The Best Dessert I've Ever Made: Chipotle Gingerbread, Caramel Ice Cream & Coffee Sauce

(Hey check out the Summer Ice Cream Social Poll over to the left there. I'm trying to whittle down some ice cream choices. Help me out and you will be rewarded with the warm glow of self-satisfaction!)

Elizabeth Falkner was on Top Chef Masters tonight.  She lost on the episode, but she is still a winner in my book, because one of her recipes is the base for the dish that won me the most praise of anything I've ever made.

I was involved this guy for a while who had a habit of making a lot of backhanded critical comments that I was too naive to understand were backhanded critical comments.  (The naivete, incidentally, also explains the "for a while" part of why I continued hanging around someone who liked to make backhanded critical comments to me about me.)

One time, we were talking about a meal we were eating (it was, in fact, one of the first times I had Pad Kee Mao, the Thai dish I'm still obsessed with), and he said, pointedly, "I'm not one of these people who's always saying 'This is the best thing I've ever had' but this is seriously one of the best things I've ever had."

It was about three months later, when I was no longer hanging out with him, that it hit me in one of those apropos-of-nothing waves of epiphany that you have after climbing your way out of a confusing whirlpool of a situation: he was talking about me.  Because I AM one of those people who is always saying something is the "best thing I've ever had."

And whatever, man.  I'm trying to come to grips and accept the fact that I am hyper and overenthusiastic. I'm constantly simmering over with too much too-muchness no matter how much I try to rein myself in.  I'm not cool or reserved. 

But imagine for a minute that I am.  I am a cool customer, rarely moved to effusive exuberance, to hyperbolic excess.  And imagine it is that person, that phlegmatic, calm, impassive person who is exclaiming to you: "This is the best dessert I've ever made."

  

Remember this dessert?  Of course you do, because who doesn't have an encyclopedic recall of this blog?

This is the Chipotle Gingerbread with Cinnamon-Vanilla Ice Cream and Dulce deLeche that I made for Thanksgiving last year.  And at the time, I thought, it was pretty awesome.  But I made another version of it for my Memorial Day party and you know what it was? Awesomer.

What I did this time was the Chipotle Gingerbread + Caramel Ice Cream + Coffee Sauce (So just imagine the above picture, but with a dark brown sauce.)

I didn't make up the recipes, I just made them and put them together.  But I did think of the combination all by myself, so look what I can do!

It was a huge hit. I mean HUGE. People are usually very forgiving of desserts, and sweets usually please most folks. I am used to bringing an ice cream or cake to a party and people being excited.

But I feel like there was some real genuine amazement at just how well these three flavors worked together.  My friend Jan also said it was one of the best desserts she's ever had.  Even a real live food professional, Becky of the great blog, Chef Reinvented, liked enough to tweet about it.  (Yeah, I linked to her tweet. That just happened. I did that. I can't unbecome becoming a person who linked to a complimentary tweet about herself. The slippery slope has slipped. Hemingway-esque unassuming stoic machismo is off the table as an option.)

Anyway, the great thing is, although this is a multiple recipe dish, it really isn't that hard, and totally worthwhile to consider making if you are entertaining and want a crowd-pleasing dessert.

Here are the recipes and a few other tips.

• Chipotle Gingerbread.  I do NOT use the crystallized ginger called for in the recipe.  This recipe fit into 2 12-mini muffin tins.  It is very very quick and easy, and could be made in advance. The actual cupcakes I used were, in fact, leftover from last Thanksgiving (!) that Will and Carolyn had in their deep freezer. 
• The Caramel Ice Cream could be swapped out with storebrought if you don't have a maker. 
• The Coffee Sauce is probably the only "challenging" part, just because it involved the scary caramelizing of sugar, but other than that, it's very fast to prepare.

Chipotle Gingerbread with Cinnamon-Vanilla Ice Cream and Dulce de Leche

I spent most of my adolescence and early adult years thinking I wanted to be a filmmaker. I went to NYU, made some student films, spent a lot of money on an independent short after I graduated, and then...moved back to Phoenix, AZ and did a whole lot of nothing about it.

I still thought about it, I still made vague attempts to write, even finished another short script and starting putting together the production team before that all sort of petered out.

