I'm a total perfectionist. I think to be a pastry chef, you have to be extremely type A. There are so many painstaking aspects of this job. Hours of spreading tuiles (those delicate cookies used as garnish), measuring and cutting cakes with no slice deviating in size from the rest, delicately forming sugar flowers to decorate cakes with. When I set out to develop my new menu for the restaurant, the process was especially intense.
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| Assembling the tarts |
I had presented my menu tasting, but only had a week to put that together. In the weekend following the tasting, I worked pretty relentlessly with our corporate chef, Chris, to perfect three of the desserts to ready them for the menu. All were close, but needed slight tweaking on plating and garnishes to make them better. We did this in addition to a busy weekend of dinner service, and at the end of it, I was exhausted, but it was well-worth it seeing how much they improved. I wish I had before and after pictures, but when I was in NYC doing the tasting it was too frantic to take pictures.
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| Apple Tart |
The first of the three is a caramel apple tart. To do something that simple, each component needs to be perfect. I paired the tart with a cider caramel, cinnamon ice cream, and a candy apple chip. The chip is particularly interesting to me. It started out as a candied apple peel and evolved to this chip. To make it, I cook the apple slices in a candy apple simple syrup, partially dehydrate them, and then flash fry them. The resulting chip is crunchy, sweet, and apple-y.
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| Trying the cheesecake with different sauces |
The second is a pumpkin spice cheesecake. It's definitely that time of year when everyone wants to eat and drink pumpkin everything. The cheesecake is enrobed in a gingersnap shell and served with a toasted marshmallow sauce and creme fraiche sorbet.
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| AC Car Bomb |
The last has proven to be the restaurant's most popular of the new ones, the AC Car Bomb (dessert name courtesy of Chef Marc). It's a chocolate bread pudding (made with chocolate brioche we make in-house) with Guinness ice cream, a banana Jameson butterscotch and bruleed bananas. Chef Marc is known for his
banana Jameson, Jameson whiskey that is mixed with sliced bananas, set aside to macerate for a period of time, strained and then served. The resulting whiskey is not overtly banana-ish, but the bananas filter the rough edges of the Jameson and give it a smooth feel. I'm not big on brown liquors, and I even like to drink the banana Jameson straight. What I love about the Car Bomb dessert is how nicely all the flavors play off each other. Each component is good on its own, but together they're even better. The sauce comes in a shot glass and is poured table side.
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| Cracker Jack Sundae |
Tonight we debuted a fourth new dessert to the menu, a Cracker Jack Sundae. It's popcorn ice cream (we make all our ice cream in house as well), caramel sauce, caramel popcorn, peanut brittle and vanilla bean whipped cream. I like being able to play around with traditional "American" sweets and presenting them in a new or different way that people aren't expecting. The popcorn ice cream is definitely a surprise to most people. It's a flavor you've had many times before, but in a different form.
There's just one more dessert that needs to be worked on before it hits the menu, a candy bar cake. Then I have some specials I'm working on, holiday menu items, and some holiday-related projects.
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