I can’t even describe what salted butter caramel tastes like. The closest I could think of is an abrasive ‘dulce de leche’ that has a harsh overtone, but no, that’s not quite right. In fact, I’m licking away spoonful after spoonful, trying to figure out the right words to do this flavor justice.
Hm, now let’s see… I think the easiest way is to describe the experience of eating it.
It’s definitely creamy for one. Not like an orange-creamsicle creamy, but like a caramel pumpkin latte creamy that you get during the brisk days of fall. Digging the spoon into the carton is like digging your feet into sand. The ice cream gives away easily, leaving traces of a rugged trail. It’s as close to soft serve as you can get, but with the consistency of a hardened ice cream. And even when the ice cream melts, it turns into a thick, brown, golden puddle. When it refreezes, it unexpectedly retains some of its soft creaminess.
It’s also complex. When it first sits on your tongue, you can taste a strong toffee flavor. Let it linger, and that toffee turns sweet for the slightest second. In the final moment, the ice cream turns bitter, but not bitter enough to remain for the aftertaste. And the aftertaste? Well, it just tastes like pure caramel.
I love the way this custard base chills, getting thicker by the hour until it becomes reminiscent of caramel pudding. I love the way this ice cream churns, so smoothly like silk rubbing against your skin. I love the way this ice cream freezes, a shade darker than the moment before. I love everything about it, from the moment I crack and separate the yolks from the egg whites to the moment the spoon lands into my mouth. Everything about this ice cream is perfect.
Although Clare and Amy can’t see eye to eye with me on salted butter caramel ice cream, I know that Angela, Jenny, and Jungyon can. I gave them a teaser taste the night before this flavor was set to debut and it made my day just to see their eyes widen while marveling at this unknown flavor. And on the night when the ice cream did debut, we killed off a good 90% of it, going back for seconds, then thirds, and even fourths for some (ahem, Angela). Though we couldn’t finish the whole thing, we started right where we left off less than 10 hours later, for breakfast. This was so irresistible that I made a second batch… right after the three of them left.
Thank you David Lebovitz- you’ve made me a very happy girl.
In love. There are no better words to describe my feelings about this panna cotta. Creamy, silky smooth, delicate, and flavoured with intensely fragrant passionfruit syrup, it fulfils all I could ever desire in a dessert. It’s also simplicity itself to make, and perfect for summertime. The passionfruit syrup can be made a day ahead and then the panna cotta whipped up in the morning. Because it is quite rich I like to serve it in a variety of beautiful little glasses, so that everyone can choose the size that suits them. On our recent holiday at the vineyard we watched the sun set over the vines ate a delicious lamb tagine, and then sat outdoors in the cool of the evening lingering over our panna cottas, talking of love and life and the joy of friendship. Bliss..
Serves 6-10, depending on serving size
600 ml pure cream 150 ml milk 1/2 cup sugar 3 teaspoons powdered gelatine (10g) 125 ml passionfruit syrup (recipe below)
Put the cream, milk and sugar into a medium saucepan and gently bring to a simmer. Do not boil. Meanwhile, in a medium bowl add 50ml hot water to the gelatine and stir with a fork until completely dissolved. When the cream has reached simmering point, take off the heat and pour over the gelatine, mixing well. Mix in the passionfruit syrup and let cool a little before pouring into serving glasses. Put into the refrigerator to set, which will take a couple of hours. Serve plain, or with a little extra passionfruit syrup or fresh passionfruit pulp drizzled over the top.
Passionfruit syrup: put the pulp of 8 passionfruit, 1/2 cup sugar and the juice of 1 lemon and 1 lime into a small saucepan. Bring to the boil and simmer for 5 minutes. Strain through a sieve, using the back of a spoon to extract as much syrup from the seeds as possible. Keeps for 3 days in the refrigerator. Makes about 150ml.
From the beginning of the year I am willing to share with you a mirror cake and I am so glad I finally got the chance to prepare it. As strawberry season is here I prepared a strawberry and chocolate mirror cake, made with a soft dark chocolate cake at the bottom, followed by a white chocolate mousse, a strawberry jelly insert and a dark chocolate mirror glaze. This cake looks really impressive and tastes absolutely amazing.
Mirror cakes are not difficult at all to prepare and they look pretty stunning. But mirror cakes need a bit more organization than other desserts, and need to be made in advance, as mirror glazes can be poured only on chilled cakes.
If you want to try this recipe I suggest to make the strawberry jelly and chocolate cake in the morning, to let them time to cool and freeze. In the afternoon make the white chocolate mousse, assemble the cake and freeze overnight. The next day prepare the mirror glaze and once done refrigerate the cake for several hours to defrost completely before serving. Once the cake is defrosting you cam prepare the white chocolate curls if desired.
Hope you will try the recipe and let me know how it turns for you. Enjoy!
Ladurée, Pierre Hermé, Lenôtre, Dalloyau, Gérard Mulot... whisper just one of these magical names to any sweet tooth in the know and you will see eyes light up, lips twitch into a smile and the word macaron will roll gently off of the tongue, escape on a sigh. Delicate, tender and sweet, the French macaron is formed of the perfect union of a feminine froth of white meringue gently, lovingly folded into snowy powdered sugar and fine almond meal, then barely scented with whatever you choose, whatever your mood, whatever your desire. Piped out into beautiful shiny mounds, silky smooth, to puff up in the warmth of the oven and transform into perfectly domed, crisp yet tender shells, nutty and sweet. Light as air, each ethereal shell is paired with another and sandwiched around a smooth, luxurious ganache, cream or jam filling allowing for an imaginative pairing of flavors, colors, textures. Hold one tiny creation in the palm of your hand, admire the elegance, the shape and color, anticipate the taste sensation as you would a first kiss. Bring it up to your mouth, to your lips, hesitate, but only briefly, knowing that ecstasy is not far behind. Now bite down * crack * into the crisp barely there outside and find yourself pulled into a tender chewy center, a burst of flavor and you are utterly swept off your feet.
