When my grandmother passed away she left me her recipe box, her collection of Norwegian spoons, other sentimental things from my childhood and her 1950s copy of the Betty Crocker cookbook. It is dog eared, written in, splattered on and the book’s spine is held together with nothing but flour and 60 years of determination.
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Thank you to everyone to sent me baking questions on Instagram this week. There were hundreds of questions, so I’m compiling a few posts to answer as much of them as I can. This one focuses on questions about meringue and there are also posts about Baking Homemade Bread, Cake Baking and Decorating and Pies and Pie Crust, Vegan Desserts, Equipment, and more.
Find my answers and related recipes below:
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When it is hot and muggy, but you want a dessert to impress this S’mores Icebox Cake is the exact answer. All the things one loves about the classic summer camping dessert without the fire (okay, just a bit of blowtorching, but that’s too fun to resist). Graham crackers layered with caramel cream, covered in chocolate ganache, with a sprinkle of peanuts (needed the crunch and salty bits) and then topped off with toasted meringue. No baking!
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It’s 90°F in the shade and I just can’t bring myself to fire up the oven today. So, the only reasonable thing to do is make a 4th of July Baked Alaska with homemade ice cream and top it with flaming meringue. If you don’t want to make your own ice cream, then just get your favorite store-bought brand and layer them up in a loaf pan. I used strawberry, coconut, and blueberry ice creams to create the red, white, and blue stripes. Okay, they’re pink, cream and purple, but the intention was right and I say close enough.
Update 1/19/23: This post lead to a dream come true for me. Dorie Greenspan is one of my favorite humans and the baker/cookbook author who has had a profound influence on my career. When she asked me to participate in her New York Times article about Baked Alaska, I gleefully accepted. Dorie had been reading about the oldest woman alive, a nun named Sister Andre, who was 117 years old at the time and had proclaimed her love of baked Alaska. Dorie flipped the colors of my baked Alaska to better represent Sister Andre’s home in France. Yesterday Dorie wrote to me again, this time to share that Sister Andre had passed away, she was 118 years old. In honor of her exquisitely long life, well lived, I made this Chocolate and Coffee Baked Alaska, using ice cream and bits and pieces from my pantry. RIP Sister Andre!
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This Blood Orange Creamsicle Semifreddo was inspired by one of my first pastry mentors, Claudia Flemming. Her book, The Last Course, was a collection of desserts she created for the venerable restaurant, Gramercy Tavern, in New York.
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Purple Sweet Potato Pie with a mound of an Italian meringue inspired by Esther Williams (anyone younger than me will have to google her). I was gifted a box of super fun produce by my friend Chadwick Boyd and in the selection from Frieda’s were a pair of bright purple sweet potatoes. I knew immediately that they would be pie.
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