My chef approved everything I made, and the most hideous, wrong, embarassing plate I created, done as an internal “you wouldn’t dare” dare, was the most celebrated choice of all.  If this was put in front of me in a restaurant I would leave in a huff.  But the class dug it.  Get it?  White Chocolate Mouse?  Corny.

This is how you write “Happy Birthday” in chocolate in Korean.  Thanks to Charles for spelling it out.

We finished our éclairs today, as well as our profiterolesand croquembouche, the caramel-topped variety of puff that gives this post it’s title.  I like to think I’ve led a life of sophistication, but I had no idea anyone topped puffed pâte à choux with caramel.  It does in fact crunch in your mouth when you bite it. 

I do not like profiteroles, croquembouche or éclairs.  They are filled with pastry cream, which I think is pretty gack.

I do, however, enjoy a cannoli from time to time, just so you know I’m not a total grouch.

Today we made ice cream and sorbet in this bad boy:

If you want to make frozen dessert treats, you really have to have a machine.  I grew up with a hand crank number requiring lots of kosher salt and muscle.  My aunt has a Cuisinart counter top model that does a nice job if you get the canister cold enough to start with.  This restaurant grade Coldelite, however, is the easiest thing I’ve used.  My favorite part is flipping it to extraction mode and churning the stuff out in a soft spiral.

I love ice cream.  My second job as a kid (first job:minor clock repairs and winding at hippie neighbor’s clock shop) was scooper at the blessed Watertown Fountain.  Within a couple of weeks the boss man (whom I now reflect on as being a 25 year old trust fund kid, but who at the time seemed like the height of maturity) and I became great pals and before long, he had me making the stuff from scratch, in addition to teaching me to make a killer hot fudge sauce.  Unlike the Coldelite, the older ice cream machines did not auto-extract and we had to scoop and scrape the stuff into buckets.

After a year or so of being open in Watertown Square he and I entered the Best of Boston Ice Cream contest and made a reasonable showing - no small feat in a state that consumes more per capita than the other 49.  Grapenut flavor.  By my sophomore year he had weasled his way into an ice cream cart at the Orpheum, so I spent the rest of high school working there, seeing excellent concerts for free.  I also continued at the storefront, and it was there that I had my first taste of responsibility when he gave me my own keys and let me manage.  It was also there that I was held up at gunpoint, but that’s another story. 

In the mid-90’s he opened a place in Williamsburg where I put in a shift or two to make ends meet while working editorial.  He’s since moved back to Chicago with his family, but I thought today of how much he influenced me, giving me my first job in food service and my first glimpse into being a self-starter.

He would have dug my lemon ginger ice cream and raspberry sorbet. 

…but doubtless God never did.” 

I love raspberries best because they are the most consistently wonderful berry, and I have tremendous nostalgia for blueberries from living in Vermont and teaching myself how to make preserves, but nothing beats strawberries during the five minutes that they are perfect.  For regular consumers buying locally in USDA Hardiness Zone 6B, that moment has passed for this year.  On to stone fruits.

But the pastry chef at Eleven Madison was able to procure some lovely strawberries, and was determined to improve on God’s handiwork, through her “Variations on Greenmarket Strawberries”. 

As my pastry mod written assignment I have been asked to taste and describe a plated dessert.  My initial plan had been to head down to Room 4 Dessert to check out some of Will Goldfarb’s sweets-as-science, but it is closed indefinitely.  So MK and I agreed to scratch our shared itch to eat at Eleven Madison, a joint I can otherwise ill afford, to have some sugary afterschool snacks.

The plate I received consisted of:

Strawberry sorbet sprinkled with crushed strawberry meringue.  The sorbet was fairly standard - creamy texture, fairly straightforward berry flavor, bluish pink color, cheery little 2″ quenelle sitting on the upper right of the plate.  The crumbly bits of baby pink cookie sprinkled on top had an elderflower flavor and a traditional airy crunch. 

Strawberry “spaghetti”, fine pulpy strands made from juice and agar-agar.  This greyish pink mush was the least successful (if the most inventive) part of the plate.  It tasted of an undersugared fruit rollup and looked like a pile of defeated fruit, with no discernible spaghetti-like strands.  It sat in the center of the plate. 

Strawberry foam studded with small cubes of lychee.  It was viscous.  The lychee was tasty.

Lychee gelee embedded with a strawberry slice, looking like a Victorian momento, something you’d find in grandma’s jewelry box.

Two tiny, perfect frais de bois.  Maybe they were just unusually luscious regular berries on the super-teeny, extra-fragrant side.

Onto this was poured an elderflower and lychee broth.  A small plate of chewy, buttery, chili-spiked financier cookies were perfect for sopping up this broth once it had been thickened with melted sorbet, foam, etc.

In contrast to this intellectual exercise on the strawberry, MK received the Peach Souffle, which came in a tidy package, arguably undernourished peach-wise, but still simply delicious and accompanied by a dollop of heavenly lemon thyme ice cream. 

So my judgement is this: a well-executed basic beats elaborate gussying.  My dessert gave me far more to talk about, but hers lingers in my taste memory, and that is confers a much greater value.

I’ll admit it, I’m a hack at desserts, and stuck on making my sweets pink, preferably through natural methods.  We frosted cakes today with gobs of buttercream which I rosied up with raspberry jam.

Cleaning veal kidneys, killing dispatching lobsters, fabricating primal cuts of beef - none of this was gross to me.  Quart upon quart of frosting layered on crummy cakes?  The foulest substance imaginable, the most stomach-churning task.

An hour into the exercise I was nauseated by the smell of sugary butter.  Two hours in I was still dicking around trying to make perfect 90 degree corners on the top. 

Still, came out looking sort of cute in a circus clown kind of way.  Gave it to xoxoanp to share with her fam this weekend.  

Homemade marshmallows?

No.

Homemade rosewater marshmallows, resplendently pink, thank you very much.

Drizzling them with chocolate took it from fairytale princess food to greedy 5-year old food.  Pastry class is weird.

I had an epic, sexy, big pimpin’ dinner at Del Posto last night and it has cleared my memory of all aspects of our brioche and croissant class yesterday morning.  Here’s a picture of a brioche à tête, a crown of rolls, and a sausage stuffed ring.

A snooty princess once suggested that the peasants eat this eggy, sweet, tender loaf if they had no bread - it wasn’t cake after all.  And it wasn’t Marie Antoinette who suggested it, poor thing.  Vive la revolution, and happy Independence Day.