What is the fascination with these tiny treats? Macarons are all the rage these days; the food blogosphere is abuzz with recipes, information, tutorials and reviews. Everyone wants to make them, eat them. Both fanatics and the simply curious patiently stand in lines outside of pastry shops in Paris, New York, London, Toronto and cities in between; lines that wind around the block as the macaron crazed make their choice between an ever-growing number of flavors ranging from the simple (vanilla, chocolate, pistachio, cherry) to the impressive (saffron, olive oil, rose, fig, cotton candy) to the outrageous (truffle, wasabi, Foie gras, mushroom, tahini). For years the decadent, dark chocolate truffle was the perfect, romantic gift. Later, chocolatiers the world over were taking the simple, handmade chocolate and infusing cream and ganache fillings with an exotic twist by adding liqueurs, teas, flowers and spices such as pepper, fennel or ginger. Yet chocolate, no matter how we love it, is overpowering and ever-present, the added flavors simply a hint, a mere suggestion. The macaron is intriguing in its bareness: it is a pastry, a sweet, just slightly nutty confection that allows for an incredible artist’s palette of creativity, a blank canvas for almost any combination of flavors, both sweet and savory or even a little of both. There is something so special, so sophisticated and elegant about the macaron that its makers have become legend and the mystique surrounding this friandise continues to grow.
Not quite a cookie, certainly not a candy, this tiny French delicacy is a confection requiring patience, care and concentration to create. It is a delicate balancing act in which so many conditions play a heavy role: perfect measurements, oven precision, the quality of the ingredients, outside temperature and humidity, the change in any one of which can wreak havoc on the results, leaving the anxious baker in front of disastrous results: flat, cracked or gluey blobs instead of the much desired perfectly formed, light-as-air shells. A professional pastry chef working for a renowned name once confided to a friend of mine that even their bakery kitchen ended up throwing out tray after tray of collapsed shells while waiting for perfect, saleable results. Practice, in this case, does not necessarily make perfect!
Fragile, temperamental, tricky: why would the home baker want to attempt making macarons? Elegant and oh-so French, the macaron is a thing of beauty and the perfect macaron brings oohs and ahhs beyond what any other dessert brings. Yet price and availability of store-bought macs have pushed many of us to attempt making them in our own kitchens. And there is certainly something exciting in a challenge for any seasoned baker and this one may just about outdo all the others. Each step is a test from whipping egg whites into the perfect meringue to folding the batter until just the right consistency to piping the batter out in even circles, from knowing when to slide them into the oven to the neck plus ultra of them all: obtaining feet. Feet, as any well-versed macaron aficionado knows, is the tiny frill at the base of the macaron shell which appears during baking, the true sign of success.
I made my first macarons on a food blogger dare. A mac virgin, I was terrified of this daunting procedure but decided to forge ahead on instinct and bravura; I screwed up my courage, shook my proverbial fist at the challenge and dove in. These first macs were perfumed simply with a dash of violet sugar and filled with a dark chocolate violet ganache and were stunning! A piece of cake, so to speak. As were my second and third attempts in traditional coffee and chocolate espresso l. But these perfect beauties, 3 batches of them, were then followed by an epic failure and then another, shattering my confidence completely, but the bug had already bitten! Despite the ever-present risk of failure, I now make my own macarons once a month and although I have my ups and downs, my successes and utter flops, I have grown to love the sifting, whipping, folding and piping, the game of experimenting with flavors, the exhilaration of pulling a baking tray of perfect shells from the oven, the pride I feel in watching my son’s friends gobble down an entire batch and beg for more or having my husband ask if he can bring them into work, full of pride himself.
Macarons are a sophisticated gift, more romantic, more wow-inspiring than chocolate, tastier and more personal than flowers. Connoisseurs everywhere rave about the macaron’s divine, ethereal character and the astounding array of flavor possibilities. Indulge in this delicacy and you, too, may be swept away in Macaron Madness.
Why a small town in Georgia would actually want to be known as the fruitcake capital of the world is something we’ll never understand. That’s one fact most people would want to keep to themselves.
Fruit cake is easily the most hated cake in the existence of baking. It’s dense, overly sweet and surprisingly heavy for its size. Sure, some people like this seasonal baked good, but we don’t really trust them. Who in their right mind wants to eat something that looks like this:
(And to be fair, this is the best picture of fruit cake we could find.)
Here at HuffPost Taste, we like to think ourselves as food lovers, not haters. We love doughnuts and melted cheese, whipped cream and sriracha — we’ve even written them love letters. But when it comes to fruit cake, all we feel is hate. In our hearts, fruit cake does not deserve a declaration of love, but the very opposite of one. This is the anti love letter. Fruit cake, we hate you, let us count the ways.
We hate fruit cake’s fluorescent candied fruit pieces. Why must its candied fruit look radioactive? (Photo credit: Ringo Ichigo)
We hate that fruit cake looks pockmarked and diseased. And yet, it’s somehow suppose to look appetizing. (Photo credit, Flickr: jeffreyw)
Fruit cake is labeled as a cake; and this is incredibly misleading. No self-respecting cake would ever be this dense. A door stop is a better descriptor — and what most people use this seasonal baked good for. (Photo credit, Flickr: Brett Jordan)
But why? Why is it so bad?? Our best guess is because it’s aged. That’s right, fruit cake is AGED. Which is a great idea for fine wines, but clearly a terrible one when it comes to cake.
