Summer Menu Changes!

Blondie with fresh berries we ran as a special

I always proclaim that I prefer fall baking to summer baking. It's not that I don't like summer's bounty of fruit, per se, but to me, better baking occurs when that's stripped. With fruit, you don't want to get in the way of the fruit. Good fruit can be a dessert in and of itself (although I'm having a hard time convincing myself of that right now...stuck in my apartment with no chocolate and only grapes) and you need to be delicate to not mask or overpower the fruit.

Original strawberry dessert

Sometimes I start out with what I think is a good idea, to only realize it is in fact not a great idea, and go on to formulate an even better one. This was the case with my strawberry dessert for this season. Chef Marc was down and we had been playing around with fried doughs. I initially had the thought to do a play on a strawberry shortcake, made with a zeppole and served with a basil gel and olive oil ice cream. I made all the components, and well, wasn't really excited by it. I've historically been opposed to fried desserts at a restaurant. It's partially because I think frying is a cop-out (who doesn't love anything fried) and partially because the bad memories I have from when I was a cook in a small, enclosed pastry kitchen that had a table top fryer. I'd leave every night reeking of fryer oil (perhaps why I had no luck meeting guys...) and vowing never to do that to my cooks once I was a chef. Additionally, I felt like this dessert was just too heavy. The thing about being a pastry chef at a steakhouse is you need to be prepared to follow up a 40 oz Tomahawk ribeye. With three potato side dishes. Most people who visit American Cut do not adhere to the warning to save room for dessert. With that in mind, I try to keep my desserts on the lighter side (not all of them, but most of them) and a fried piece of bread dough with an oil-based ice cream just didn't fit the bill.

Strawberry Ice Cream Cake

Back to the drawing board, I almost immediately thought of doing a strawberry and olive oil ice cream cake. I am obsessed with frozen desserts. Probably unhealthily so. I love the textures and temperature differences they add to a dessert. As a kid, the only birthday cake I ever wanted was an ice cream cake from Carvel, with those giant gel-blob balloons on it. I set out to make a lighter, grown-up version of the cake I loved so much as a child. I used strawberry and olive oil semifreddos (Italian for semi-frozen, essentially a frozen mousse) to give the cake a lighter feel. I guess that makes the term "ice cream cake" a misnomer, but it's easier for guests to visualize that than "semifreddo cake." I added layers of basil-soaked sponge cake and homemade Nilla wafers mixed with dehydrated strawberries. This gets molded into a giant cake and sliced for individual portions. Completed, it's 9 layers of semifreddos, cookie crumbs, and cake served with strawberries tossed with a little sugar, basil and mint and garnished with tiny mint and vanilla meringues. It is quite possibly one of my favorite desserts I've ever made. As I was cutting the cake Saturday night, I felt compelled to eat every piece of scrap. Maybe not the best decision I've made for my body all week, but delicious.

When I came up with my mascarpone cheesecake recipe back in the winter, it took somewhere between 25 and 30 attempts to perfect it. It was only supposed to be on for that season, but then Chef Marc declared it the best cheesecake he ever had, and it hasn't budged from the menu since. The components change seasonally, with its current iteration being cherry. Initially, I wanted to do sour cherries, but they proved to be impossible to find in South Jersey, so I went with sweet, dark cherries. It seemed natural to have the crust be a chocolate graham and to pair it with a cherry sorbet, made with fresh puree. Our corporate chef, Chris, had seen this idea to make a chocolate sauce out of equal parts sugar, cocoa, and water, making it like a light caramel and then deglazing with the cocoa and water. It tastes exactly like a liquid Oreo. The dish, overall, is super sexy with the contrast of colors: a deep blood red gelee on top of the pale cheesecake.

Almond Poundcake

I also worked on an almond poundcake with a stone fruit compote (I used peaches and nectarines) paired with a bourbon sweet tea ice cream that I think will appear later in the summer. These three desserts really made me rethink my stance on summer fruit desserts and got me excited about the possibilities. Now I think the problem is there are so many fruits available in such a limited amount of time and only 7 desserts on my menu!

