Jacques Pepin's Fast Food My Way includes several light, flavorful desserts. Here is a fresh pineapple simmered in a caramel sauce and sprinkled with pistachios. Simple cookies garnish the fruit providing a crisp bite complimenting the pineapple.
Frango Cafe (on the Seventh Floor of Marshall's Fields Macy's on State Street) in Chicago has several fun desserts. This one is a variation on the camping classic sandwiching toasted marshmallow and chocolate bars between graham crackers. The purist would find the ratios out of balance in the Frango version; it still tasted good and was fun to try!
I found this recipe in Moosewood's Simple Suppers cookbook. It is a good, easy way to make a variation on the Thai sticky rice with mango dessert. The tapioca has coconut milk and lemon zest flavoring it and is good on its own. Adding the mango and/or strawberry creates a beautiful dish.
Using the basic recipe for roasting fruit from A New Way to Cook, we served these roasted pears with vanilla ice cream. The roasting juice was Orange Blossom honey and vanilla with a bit of water -- very simple!
Ahh... Sherry Yard does it again! What a fantastic dessert! This gingerbread financier cake is served with whipped cream and dried cranberries. There's a great addition of lemon zest in this cake which is an unexpected, delightful surprise.
Baked using the recipe from Jameson's Border Cookbook, a trusted and loved source of recipes, this Mexican chocolate cake is an amazing experience. Mexican chocolate, such as Ibarra or Mayordomo, have a different taste than traditional bittersweet found in the US and Europe. There is a hint of almond and cinnamon that is delicious. I've decided this is now my favorite chocolate cake.
What a celebratory dessert! Angel food cake, ice cream, and homemade cherry sauce result in a delicious dessert.
For this Rhubarb Custard Tart, I followed Cresent Dragonwagon's Passionate Vegetarian recipe. The crust is particularly worth mentioning, even though it isn't in the photo. Rather than being a traditional tart crust, this one is a more rustic, hearty crust. It is multigrain and has wonderful toasted sesame seeds that burst with flavor.
To celebrate Independence Day on July 4, we made homemade ice cream and topped it with strawberry sauce and with cherry sauce. For the ice cream recipe, we turned to Sherry Yard's wonderful dessert cookbook.
This fruit plate was a long-anticipated breakfast dish. The sliced nectarines, raspberries, and strawberries were sprinkled lightly with sugar and then dribbled with fresh lemon juice. I had intended to serve the fruit as a dessert plate but then had gotten full before dessert. The flavor combination was described in Deborah Madison's Savory Way in a section that includes other simple dessert/fruit ideas that highlight the tastes in fabulous combinations.
This dessert was the finishing touch to our salad dinner on Tuesday night. Fresh raspberries, drop biscuits left from breakfast on Memorial Day, and decadent, freshly whipped cream combined to make variation on raspberry shortcake.
Back from a trip to the Texas / Mexico Rio Grande Valley, I am inspired to fix some Border food. This flan was an indulgence and immensely enjoyable.
These two blueberry scones were crispy on the edges but melt-in-your-mouth luscious. I expected them to rise more than they did -- I'll have to try them again and see what happens...
This photo is from a couple of weeks ago. When I was making treats for the staff meeting, I had extra dough from the base of the raspberry bars and so made sugar cookies. They were so light and flaky. I pulled out this dog shape and a little lion since it wasn't near any holiday.
An attractive and simple fruit dish! The Golden Delicious apple is baked at a low temperature on a cabbage leaf after being oh-so-lightly sprinkled with lemon juice and cinnamon-sugar. The apple remained crisp and crunchy and was infused with the sweetness and flavor of the topping.
A week or so ago, we had this for a special dessert. We had angel food cake (naturally fat free by the way), with whipped cream (not fat free...) and raspberries. Yum!
At work we have a list where we're assigned to bring treats for the monthly staff meeting. It only comes around once or twice a year, for which some people are very happy even though it is fine to buy something. I decided to bake! Here are raspberry breakfast bars from Nancy Silverton's Pastries from the La Brea Bakery and Meltaways with Lemon Curd from The Secrets of Baking: Simple Techniques for Sophisticated Desserts. Smashing!
Well, this looks better than it tasted unfortunately. I'm not sure why it turned out so dry... It was immensely helped by the mascarpone frosting and the raspberry sauce.
As a treat the other evening, I decided to try a new-to-me technique for batter. This cupcake recipe is based on a technique called folding. And it was much more directive then the way I learned to do it in junior high "home ec" class! The cupcakes turned out great (much better than the cake I tried more recently! which I hoped to send to work with Bill.)
Oh, how delightful! I've recently started learning how to make souffles. The first I tried were oatmeal souffles and it was like eating oatmeal-flavored air. The one pictured here is flavored with a banana-rum sauce and chopped Valrhona chocolate. It is just out of the oven and will shortly be served with a chocolate sauce. Yum!
