Happy Birthday, Kristen!

My sous chef, Kristen, loves her birthday more than any person I've ever met. I quickly learned this last July after realizing that her birthday celebration went on for several weeks. We now jokingly (or not so jokingly...) say that she celebrates her birthday month.

Birthday Gifts: She's also a cat lady

Kristen also hates cake,  loves ice cream cake, and I happen to love making ice cream cakes. I first started making them when I was a cook at Maialino and was tasked with the job of making one of our favorite cook's going-away cake. The hardest part was figuring out what that Cool Whip-like frosting was, but once I cracked that mystery, it was no time before I was frosting the cake in the meat freezer, sprinkles flying everywhere, all over Lady Gaga's food (that's a story for another day).

Last year for her birthday, I quickly threw together an octopus ice cream cake, but this year I had time to plan. Because Kristen loves owls, I decided to make an owl-shaped cake. You need to work very quickly when it comes to ice cream cake (especially in the month of July!) and my decorating options were kind of limited. On top of that, a major project popped up this week (more on that in the future) and I had limited spare time. She had made me an amazing Wall-E cake for my birthday this year, so I made sure to make the time to get her cake completed...especially since she had been dropping hints to everyone that she wanted a cake for weeks prior.

I stashed the cake in the far depths of the walk-in freezer, hoping that she wouldn't snoop. Saturday was finally the big day, and we gave her the cake during our pre-shift meal. I wouldn't say she was surprised (...Kristen, were you snooping?), but she was definitely really happy. Cutting the monster was a challenge. The cake was 4 inches tall and a solid ice cream brick. We have a huge staff, and it was a huge cake!

After a long night at work, pickleback shots

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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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