Cookbooks

This modern, savory interpretation of panna cotta comes from Chef Debbie Gold, who participated in the 2000 Workshop. It has the silky, quivery texture of a traditional dessert panna cotta, with an appetizing butterscotch color. For an autumn first course, serve the custard with crisp toasts and a tart salad for contrast. Note that the panna cotta must be chilled for at least four hours before serving.

Inspired by the simplicity and purity of Japanese sashimi, American chefs are exploring the world of seafood crudo (Italian for raw). Typically, crudo is accompanied by Mediterranean garnishes like capers and olive oil rather than the soy-based dipping sauce that is served with sashimi. At the 2005 Workshop, Florida chef James Reaux made a beautiful halibut crudo with chive oil, using the abundant chives in the winery garden. For raw preparations such as this one, the seafood must be impeccably fresh.

Like the marriage of prosciutto and melon, this duo explores the harmony of salty and sweet. Replace the peaches with nectarines, figs, or pears, if you prefer, or offer a combination. It’s an easy, juicy hors d’oeuvre for a hot summer evening. Although you can wrap the charred fruit with prosciutto, the nutty, earthy serrano ham from Spain is less commonplace and may be a discovery for some of your guests. Don’t wrap the fruit ahead or the ham will soften.

Crab cake fans will enjoy chef Marc Ehrler’s golden shrimp cakes, a dish that reflects his years cooking in the Caribbean. Chef Ehrler, a 1991 Workshop participant, substitutes rock shrimp for crab, grated yuca for bread crumbs, and cilantro for parsley to make an appetizer that tastes like something you might find at a seafood shack on Martinique. A mango salad seasoned with chile and lime is the palate-tingling accompaniment. Look for yuca, the starchy root vegetable also known as cassava, in markets that cater to a Latin American or Caribbean clientele.

Everyone’s inner child emerges when these “corndogs” come out of the fryer. Who doesn’t love eating from a skewer? But unlike the popular corndogs that star at America’s state fairs, this whimsical hors d’oeuvre hides a juicy whole shrimp under its cornbread coat. Steven Oakley, a 2005 Workshop alumnus, serves the skewers with homemade honey mustard for dipping. On another occasion, you could use the cornmeal batter for pancakes.

Over the years, workshop chefs have devised many memorable hors d’oeuvres with chèvre because of Cakebread’s long friendship with two wine-country goat cheese producers: Laura Chenel and Skyhill. This one-bite appetizer, featuring soft herbed goat cheese spread on a potato slice with a dollop of tapenade, comes from chef Pascal Olhats, who prepared it during the 1993 Workshop. If you have a small food processor, you can halve the tapenade recipe, as you need only a small amount for this dish. Then again, tapenade keeps well in the refrigerator, and you will be happy to have some on hand. Use it as a sandwich condiment or spread for crostini, slather it on grilled tuna, or toss it with pasta.

The affinity between asparagus and eggs is apparent to anyone who has ever enjoyed an asparagus omelet. But here’s another variation on that theme. Brian roasts the asparagus to concentrate their flavor, then tops them with fried farm eggs basted with sizzling olive oil. The edges of the egg white become lacy and crisp while the yolk remains runny. A sprinkling of Parmesan helps make the dish more wine compatible. Serve as a first course for a spring dinner party, or in larger portions for a weeknight supper. It’s best to fry only one egg at a time, but each one takes less than 30 seconds.

A professor of wine and spirits at the Culinary Institute of America, Michael Weiss is part of our Workshop “faculty.” He teaches a wine and food pairing seminar for the participants every year and selects appropriate Cakebread Cellars wines for the evening meals. That’s no small challenge given how complex many of the chefs’ creations are, but we give Michael carte blanche in the cellar. When entertaining at home, he and his wife, Jenny, often serve their own gravlax as a first course. In place of the fresh dill that perfumes traditional gravlax, the Weisses season the fish with coriander seed, fennel seed, and lemon. The method works beautifully on farmed Arctic char, a more sustainable choice than farmed salmon. You can serve the translucent slices with toast and condiments, as described here, or on cucumber slices with a dab of crème fraîche.

Chef Walter Pisano, a 1999 Workshop alumnus, makes an aromatic pesto that includes neither basil nor garlic. He makes it with fresh spring herbs—parsley, chives, and mint—in place of the basil that doesn’t mature until summer. It’s lively and light, just the right complement to his feather-light gnocchi, but you could use this pesto on fresh pasta or fish as well. Chef Pisano’s gnocchi melt on the tongue when made with high-quality ricotta. At the winery, we use Bellwether Farms ricotta (see page 77), but Calabro also makes an excellent product. You may need to visit a specialty cheese shop to find fresh ricotta. Supermarket ricotta containing gums or stabilizers will not produce the most delicate gnocchi.

A light, bright, citrusy hors d’oeuvre for a warm summer night, this tartare requires impeccably fresh tuna. Keep the fish on ice as you prepare it and serve it immediately for the most vivid flavor. To preserve the tuna’s plum-red color, don’t add the salt or soy sauce until the last moment. You can present the tartare in lettuce cups, if you prefer, instead of on fried wontons or crackers.

Canadian chef Rob Feenie made this savory tart during the 2002 Workshop. Unlike quiche with its custard filling, the classic tarte flambée topping includes no egg—just fromage blanc thinned with crème fraîche, sweet sautéed onions, and smoky bacon. The name (“flaming tart”) derives from earlier times, when cooks would bake it near the embers of a wood-fired oven.

