i went to rome for the gelato

If I'm being honest, the main reason I wanted to go to Rome on vacation was to try as much gelato as possible. That and drink an unreasonable amount of coffee. Below I present a humble list of the places I went and the flavors I ate while in Rome.


san crispino
flavors: pistachio, caramel meringue, stracciatella, chocolate, honey, crema, pear ginger

This was the first place we went because there was an outpost just two streets away from our hotel. The snooty way they keep their gelato---in deep silver bowls with lids---matched the snooty attitude of the workers. I've read several times that this is the favorite gelato of the masses and it made sense once we tried it. Their gelato lacked any assertive flavors and left no impression on me. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. The caramel meringue was their best effort. I enjoyed the bitter caramel and sweet and crunchy meringues. But the rest just failed to impress.


giolitti
flavors: caramel, coconut, dark chocolate, mint

This place gets a lot of play in the blogosphere as well. After my visit, I wasn't sure why. I know you can't pass judgment by tasting only four of Giolitti's extensive offerings, but all four were so loathsome to me, I just couldn't see plunking down another 7 euros to give them a second chance. The caramel tasted like they melted down a bunch of those cheap butterscotch hard candies from Brach's, added some milk, and froze it. The coconut was overly sweetened and the mint assertively flavored with what tasted like a bad mint extract (or Altoids, perchance?). The chocolate was the only passable flavor.


cremaria monteforte
flavors: hazelnut, fior de latte, stracciatella, chocolate hazelnut, melon, yogurt, chocolate mousse, almond

The gelato here was consistently delicious. The hazelnut was outstanding, as well as the melon, chocolate hazelnut, yogurt, stracciatella and chocolate mousse. The fior di latte had a light, pure flavor, but was a bit icy. I expected the almond to have as intense a flavor as the hazelnut, but it paled in comparison, which was a great disappointment.


fior di luna
flavors: chocolate hazelnut, pistachio, rice, chocolate chile, coconut and pine seed

There was a sign here that talked about the importance of sourcing ingredients for the gelato they made. And it showed in the purity of the flavors---everything we tried was delicious. The pistachio was my favorite, followed by the pine seed, which leaned pleasantly toward the savory side. My only complaint was that the chile was a little too spicy. Chris gave up after two spoonfuls because it was starting to make him choke.


old bridge
flavors: coffee, rice, nutella, ricotta with pistachio croquante

This shop did not blow me away. The nutella was chalky and they had dropped a few pieces of Baci candy in it by mistake because the Baci flavor was placed right next to the Nutella. The coffee tasted off (maybe flavored with extract) and the rice tasted like they just folded in some cooked rice, which was odd. But then there was the ricotta. SO DELICIOUS. It wasn't overly sweet and the caramelized pistachios were crunchy and bitter. This was one of the best flavors I tried during our whole trip.


fata morgana
flavors: basil, banana with walnut croquante, honey, lemon curd, baklava, tiramisu

If you go to only one gelateria in Rome, you have to go to this one. The flavors were crazy and all delicious. This is the place with the much-hyped Kentucky flavor----chocolate mixed with tobacco (didn't try that one, though, because it's not my style). The basil was light and refreshing and the lemon curd intensely tart. Wished I could have tried the licorice, the white chocolate pine nut or the poppy seed, too. Sigh.


caffe san eustache
I went here for a cappuccino because it reputedly has the best coffee in Rome. I actually had a hard time finding the coffee underneath the stiff, rubbery blanket of foam on my drink. I went back and ordered a straight up espresso and I liked it much better. After that, I stuck to ordering espresso, so I could better judge the taste of the actual coffee. And it was all terrific, no matter where we stopped. I am missing Rome's coffee already...

the cake we cut in half

vanilla cupcake cake with nutella filling
This cake for a Sex and the City themed bridal shower was inspired by a fairly famous and ridiculously expensive purse. Anthony used the giant cupcake pan to bake the cake, which made getting the right shape quite simple. The real problem came in recreating the tiny, metallic crystals that cover the actual purse.

We tried using sanding sugar first. It was impossible, though, to get the definition we needed to make our "crystals" look authentic.

Next up, piping tiny royal icing circles all over the cake---translate"pain in the ass." We finished half of one side and made an executive decision that it just wasn't going to look realistic enough. ARG.

I should add that at this point we had cut the cake in half.

IN HALF.

Why? Because it made adding sanding sugar or piping royal icing on it so much easier if the two halves of the cake were lying flat on sheet pans. Our next idea was to cover the cake in fondant, so we had to reassemble the two pieces. Anthony added a small amount of buttercream to each side, pressed them together and covered the miraculously resurrected cake in fondant.

But back to the crystal problem. After the cake was covered in fondant, we used a piping tip to press small circles into the cake to mimic the crystals. We then used luster dust to shade the cake and add details.


My next post will be from the Eternal City---Rome! In preparation, I have been working on two phrases in Italian that I intend to use every day:

"Un cappoccino, per favore!"

"Una coppa con due gusti, per favore!"

moose lodge

Unfortunately, I had to spend my one weekened day this week going to a wedding. Chris and I spent a total of 8 hours in the car today just getting there and back again. The wedding was in the boondocks of Pennsylvania with the reception held at the Moose Lodge Family Center. Yes, it was as bad as it sounds. And they MISPELLED my name on the place card. C'mon, man!


They had strange signs posted everywhere, about bowling nights and family counseling and the evils of smoking. I grabbed the sign shown above because I took a fancy to it.

I meant to get a picture of the cake but the lighting was horrific inside and I never shoot with a flash. The cake was three tiers covered in white buttercream with a piped shell border and a cascade of purple buttercream roses. Someone had stuck their thumb deep into the side of the cake and I wished I had an offset spatula with me to fix the offending crater.

