I have a terrible sweet tooth (as you may have divined if you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time), but my sweet tooth is not typical. Not for me the sweetness overload, the gooey cakes, the sugary cookies and candies. I prefer a more subtle sweetness, balanced by savory, or tart, or [...]
Entries Tagged as 'dessert'
Raspberry Meringue Bread Pudding
March 29th, 2010 · 10 Comments · Baked Goods and Desserts, Recipes
Bread pudding. The words themselves are hardly inspiring. Stodgy, pedestrian, British, with those overtones of school dining halls and hospital food. There are some truly execrable bread puddings — dry, almost crusty, with little discernible flavor other than that provided by a few sugary raisins, and no give. And frankly, most bread puddings I’ve had in even the best bakeries and restaurants have been in this mold — cut into neat squares and utterly unappetizing.
But a good homemade bread pudding is a different beast. This is spoon food, creamy and gooey and served warm from the oven in a bowl. Bread and milk and eggs and sugar combine to form an alchemy — no longer distinct elements but something altogether new and wonderful. Comforting and exciting all at once, bread pudding has the potential to hit exactly the right dessert spot.
Bread puddings can range from the basic bread and butter pudding, also known as “make a dessert from things in your pantry” to the very fancy indeed. This one is somewhere in between. It is an easy bread pudding, make no mistake about that. And most of the ingredients are in my pantry, but the basic sandwich bread and milk and eggs is kicked up a notch — the bread is a brioche (the best bread for bread pudding hands down, if you can find it), spread with a sweet and tart raspberry jam. The custard is thickened with cream and scented with the floral aromas of Tahitian vanilla extract and Amontillado sherry. And to top it off, the pudding is taken from the pedestrian to the porsche with a topping of creamy, dreamy, meringue, browned to perfection.
Sisterhood and Molasses Cookies
November 4th, 2009 · 10 Comments · Autumn, Baked Goods and Desserts, Make Ahead, Recipes
One of the things I truly love about cooking is the sense of community that’s created around food. Not just the bloggers and their social media, the chefs and their late night hangouts or even the people around your dinner table, but the broader community that comes from the sharing of recipes. Every time I cook something from a recipe, I’m connected to the hundreds (thousands) of people who have cooked the recipe before (or something very similar. In cooking, like in so many things, there is nothing new under the sun) and when I am finding myself particularly prone to flights of fancy, I imagine sitting in a shadowy quilting bee with all the people who are sharing the secrets of the kitchen with me….
Of course, the best kind of recipes are ones that come from people you actually know, because not only are they approved by a source you trust, the act of cooking that recipe connects you to the recipe’s giver … These molasses cookies,which come from my friend Kas, are a recipe like that. Every time I make these molasses cookies, which are chewy in the middle, slightly crisp around the edges, and ridiculously, unbelievably “more”ish, I think of Kas, and it makes the cookies taste just that much sweeter.
Tags: baking·cookies·dessert·sweets·Vegetarian
