Panna Cotta Perfected

| Recipe

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have wanted to master a panna cotta, and I think I have settled on the right recipe for me. Ultimately, every recipe is some variation on the ratio of heavy cream to milk (or any other combination of dairy fats), with sugar, gelatin and flavoring.

For this particular version, I first made a raspberry fruit pureegelée(fruit puree slightly diluted with water and apricot nappage, to taste, with gelatin) and let it set in the mini cups on a slant. Then I made my panna cotta, using the recipe below, and poured it into the cups upright. Finally, I topped with some almond granola and a fresh raspberry. I originally intended to make a white chocolate basket for the raspberry but ran out of time. The result was still quite tasty and pretty!

Panna Cotta
Makes about 28 fl. oz.

Ingredients:
  • 2 cups (473 mL) heavy cream
  • 1½ cups (355 mL) milk
  • 5 Tbsp (~63 g) granulated sugar
  • 4 sheets gelatin, bloomed (about one packet or one tablespoon of powdered gelatin)
  • 1 vanilla bean (split and scraped)
Directions:

  1. Heat heavy cream, milk, sugar and scraped vanilla beans until the sugar dissolves. Add the bloomed gelatin.
  2. Cool in ice bath until lukewarm or just cool. This step helps prevent the fats from separating out into a two-layered panna cotta.
  3. Pour into molds and chill for about 4 hours or overnight (although the longer you chill, the harder the panna cotta will be).
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Pastry School Recap | Units 10/13/15 Plated Desserts

| Pastry School

Something about plated desserts feels classy and elite to me. If I were to feel like a true pastry chef, I feel like I would have to master the art of these. However, I doubt I would ever work in the pastry kitchen of a restaurant. So, our dessert menu project from pastry school will have to suffice for life experience.

We had three units of individual plated desserts. Three! That is a lot, and I think most of us were a little sick of them by the end. I could fill pages of this blog with photos of visually stunning dessert plates, but I’ll stick with the ones I concocted for our dessert menu project, for which I created my imaginary dessert restaurant, Spiked, featuring cocktail-inspired desserts.
(Disclaimer: Again, neither this restaurant nor the URL is real.)
From my menu, the chef selected the Margarita and the Rum & Coke for actual presentation and taste-testing.
The Rum & Coke was intended to be a glass full of brown sugar rum ice cream sandwich cubes, coated or sprinkled with chocolate pop rocks, with a side of sour cherry compote and cherry cola sorbet. Unfortunately, the classroom fridge and freezer blew out the night before presentation, which melted everyone’s ice cream. So in a pinch, I remade the rum ice cream and scooped it into the cup, sprinkled with chocolate pop rocks, and inserted a chocolate tuile straw for decor. Tastewise, it was still a success!

The Margarita was my favorite, and is also the concept that inspired my recent eggnog bombe. This dessert is a citrus tequila mousse bombe with Grand Marnier crème brûlée and a lime cookie. On the side is an orange tequila sauce, lime cookie crumbs, crème anglaise and a candied lime.

Please excuse the iPhone photos! That’s all I had available in class.

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Office Bytes | Holiday Eggnog Bombe

| Holidays

Happy holidays! My 2015 new year’s resolution is to establish a new Milo’s Bonbons website/storefront (with a blog section to keep providing updates of course). But before we bid farewell to 2014, here is one more post from the holiday season — my plated dessert version of the classic eggnog.

This bombe is made with a rum crème brûlée tucked inside a crème anglaise Bavarian cream dome, on top of a cinnamon nutmeg shortbread. I plated this with a pear compote, shortbread crumbs and a curled wafer for my office holiday party potluck. This dessert was great while it was still cold and semi-frozen. Admittedly once it hit room temperature, I thought the flavors and textures were a little flat. (Certainly not as interesting as my original incarnation of this dessert as a citrus margarita bombe, which I created for my pastry school plated dessert project. I’ll recap that project shortly!) Then again, I don’t actually consume eggnog so I’m probably not the best judge for what eggnog should taste like . . .

But, this was a good opportunity to practice the preparation and service of a plated dessert. Main takeaway: stick with simple baked goods for an office potluck to avoid sleep deprivation.

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