... a spirited celebration of regional food and culinary craft, season by season, with original recipes by Susan S. Bradley
Christmas is the season of giving, and no gift is more welcome than something personal from your own kitchen. Pack your creation in a pretty holiday tin, canister, or gift jar, and you’re ready to make merry. The following are some of my favorite holiday treats, all perfect for giving.
This concept should have been a cinch. After all, I developed White Chocolate, Cardamom & Coconut Beignet and they’re wonderful—ethereally light, tender, moist, and beautifully flavored.
But I made a classic mistake at the onset. I tried to pattern the new beignets after the earlier success. And that, my friends, was a disaster. I threw batch after batch of beignets in the trash after just one taste.
Something different went wrong with each batch: too dry, too wet, not sweet enough, not pumpkin enough, not spicy enough, and finally, just okay but nothing special. I almost gave up. Where was I going wrong?
I was at Trader Joe’s a few weeks ago and spied a perky little jar of Pumpkin Butter. I must be years behind on this, but that was my first encounter with this luscious spread.
Clafouti (pronounced klah-foo-tee), a simple French custard-cake, is the perfect foil for the fresh fruit and berries of summer. Formulas vary wildly from one end of the spectrum (custard) to the other (cake). I love trying them all, and I’ve shared two of them with you already. What I am sharing with you today is a chewy, cake-style clafouti with a sweet-tart topping of lime and vanilla-scented fresh rhubarb.
One of the easiest and most effective ways to elevate a simple dessert to epicurean heights is to add a brightly colored, brightly flavored dessert syrup. You can serve a dessert syrup over ice cream or gelato, alongside panna cotta or baked custard, with tea cakes, or as the key flavoring of an Italian soda, lemonade, or limeade (recipe below).
To my palate, this is the perfect Panna Cotta. It is lightly set and lightly sweetened with a good balance between fat and lean dairy ingredients.
To develop this master recipe for panna cotta, I created a recipe grid that compares key ingredients across examples from 20+ respected cooks. As you might imagine, the key proportion of gelatin to total amount of liquid is all over the place in these examples. You should not be overtly aware that there is gelatin in this dessert when you are eating it. That aspect should be quite subtle.
This article includes tips & tricks for creating the most wonderul Panna Cotta imaginable, plus six inspired variations.
When I happened upon the inspiration for this cake (Gourmet Traveler Magazine, Yoghurt & Almond Cake with Orange-Caramel Peaches & Vanilla Yoghurt), I puzzled over the ingredient proportions and procedure. Was there enough fat to produce a moist cake? Was there enough flour to produce a cake that could carry its own weight? Was the egg proportion too high?
I was flipping through my well-worn copy of The Great Book of Chocolate by David Lebovitz, flagging the pages of interest, when I saw a recipe for something called a Congo Bar and realized that I didn’t know what a Congo Bar was.
Then, as I read through the recipe, it started to coalesce in my head as a Blondie loaded with chocolate chips and chopped nuts. And as good as I’m sure David’s recipe is (which came to him courtesy of the Goddess of Baked Goodness, Flo Braker), I couldn’t help remembering that I created the Best Blondie in the Universe last year around this time and even suggested loading it with chocolate chips, chopped nuts, coconut, chopped peanut butter cups and anything else you can think of. For the post, I made a Peanut Butter Caramel Sauce and dolloped that throughout the batter. So was that creation actually a Congo Bar?
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