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Dessert - The Polyphonic Dessert Blog


mktye

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So I am thinking about making the above cake again.  I thought about subbing zucchini for the banana, as I don't have any bananas and have a huge zucchini that I think will be best shredded.  I will post in the comments of the cake, but anyone have any thoughts on this not being a good idea?

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I am currently having way too much fun with the Washington Post cookie issue.  First up was honeyed sriracha cookies - they are really different, sweet on the front end with a subtle spice that grows as you eat.  I'm also going to try my hand at the gluten-free chai-spiced snickerdoodles and the raspberry pomegranite bars.  I love that the holiday season gives me a good excuse to bake a zillion cookies and then share them with colleagues and friends.  :D

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Going back to comments made far earlier, I've been completely wowed by the chocolate bars in a panera chococlate pastry.   They are from guittard, arriving in a wholesale delivery, visible in this video  and delivered wholesale.

Per guittard's web site their chocolate chips and baking bars are available at Whole Foods and Wegmans.  Just wonderful chocolate.

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I had to vent somewhere, even though my lemon tea cakes turned out well for little man's class's Valentine's Day tea party, but boy, coconut flour is not easy to work with!

Although, I must say it is nice to have this option to use to accommodate for a diabetic child and a nut-allergic child in his class.

In Paleo cooking, coconut flour and almond flour are the two most common stand-ins for wheat and other grains. While almond flour used for fried chicken wouldn't be mistaken for the real thing, it can be good. I recently had a slice of homemade coffee cake made with coconut flour which was very good. Could share that recipe here if anyone is interested.

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^ The thing with both coconut and almond flours is that they add extra fat to the mix, and some recipes just don't hold up with extra fat.  (I'll spare everyone the gory details of how I know that.)  You can either dial back the butter (or coconut oil) in your regular cake-y recipes which will be a trial and error process, or find a recipe already tweaked for these flours.  European tortes, financiers, and other nut-based things are the only types I've found will convert with no clear difference in texture. 

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Planned for tonight, dessert for a friend who loves sour cherries: mini páte sucrée shells with cherry pie filling (made from sour cherries I froze last summer).  I made rather too much páte sucrée, so I cut out some rounds, then cut heart shapes out of half the rounds, and baked.  Today I'm going to sandwich them with ganache, then fill the heart-shaped holes with a little cherry filling.  Did a test run last night from the heart-shaped cookies; tasted like Pepperidge Farm Milano cookies, but waaay better, and with cherry.

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Yeah, this worked.

The filling on the left and middle is chocolate ganache, and on the right is cherry pie? What do you call these delectable treats? Oh, wait a minute: You're going to have ganache all the way through the milddle, and then fill the empty portion of the top heart with cherry pie, having a chocolate-ganace sour-cherry-pie cookie? YUM! Will you have a couple of extras?

I vaguely remember you saying páte sucrée is your favorite pastry crust - is that true?

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[A question as an infrequent reader, visitor, and moderator about this thread: I'm tempted, and my instinct tells me, that the previous three posts should be split off into a topic called Chocolate-Ganache Sour-Cherry Cookies, and let porcupine's recipe stand alone and be searchable. Or would that violate this thread? I'll do whatever you all want; it just seems such a waste to have things such as this buried in here when I could put links to the new posts, and have everything at most one click away. What do you want me to do? Nothing? Maybe I could work at the beginning instead of the end so it's less noticeable? I can *always* undo what I'm working on, if people don't like it. I believe being searchable and able to be found is important for both future users, and recipe authors alike, but I'm going to defer to you, and if it ain't broke, I don't want to fix it. Thoughts? The "Polyphonic Blog" was my own idea, but it really throws everything together into the same mixing bowl (the I-95 interchange project was called <<la moulinette>> in French), and doesn't give recipes such as this their due. What would Food52 do? My goal is to be efficient, usable, and cook-friendly while at the same time doing nothing to lose any group camaraderie that might have formed as a result of this thread.]

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The filling on the left and middle is chocolate ganache, and on the right is cherry pie? What do you call these delectable treats? Oh, wait a minute: You're going to have ganache all the way through the milddle, and then fill the empty portion of the top heart with cherry pie, having a chocolate-ganace sour-cherry-pie cookie? YUM! Will you have a couple of extras?

I vaguely remember you saying páte sucrée is your favorite pastry crust - is that true?

The picture shows stages of assembly.  Left: ganache spread on a páte sucrée cookie; center: a cutout cookie placed on top; right, the heat-shaped hole filled with cherry pie filling.  What do I call them?  I dunno... "something I whipped up to bring to my friend who loves sour cherries"?  I don't name my creations...  except I do actually have one known in a circle of friends as "Erika's birthday cake" (six layers of devils food cake with raspberry buttercream filling and chocolate buttercream icing).

Páte sucrée is not my favorite, but it has its applications.  I'm nuts for páte brisée, and use it a lot.  It's more versatile.