Current pastry menu at American Cut

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Photos & Stories from Macy's DeGustibus Event

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a cooking demo at the Macy's De Gustibus school with Chef Marc. Because he's pretty much a "celebrity" chef, Marc gets invited to do a lot of various events, appearances, and classes. The event was an American Cut preview event because....we're opening an American Cut in NYC!!! This is GIANT news that I could not be more excited to share, especially since I will be moving back to be the pastry chef! More about that later!

Paramount Hotel

I got up to NYC the day before the event and checked in at The Paramount Hotel, a hotel owned by American Cut's parent company, LDV. Beautiful hotel, wish I could have spent more time there, but we were super busy with prepping for the next day. I headed downtown to Chef's restaurant, Marc Forgione, to begin preparing for the De Gustibus event. We did 5 courses in total, with dessert being the last. For dessert, we made my mascarpone cheesecake with a tangerine gelee. This cheesecake has been on the menu at Cut in various forms since the winter; currently it's paired weth a rhubarb Campari gelee and rhubarb fennel sorbet.

Here's the deal about the Forge kitchen... It is really tiny. And not so well-equipped. With low ceilings, a lot of humidity, and a walk-in refrigerator that feels like a cave. It's really incredible how they manage to turn out consistently incredible food with the resources they have. Kudos to the staff who works there on a daily basis. They managed to clear off a good amount of space for me, so my prep was no problem...Until I had to bake the cheesecakes in what appeared to be a large toaster oven. Unaccustomed to the way that oven worked, my cheesecakes swelled, and I had to perform some "surgery" on them the next day to give me enough room to put the gelee on top. A small problem that cost me at least an hour of sleep because I like to over stress about everything.

Showing how to mix the cheesecake

Mascarpone Cheesecake

Chef Marc in action

Wednesday was the day of the event and we met at Forge to do some last minute preparations and pack up to drive over to Macy's Herald Square. When we finally beat the traffic and got there, Chef Marc attempted to give me the keys to his brand new SUV to park it. Here's all you need to know about my driving skills: They are not good. I quickly handed them off to our chef de cuisine, Quincy, and assumed navigation responsibilities.

When we got in the DeGustibus kitchen, our hosts Sal (the owner/director of De Gustibus) and Emeril (the kitchen's lead chef) could not have been nicer or more accommodating. I'd seriously like to go back every week just to hang out with them. We unloaded all of our mise en place and got ready for guests to arrive. The first four courses were a blur with Chef showing the attendees how to prepare some of Cut's signature dishes: everything bagel gourgeres, shrimp cocktail, the OG caesar salad, and Tomahawk/chili lobster surf & turf. Before I knew it, it was time for me to hit the stage to assist Chef Marc with the dessert course. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous. I'm used to being behind the scenes making the desserts, not on stage in front of an audience.

Fire power, unmolding cheesecakes

As soon as the lady in the front row yelled out "You're so pretty!" (did I mention there were wine pairings with each of the courses...?), I felt calmer, and Sal, Chef, and myself began to converse about the desserts at American Cut, our process, and the cheesecake we were preparing (which the audience got to eat while we were demoing). We told the story of how it took over 20 attempts to perfect the recipe.


Overall, the event was a big success. I personally had so much fun, and I hope that I get to do another event at De Gustibus in the future. So onto my bigger news... I will be moving back to NYC in a couple of months to open our second location of American Cut! The restaurant will be located on Greenwich St. in Tribeca (only a block away from where I got my restaurant start at Locanda Verde!) and will be opening sometime in late summer. As much as I've enjoyed my time in Atlantic City, I am anxious to get back to NYC which feels like "home." I have a couple more months though to soak up all the UV rays I can.

Group Shot

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Menu Process: Revisions, Revisions, Revisions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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