I wasn’t doing a whole lot of anything beside being a working stiff during those years anyway, so even if it truly was My Calling, who knows if I would have been able to drag myself out of the general stupor I was in to actually make anything happen.

But here’s what my current theory is: I just couldn’t get past that it’s just so...frivolous.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad other people still do it. (Although, other than David Lynch and documentarians, I’m not generally that excited by anyone still doing it since the ripple effect of Jaws and Star Wars put an end to the Golden Years of Films by and for Grown-Ups - aka the ‘70’s).

For me, personally, though, I was just never able to quite recover from my horror at the amount of resources used in the re-creation of reality. The decadence!

That’s what I like about cooking. While it’s a stretch to think of my ice cream experimentation as anything approaching utilitarian, the idea of using my creativity to result in something people can actually eat appeals to the my more pragmatic side.  I like to aim low on Maslow's Hierarchy.

And, as another person who transferred her interest in film to food pointed out, food is also a hell of a lot more instantly gratifying. Not just for the eatin’, mind you, but also for the audience response. Elizabeth Falkner’s background in film is all over her book Demolition Dessert...

...and it's reflected in the name of her restaurants Citizen Cake and Orson.  She speaks in the below about why she loves desserts and why she made the transition from film to food.

I’ve been eyeing a lot of different recipes in her book, but the one that was jumping out at me loudest as I planned the Thanksgiving Dessertaganza was the Chipotle Gingerbread (full recipe in link) component in her Gingerbread Bauhaus. I didn’t want to do the whole composed dessert from the book, which involves pear sorbet, shards of royal icing and pomegranate gel.

But I thought the gingerbread, baked into mini-muffin tins, might make a nice tiny composed dessert topped with a little bit of something like that cinnamon-caramel ice cream we had at Poppy.

I experimented by trying to caramelize the some cinnamon sticks in the sugar in this Chow.com Caramel Ice Cream recipe. I don’t know if I actually caramelized the cinnamon, but I know I didn’t caramelize the sugar itself. Paranoid after too many caramels that went from just right to burnt in some nanosecond lost to A.D.D., I removed the cooked sugar too soon. It tasted sweet, not caramel-y.

Luckily, though, the cinnamon flavor was present, and the addition of a scraped-vanilla bean meant that a tasty cinnamon-vanilla ice cream resulted even if caramel continues to be a wild mustang I am unable to tame.

You know what I can tame, Caramel? You know who plays nice and isn’t a occasionally injurious jerk? Dulce de Leche. That’s right, I am taking advantage of NAFTA and going south of the border for my tasty light brown dessert sauce.

What do you have to do to make Dulce de Leche?

OPEN A CAN. Open a can of sweetened condensed milk, pour it into a baking dish, cover it tightly with foil, set that baking dish into a larger one filled with water, and cook it at 425 for about an hour or until it’s the color of MISBEHAVING CARAMEL.

You can also do it in a slow cooker or go the daredevil route – boil it in the can, risking explosion. (Oh.  Well, I guess this sauce is also occasionally injurious.  Hmm.  Why is making dessert sauce so high risk?)

Okay, so my composed dessert results from these three doesn’t look as good as something Elizabeth Falkner would create...

...but this is the one dessert that blew past my usual underwhelmed response to “New Favorite Thing.”

The Chipotle Gingerbread – which, incidentally, is quite quick to make – doesn't have too much heat, it’s just like a tiny extra kick to the usual spice of gingerbread. The Cinnamon-Vanilla Ice Cream is rich while not being excessive sweet, and then the smidge of Dulce de Leche adds that final bit of caramelized but not cloying sweetness that brings it all together.

And I hate to second guess myself, but you know what might even be better than Dulce de Leche with this? This Five Star Holy-Crap Coffee Dessert Sauce from Chow that I've made before, although it does require the basic caramel sauce process, so it's nowhere near as easy as the DdL.

If you’re not an ice cream maker, I would still recommend trying this. Again, the gingerbread is pretty quick to make, and the Dulce de Leche is effortless. Buy a pint of cinnamon ice cream (if you can find it) or caramel or just the best vanilla you can get and give it a whirl.