With the addition of rich chocolate ganache, the Devil’s Food Cake you’ve now mastered can go from everyday fabulous to over-the-top decadence. This recipe for a 6-inch cake is perfect for a romantic date night or a small, formal dinner party, although it can easily be doubled for a standard three-layer 8-inch cake or two-layer 9-inch cake. The ganache here has a subtle hazelnut flavor, but by simply substituting other flavorings for the hazelnut liqueur, you have a wealth of other options. Take note: Icing your cake with ganache will be slightly more difficult than with icing because the consistency of the ganache is a bit thinner until it sets, and if it becomes too cold, it will be hard to spread. Be patient as the ganache cools. If you spread it too soon, it will be challenging to accumulate a thick enough layer on the cake. Once the ganache is spreadable (the consistency of ordinary icing or peanut butter), work quickly in icing your cake. If the ganache gets too cold and thick, it will begin to crack and pull apart the cake as you try to spread it. If that happens, just reheat the ganache over a double boiler until it becomes malleable again.

In this presentation, traditional chocolate cake is enhanced with silky-smooth Caramel Buttercream offset by crunchy, salty chocolate-covered pretzels. This flavor combination is a best seller for adult birthdays, because it’s unique and sophisticated, but also made with recognizable flavors. The base of this icing is Swiss Buttercream (page 155), so it’s more buttery and not as sugary sweet as traditional birthday cake icing. Flakes of sea salt just lightly sprinkled at the edges of the cake give you an extra little burst of saltiness and help enhance the flavors of the caramel and the cake. The Caramel Buttercream requires a little more work than other icings, but it’s well worth the effort.

Mud pies come in handy as a great use of leftovers or trimmings of chocolate cakes, cookies, or brownies. They are a great opportunity to get creative with your desserts, since there is really no “wrong” way to make them. The point is just to create a rich, gooey dessert with a crumbly crust. This particular version incorporates chocolate cake, chocolate mousse (which can also be served on its own or used to ice a cake or cupcakes), and fudge sauce. Additional toppings are limitless. Because they are such a messy dessert, I like to prepare and offer mud pies in individual martini glasses, wineglasses, or tumblers—it makes it much easier to serve and enjoy. You can, if you prefer, fill one 9-inch pie dish, using the same method, and slice it to serve. Cake trimmings can be collected and frozen for up to 2 months in advance, or you can bake 1/2 recipe Devil’s Food Cake (page 98) in a 9-inch square baking pan, cut it into 1-inch cubes, and allow them to sit out and get slightly stale overnight.

This Rocky Road Cupcake has a surprising marshmallow center that provides a yin-and-yang contrast to the dense chocolate icing. For a more daring, sweet-and-salty version, try using chopped Smokehouse almonds instead of the traditional toasted ones, or top the cupcakes with chopped salted peanuts. Once you’re comfortable with the technique of filling a cupcake, you can use other fillings, such as chocolate mousse, Nutella, fruit curd, or a favorite custard, to create other flavors.

Mini cupcakes are a chic, modern-day petit four; they have become a favorite for cocktail party desserts. Although they look equally elegant passed on a tray or displayed on a table, they are more whimsical and less stuffy than traditional options, such as mini fruit tarts or truffles. At Tribeca Treats, the flavor combination of s’mores is one of our most popular: The fluffy Marshmallow Icing perfectly balances the dark chocolate cake. You can also substitute sweetened white coconut for the graham cracker crumbs and you have another great classic treat, the “Snowball.”

The base recipe for our chocolate cake is the easiest cake recipe I know. It’s an oil-based (as opposed to butter-based) recipe, so, just like boxed cake mixes, it can be mixed by hand in one bowl. For that reason, it is a favorite of mine to make at a vacation home or anywhere that I’m not sure about what mixers or baking equipment will be available. Once baked, this batter results in an airy, spongy cake with a rich chocolate flavor. It tends to rise a lot in the oven, especially in the center, so the cake layers will always have to be trimmed to make the layers flat before they are iced. Accordingly, be careful not to overfill the cake pans or cupcake wrappers.

City dwellers, and anyone else who feels that he or she doesn’t get enough time in front of a campfire, can still enjoy the taste of s’mores with these cookies, which cleverly combine the graham cracker–marshmallow–chocolate trifecta. What they lack in the crispy char of the toasted marshmallow, they more than make up for in their ability to be made in advance. They are also one of the most versatile cookies in this book as far as being appropriate for all occasions. Bring them to a family reunion, use them as a butter-up-your-boss gift, serve them with petit fours at a formal affair, or just keep them in a jar at home to treat yourself.

Imagine taking a bite of the edge of a cheesecake, with a chunky piece of crust on your fork and a thin layer of the sweet-and-sour cream cheese filling gracing the crust. Now imagine having that flavor in a bite-size version that you can pop into your mouth by hand. These sandwich cookies are like mini inverted cheesecakes (by “inverted” I mean more crust than filling). The cream cheese icing, which adds a tanginess to the cookie, can be made with or without cinnamon. The sugar in the cream cheese icing acts as a natural preservant, so the cookies can be left at room temperature in an airtight container for a week.

These cookies are just as tasty eaten plain as they are in any of the variations in this chapter. Steps 6 through 12 of this recipe outline how to bake them on their own for a snack. If you are using the dough for another recipe in this chapter, stop at step 5.