Archive for the 'Desserts' Category

©2008 Harry Kenney

How I came up with this dish has an odd little road to it. A couple months ago I had friends coming over for a get together and I had my cooking itineary planned, complete with an Italian dessert. No, not one of my own. I do do other people’s recipes at times too. Sometimes I make so many changes that they end up turning into something different and my own, but this was one of those times I was going to pretty much go along with the recipe I had. (At least that had been the initial plan.)

Listen up, this will teach you the value of reading something first, and all the way through and thoroughly. I was going to make this chocolate ricotta dessert (forget what, maybe was a cake, I seem to think it was going to be one of those custard things in ramekins. I had read the recipe throught and even did the two hour prep (again this was a while back, Iwrote down the recipe, but I didn’t write down this story, so bear with my fuzzy memory.)

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©2008 Harry Kenney

Here’s the second homemade cookie recipe I promised I’d get up to the site that I did over the holidays. Applesauce cookies. Yum! And while this is a good one to eat all year round, it definitely has those fall - winter spices we’ve come to associate with the Holidays. Moms take note: with fruit, nuts and raisins in this it’s no doubt a higher than average nutritional cookie too.

There is one important baking item I want to touch on though, and I should have done this with the butter cookie recipe probably, and that is the whole discussion or school of thought about salted versus unsalted butter in baking and especially cooking recipes. Salted butter, even though most of us don’t taste the salt, is the most commonly found one at markets and convenience stores. And against popular thought, it’s the one I use.

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I said previously that I had made some cookies during the Christmas holidays but had forgotten to get them up here. Well here’s the first of two cookie recipes. This is one of those classic, basic cookies. The butter cookie.

Now there’s a variety of things you can do with butter cookie dough. This particular recipe is (mainly — you’ll see what I mean at the end) for use with a cookie press or cookie “gun”. If you’re a woman you probably say press. If you’re a guy, you probably call it a gun.

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©2008 Harry Kenney

If you enjoyed my very recent Chocolate-Raspberry Lava Cake recipe, then you are going to love this “makeover” or redeaux as well. Remember the original lava cake was made as a mistake. And this dish came about when I messed up my lava cake. So much for the saying two wrongs don’t make a right!

Think of it almost as a crunchy chocolate pudding “slash” cake. Obviously since it never leaves the dish it can’t “lava” out like the original. And as you see the cracking on top in the photo, you see why I had to call this chocolate cave-in cake.

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Lava cake, aka molton cake, aka volcano cake (hmm, I sense a theme here) … whatever you want to call it, it’s fun and delicious, rich though lighter than you would expect — a chocloholic’s dream. Women want it and want to run away from it at the same time (because they want it, you see.) Kids love it, so do guys. What’s not to love about a miniature chocolate cake that oozes out even more liquid chocolatey goodness when you cut in to it?

There seems to be two basic ways to make this cake. The way that’s most difficult (patterned on the original “mistake cake”) that can easily fail, and the way that guarantee’s success every time. Being one of these crazy people who actually expects things to behave the way they are supposed to be — you know, purchasing a watch with the expectation it tells time, a refrigerator that stays cold, crazy things like that — my version falls into the latter category.

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You might recall I mentioned before that one of my earliest “dishes” I ever made was simply baking some chicken breasts in the oven and five minutes before they done pouring creamy Italian dressing over them. It was simple and delicious. Well, if that was the first-ever dish I made back in my teens. Then this one here would no doubt be my second one. And likewise is both super simple and delicious. And as you see, one that stood the test of time and that I still make today.

You’ll also see one of the key components in this is liquor. Yes, I do love my liquor — when cooking. Why? It’s an ingredient. It’s very flavorful. Remember extracts, vanilla extract and the rest also come from liquor, and they are likewise very potent tastes, that is,they pack a lot of flavor in a very small, concentrated amount.

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Whew! The last three recipes were each a bit complicated and time-consuming in terms of preparation and cooking … got to do plenty of interesting cooking things though: turned a slab of beef into steaks, pounded meat thin, made a meat stuffing, created a custard in a pot, made a ganache, took a squash apart, made a puree with the food processor, oven-roasted vegetables, got to cook some chorizo…

Time then to switch things up and do something quick and a bit more whimsical. So for today, it’s pizza for kids. Yes, I know, kids like any kind of pizza; but that said, they’ll like these even more. Moreover, you don’t have to have kids, these are definitely pizzas for the kids in us all!

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Sometimes you just want to have it all. And sometimes you can — especially when you’re cooking. And in this case, baking. How this recipe came along was simple: I had a couple of bananas, I wanted to use them to make some kind of sweet desert, preferrably something baked and I wanted it to include chocolate.

While it’s true with this basis there’s a hundred things I could choose to do, the first thing that popped to mind was maybe a banana cream pie. Graham cracker crust, chocolate pudding (some folks do vanilla), sliced bananas and whipped cream. Yummy but way too easy. No challenge in it.

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First let me direct you to my recipe on Fruit and Cream Cheese Triangles as that covered a lot of the basics found in this recipe here. In fact, this recipe is in many ways a continuation or the next step after those delicious little triangles.

Using the same amount of puff pastry dough that made the nine triangles, one sheet, I was this time able to more simply create four large turnovers. Since I’ve never really played with puff pastry dough prior to these two outings, I saw no sense in making the filling from scratch, as I was more interested in getting the pastry correct and learning from what I was doing.

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No sense delving into the difference between a trifle and a parfait as I have already done that previously when I made the Pear Parfait. Another thing, these really are pretty easy to make and can come in such a variety of combinations.

Since the last time when I did the Pear Parfait, I did go out and get an actual trifle bowl with several small desert dishes. I knew I had a big party coming up and in an effort to make it a bit easier with all the dishes I was making, I figured, correctly, a trifle would make for a low-effort but big-wow-factor ending to the meal.

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For some time now I’ve been wanting to try my hand at baking. Ok, let me go back a bit. I don’t mean baking from scratch. I’m also not talking the other extreme of baking from a 100% premade box of Pillsbury or Duncan Hines or whatever. Somewhere in between.

You see, I already know from making cakes from a mix, that I’m bad at it. They taste good, but they look homemade. Ok, they look worse than homemade. Maybe it’s the frosting part that I don’t have down. I just know my cakes of the past tend to look something like that Salvador Dali painting where the watches are melted on tree limbs. When it comes to cookies from scratch things get weirder still. The easiest recipe I will botch totally. The more difficult cookie recipes come out fantastic. But I digress.

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What is the difference between a parfait and a trifle? Well, first, this is actually a British trifle as they contain lady fingers, where as the American version, one thinks more of ice cream. Nowadays they are fairly interchangable words. That having been said though, one can still easily a web forum full of people arguing strongly as to which one it really was. Myself, I always like to go with the an alliteration when given the choice.

What is this then? It’s a multi-layered desert in a glass. Note: A trifle can be done directly in the glass, but is often done in a (you guessed it) trifle bowl, and then put into glasses. The idea as you see is two-fold. First, the repeated mention of glass is an easy clue that this is a desert to be as much relished by the eyes as it is by the tongue.

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