I can't wait to get baking again next weekend. I have been thinking about a Neapolitan ice cream cake...

coconut smackdown

coconut cake two ways
I decided to work on an ultimate coconut cake this week. I wanted to give it a better name, though, than just coconut cake. I've always wanted to make up one of those names where the consonants are deliberately messed with or left out like Tastykake, Sno Ball, Krispy Kreme or The Simpsons' wacky Kwik-E-Mart.

So from here on, this cake will be know as:

---wait for it---

KRAZY KOKONUT KAKE!

I already knew how I wanted to finish the cake----a thin coating of coconut buttercream and stripes of untoasted and toasted coconut. The actual cake is what gave me pause. Should the cake have coconut in it or should the filling have the coconut? I didn't want to put coconut in both because I intended to cover the entire finished cake in coconut.

So I made two versions and am dying to know---which version would have you licking the crumbs off the counter?


Version 1 (on the left)
Cake: white cake with coconut mixed in
Filling: passion fruit curd

Version 2 (on the right)
Cake: white cake soaked with coconut syrup
Filling: coconut cream topped with toasted coconut

Let me know in the comments below!

ice cream break

white chocolate ice cream with salted macadamias
I've been working on so many cake related things recently that I decided I needed a brief hiatus. With summer around the corner, I decided to churn some ice cream this weekend.

At work we make a salted cashew ice cream that is one of my personal favorites. The ice cream base has cornstarch in it as the thickener (instead of egg yolks) in order to keep the pure white color of the milk. Once the base is churned in the ice cream machine, BUTTERED and SALTED cashews are stirred in. Butter and salt in ice cream? Oh yeah. So good. Of course I would want to try my own spin on the recipe at home.

White chocolate, as you know, is pure sugar, so adding a salted nut to it made perfect sense to me. I chopped the macadamia nuts then roasted them in the oven with butter and salt. Once the ice cream finished churning, the nuts, and all that melted butter and salt, were cool enough to fold in.

The white chocolate made the smoothest ice cream base I've tasted in a long time. And the salted macadamias were, to use the vernacular, REDONKULOUS.


mango sorbet
I used a recipe from the Ciao Bella Book of Gelato and Sorbetto. I recommend buying this book if you are interested in a foolproof way to make ice cream or sorbet at home. You learn two base recipes, plain and chocolate, that you can add different ingredients to in order to make different flavors. The sorbet recipes are just as simple. You make a single batch of simple syrup, then add different amounts of fruit puree to it.

The finished sorbet tasted just like biting into a fresh mango. I sandwiched a scoop in between two home made graham crackers, closed my eyes, and tried to remember what summer feels like.

Next weekend I'll be working on another cake with Anthony and hopefully in my spare time I'll be working on a killer coconut cake. Stay tuned my friends.

christening cake

red velvet christening cake
This cake was for a pair of adorable twin boys, Aiden and Dylan. They had a christening today on Staten Island, and Anthony and I provided the cake. We filled this cake with cream cheese frosting, but covered it in buttercream because buttercream is more stable when you have to stack multiple cakes.


Anthony made quite a few versions of the cross on this cake. There was one particularly large version that brought to mind that line from the Exorcist, "THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!" I'm not going to lie---I did spend some time chasing my poor husband Chris around the house, waiving that cross and yelling that line.

We ended up using a smaller version of the cross, adding a generous amount of gold luster dust to it, so that it was more fit, as Anthony said, for a Staten Island Jesus. It also reminded me of the pictures of Jesus I saw as a child---you know the ones. The kind where He is glowing and golden. Perchance it was luster dust back then, too?


After we delivered the cake, we stopped at Restaurant Depot and I GOT MY OWN MEMBERSHIP CARD! Oh yeah. Gonna do some serious damage with this baby. (Chris, you're not reading this, are you???) I bought a few pans with lids for all the ice cream I make and I bought parchment paper, too, so I will FINALLY have paper that perfectly fits my half sheet pans. All you bakers out there know what I'm talking about. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to cut your parchment paper (that stuff that comes in a roll) down to size so it sits neatly inside your half sheet pan. ARG. What a waste of time and parchment paper...

s'mores cake

s'mores cake
I started off with a much more complicated idea for this cake, but ended up simplifying it quite a bit. I originally wanted to make a graham dacquoise (a French style meringue cake) and layer it with ganache then wrap it in a flexible marshmallow layer on outside----too fussy and not American enough. It would have been amazing, but a little too close to froufy plated dessert land. Also, the essential s'mores flavors---toasted marshmallow, chocolate and graham cracker---were getting lost. I scaled back to a chocolate cake covered in fluffy, toasted marshamallow frosting and I was not disappointed (besides, any day I get to torch something, I am a happy camper).

My final version tasted delicious, but there are two tweaks I would make.

MORE MARSHMALLOW. Instead of the cake to filling ratio at 2:1, I would make it more even so the marshmallow filling stands up better to the chocolate cake. I also would cut up some hand made marshmallows into tiny cubes to garnish the top of the cake. Very Oriol Balaguer.

MORE FUDGE. I would also add some of the fudgey glaze to the layers of the cake to add a little more richness. I would layer the marshmallow first, the fudge next and then the graham crumbs. The fudge would help the cake layers look more distinct so that the graham crumb wouldn't sink into the marshmallow. I'm looking for perfectly distinct layers.

I have to give Alex, our sous chef at work, a shout out for this cake. She's been drizzling chocolate so on the top of cakes at work now for a while and it certainly looks terrific. That's what I tried to recreate here.