[A question as an infrequent reader, visitor, and moderator about this thread: I'm tempted, and my instinct tells me, that the previous three posts should be split off into a topic called Chocolate-Ganache Sour-Cherry Cookies, and let porcupine's recipe stand alone and be searchable. Or would that violate this thread? I'll do whatever you all want; it just seems such a waste to have things such as this buried in here when I could put links to the new posts, and have everything at most one click away. What do you want me to do? Nothing? Maybe I could work at the beginning instead of the end so it's less noticeable? I can *always* undo what I'm working on, if people don't like it. I believe being searchable and able to be found is important for both future users, and recipe authors alike, but I'm going to defer to you, and if it ain't broke, I don't want to fix it. Thoughts? The "Polyphonic Blog" was my own idea, but it really throws everything together into the same mixing bowl (the I-95 interchange project was called <<la moulinette>> in French), and doesn't give recipes such as this their due. What would Food52 do? My goal is to be efficient, usable, and cook-friendly while at the same time doing nothing to lose any group camaraderie that might have formed as a result of this thread.]

You know that we feel differently about this.  If you make it a separate thread, it won't get many (or any) replies, won't start any discussions, and will die a slow death as it sinks to the chronological bottom of the forum.  It's arcane enough that no one will ever go searching for it.  No one is going to go searching for chocolate cherry cookies.  (Also, the index is way too crowded with small topics to be useable, but that's a different subject.)

However, if you leave the post in the Dessert thread, people will see it every once in awhile as they scroll through recent posts, looking for ideas, which is one thing I do.  I do that with the Dinner thread, too.  Someone back me up here, please.

Separate topics should be for more general things (cake, pie, cookies, etc.)  Specific dishes should only merit their own threads if they're incredibly popular or trendy.

Seriously, you need to consider the way the forum is actually being used, instead of the way you think people might use it in the future.  Your organizational sensibilities aren't going to change users' behaviors.

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...

You know that we feel differently about this.  If you make it a separate thread, it won't get many (or any) replies, won't start any discussions, and will die a slow death as it sinks to the chronological bottom of the forum.  It's arcane enough that no one will ever go searching for it.  No one is going to go searching for chocolate cherry cookies.  (Also, the index is way too crowded with small topics to be useable, but that's a different subject.)

However, if you leave the post in the Dessert thread, people will see it every once in awhile as they scroll through recent posts, looking for ideas, which is one thing I do.  I do that with the Dinner thread, too.  Someone back me up here, please.

Separate topics should be for more general things (cake, pie, cookies, etc.)  Specific dishes should only merit their own threads if they're incredibly popular or trendy.

Seriously, you need to consider the way the forum is actually being used, instead of the way you think people might use it in the future.  Your organizational sensibilities aren't going to change users' behaviors.

I worry some of this thinking will apply to the new coffee sub-forum but not sure.  It's not quite the same thing but, since the separate forum was created, the activity around coffee houses has become near moribund.  Maybe was more or less that way before when part of the main DC dining thread.  May just not be a ton of interest in it here.  Or we need to give it a few or several months. Again, not sure.

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A friend brought me a bag of Meyer lemons from California, so I had an excuse to have people over for dinner and play around with dessert concepts.  I ended up making a variation of crepes Suzette, using Meyer lemon in place of orange.  I also put a dollop of lemon filling in each crepe.  The filling was fresh ricotta and mascarpone sweetened and flavored with Meyer lemon zest.  This was an insanely rich dessert but it was tasty.

There's mascarpone left over and heavy cream on hand, and more Meyer lemons.  Thinking maybe I'll make a semifreddo and hope it keeps in the freezer for a few days.

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Making a cherry pie with frozen cherries can be problematic, and I made a basic error that I feared had messed up the pie.  The problem with pie is that you don't know if it's right until you cut into it, and since it was for guests I didn't want to cut into it early.  So I made some páte brisée and baked it as mini tarts, and while they were baking I used frozen blueberries to make a blueberry pie filling on the stove, and had blueberry tartlets as an emergency backup dessert.

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Lemon, raspberry, and blackberry trifle. I had a lemon cake layer (Nigella Lawson's Lemon Syrup Loaf Cake) in the freezer, which I turned over, swabbed with framboise, and cut into fingers for the base. I tossed on some (freakin' delicious) blackberries and raspberries, poured over vanilla-bean custard, and topped with freshly whipped cream. So delicious on a summer afternoon.

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I made a simple summer fruit cake late last week, with blueberries, plums, and cherries.  I ate the last unfrozen piece for dessert on Saturday night, topped with additional blueberries and whipped cream, served alongside a scoop of Ice Cream Jubilee's caramel popcorn ice cream.  This was very satisfying on a hot summer night and not something I would typically make.  Dinner had been cheese and crackers...

