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.

Satisfaction is an Investment

A couple months ago, Sarah was over for a visit while I was cooking.  She had just made some seitan from scratch, and we talked about fake meat and my history of a disappointing experience cooking with it. 

If I buy something that is highly seasoned and processed, the fake meat equivalent of a Dorito, then I enjoy it just fine, as I do all junk food.

But if I took something in its basic form – say, plain tofu – and tried to cook with it, I invariably seemed to end up with that kind of thin-tasting, unsatisfying meal that, until recently, had been the hallmark of cooking for myself.  

Prior to…well, really, the learning experience that has been this blog, most of my cooking experience has resulted in an end product that has been as hearty and satisfying to eat as a stick of celery.

Is it food?  Sure.  It has volume, texture, some kind of flavor.  But on the Hearty Satisfaction Scale, it’s about a 2.

Maybe it is all a question of umami. 

While I do eat seafood now, my cooking life has always been primarily vegetarian and often lo-cal focused.  When you cook primarily vegetarian/lo-cal food, it’s just not…automatic that what you produce will click with the savory/heart/umami receptors in your brain. 

This is what cooking very often seemed to result in for me.  It’s also one of the reasons why – despite my interest – I never stuck with it until I had a blog. At least with a blog, I could write about my failures and feel creatively fulfilled, even if the food was one big vat of celery-stick disappointment.

Until the past couple of months.  Something has happened with my cooking.  I think it started right after the Thanksgiving Thanksgiving Dessertaganza.

The President of the Debate Club and her hubs were here right after the New Year.  She’d last been here at the end of September.  I cooked for her then and I cooked for her this trip and she could taste a difference.  

The story of Mama Cass getting hit on the head with a pipe and expanding her vocal range is most likely apocryphal.  But I feel like the story, even if it’s untrue, is an illustration of a truth, which is that sometimes you toil and toil and make no progress, then suddenly experience tremendous progress that just feels like it happened TO you as opposed to being the result of any work on your part.

I think this maybe has happened with my cooking, some kind of development that, like most things in my life, I unthinkingly stumbled into, got it to work and then retroactively articulated it to myself. 

The epiphany: to a person with my sorts of taste buds, (ta da!) satisfaction is an investment.

What does that mean?  Basically that if, like me, in order to feel satisfied you’re going to need some richness, some umami action, some depth and body to your food, it isn’t going to come cheap.

It could require fat: butter or oil.  And so, if calories are a concern, this means you are spending them on satisfaction and ergo won’t have as much currency left over for quantity. 

This is an important distinction for me, because, as I wrote about recently, sometimes the main thing I do want is quantity.  I want a big bowl of something, not a little sliver of savory or a ramekin of richness.  I am hungry in such a way that only an actually large physical volume of food will make me feel satisfied.  So I need a bunch of vegetables with a little bit of something on top of it, or something else.

But if what I’m looking for is that complex umami action, then that I could eat my way through that bowl of vegetables and feel like I missed the boat.  So if that’s what my hankering is for, maybe it is the time to spend the calories on butter.

At other times, the investment is time, as in the case of making stock.

I have the patience of a cranky toddler.  In my cooking world of days past, making stock – 45 minutes for ONE ingredient in something else??? – seemed beyond the pale.  God just buy a box of it.  Then I found Mark Bittman's Roasted Vegetable Stock.   (His version is here, my go-to version with a couple of tweaks is below.)

It’s actually even more time-consuming than a regular stock in that one must roast the veggies for around 45 minutes.  But for some reason, Bittman’s description convinced me to try it once, and after that, I was convinced to continue making it all the time.

Where previous all-veggie soups or stews started out with the highest of hopes, only to end up watery-tasting and being eaten out of sheer duty only, things I made with this stock were satisfying in a way I previously associated only with eating out. 

Ergo, now it’s a staple in the Three-Bowls kitchen.  I make and freeze it on a regular basis. 

One of my tweaks from Bittman’s original to double the mushrooms.  I don’t feel like it makes it particularly mushroomy, just that it adds to the overall savoryness.  I use it as a base for almost every vegetarian soup or stew that I make, cook grains in it if there isn’t a lot of flavoring in the recipes, etc. 

If you cook a lot of vegetarian food and also find yourself slightly underwhelmed by your home-cooked stuff compared to processed food or what you eat out, try this and see if it might make a little difference.  While it is a time commitment, this cranky toddler finds it worth it.  

Tofu photo via Flickr user Rick.

Garde Manger

The Prez and I ate out a lot during her visit, but I also forced her to endure a few of my cook-a-thons...

(The Prez by hour two or so of a cook-a-thon.)

...and therefore my cooking.

At the end of the visit, we were reviewing our eating out and the Prez also gave me some constructive feedback on my cooking.

The one area, she felt, where I do best is in my salad making. She said my dressing of salads is the culinary equivalent of a “sexy negligee.” She said she and her husband can’t seem to get it together with salads. Her hub’s style is more “ratty overcoat” and hers is “naked.” But I apparently hit the sweet spot with my dressing amount and the actual construction of the salad.

What is odd is she is the third separate person to say this in my lifetime, and considering how few opportunities I’ve actually had, cumulatively, to cook for people, this is not an insignificant proportion. So maybe there is something to it.

I think what happens is that I tend to always want MORE of everything. But I REALLY hate over-dressed salad. So that tension between my natural tendency towards excess and the one time I genuinely desire restraint seems to actually work.

Also: tongs. Not salad tossers. Regular metal tongs and really TURN those suckers over and over. If there’s extra dressing in the bottom of the bowl, I use those tongs to hold the salad in place while I pour out the extra dressing into the sink.

The weekend after the Prez left, I went to the West Seattle Farmers Market with Carolyn and Will, and then we cooked a late lunch back at their house. I was put in charge of making the bread salad.

I didn’t create it, just followed Will’s direction, but after the Prez’s comments, I felt a great deal of pressure.

The Italian name for this dish, Panzanella, comes from a word meaning “little swamp.” Meaning – the desired texture and…sogginess of this dish takes it to the very edge of the thing I fear most: overdressing. Could I achieve an appropriate texture without taking it too far?

I followed my usual fearful and cautious dressing process (described in the recipe post below), but in deference to the intentions of the dish, I did add one small glug of olive oil and balsamic more than I would have normally.  Despite this wild abandon, I was pleased with how the dish ultimately turned out, and Will and Carolyn, unbidden, commented that they both enjoyed my execution.

Phew! Since baking is iffy and protein is a mystery, it’s nice to know there is one station in the kitchen where I might have some consistent success.

I made one salad I liked a lot while the Prez was here, and I am posting the recipe for Sorrel Salad below.