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Yesterday I finally made pizzelles with something other than anise seed. Been wanting to do this for years. This time, orange zest and ground cardamom. I formed the cookies over a dowel to make cylinders, then pretended they were cannoli shells and filled them with a mixture of sweetened ricotta cheese, shaved chocolate, and chopped pistachios. It's possible I like this better than standard cannoli shells, which are often difficult to pierce even with a fork.

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2 hours ago, Xochitl10 said:

How did it go?

Better than expected. :-) She lost interest toward the end, which was fine with me because at that point I just wanted to get the cookies done. The worst part was when she stuck her hands into egg yolks and flour. She had fun dumping ingredients into the bowl, though. And the cookies came out pretty well. :-)

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On 9/20/2017 at 6:52 AM, porcupine said:

The pawpaw-coconut semifreddo turned out great. Last two nights was pawpaw Victoria sandwich with whipped coconut cream. Still have a lot of pawpaws to use. One thing's for sure, though: dairy and coconut both tame the sharp, terpene-y taste that some pawpaws have.

Wanted you to know that the paw paw bread we had last Saturday at Restaurant at Patowmack Farms was just about the best part of the meal! The paw paws were foraged on site.  Where do you get yours?

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17 hours ago, MC Horoscope said:

Wanted you to know that the paw paw bread we had last Saturday at Restaurant at Patowmack Farms was just about the best part of the meal! The paw paws were foraged on site.  Where do you get yours?

Not far from that restaurant is an established pawpaw orchard; the owner lets people come and pick by appointment. If you'd like his contact info send me a message.

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After finishing the plum harvest for this year, I made Marian Burros' plum tart with a handful of our bounty. My niece described it as being "like a cookie," which it kind of was -- dense, with a nice crunchy crust around the edges. It was simple and delicious and went perfectly with afternoon coffee and ice cream. I think next time, I'd make it with some almond flour and possibly some spices.

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We're headed to a birthday party where the birthday boy is roasting an entire pig.

Our contribution to the feast is:

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Blueberry, olive oil and ricotta cake

1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 1/4 cups ricotta cheese
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 cup + 1 tbsp. granulated sugar
2 tbsp. grated lemon zest
3 eggs
1 pint blueberries
Confectioner's sugar

Preheat oven to 350 F.

Butter and flour a 10-inch springform pan.

Combine flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder in a small bowl. Whisk all ingredients together.

In a separate bowl, combine ricotta cheese, 1 cup granulated sugar, olive oil and 1 tbsp. lemon zest. Whisk together until smooth. Crack in eggs, one at a time. Whisk egg in before adding the next one.

Fold in flour mixture. Mix together until dry ingredients are incorporated; do not overmix.

Add batter to buttered and floured pan. Spread evenly. In a small bowl, combine blueberries, remaining lemon zest and 1 tbsp. granulated sugar. Mix well. Top cake batter with blueberry mixture.

Bake for 65 minutes in a pre-heated 350 F oven or until cake is golden brown and pulls away from the sides of the pan. Cool for 15 minutes in the pan, then transfer to a wire rack and cool a bit more. Sprinkle top with confectioner's sugar, then serve warm or at room temperature.

This recipe is sized for 8-10 people.

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On 12/9/2017 at 8:11 PM, TrelayneNYC said:

B and I are headed to a cookie party later tonight.

These are our contributions:

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Meyer lemon-ricotta bars with a Meyer lemon shortbread crust
Cream cheese cookies

 Could you post the recipe or source for the cream cheese cookies, please? I love cream cheese!!!!

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4 hours ago, dcandohio said:

 Could you post the recipe or source for the cream cheese cookies, please? I love cream cheese!!!!

Here you go:

https://food52.com/recipes/14625-cream-cheese-cookies

Their instructions say to drop the batter onto a tray by the tablespoon. The cookies pictured above are what resulted. If you want them smaller, drop them by the teaspoonful. We ended up baking in multiple batches.

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I've been on a passion fruit kick ever since I discovered frozen passion fruit purée at By Brazil in Wheaton. Since it's so acidic, passion fruit can be subbed one:one for citrus juice in a lot of applications.

My first experiment was passion fruit pie, based on key lime pie. Then I made curd, which is not only great on its own, it's a good base for other things. Combine with stiffly whipped cream and stiffly beaten egg whites for a delicate passion fruit mousse. I expect with a few tweaks the mousse will make a good semifreddo (possibly my next experiment).

Yesterday I made this vanilla cake from serious eats, with the accompanying Swiss buttercream. Since I had egg yolks left over, I made a passionfruit curd. Then I decided to use the curd as a filling in the cake but changed my mind when I realized that I didn't know how my friends felt about passion fruit, so I served it alongside. I also set aside some of the buttercream and combined it with an equal volume of curd as a test. The buttercream was stiff enough that it held the curd, et voila! passion fruit buttercream that won't slide off the cake.

That cake recipe has rather a lot of milk in it, so for a future experiment I'm going to sub coconut milk and make passion fruit buttercream to ice it, with passion fruit curd filling.

I love playing around with desserts.

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