Marcel Desaulniers - Celebrate with Chocolate: Totally Over-the-Top Recipes

C ELEBRATE
with C HOCOLATE

TOTALLY OVER-THE-TOP RECIPES

M ARCEL D ESAULNIERS

Recipes with Ganache Hill Test Kitchen Chef Brett Bailey
and Trellis Pastry Chef Kelly Bailey

Photographs by Ron Manville

T O MY WIFE , C ONNIE D ESAULNIERS
C ONNIE AND CHOCOLATE MAKE EVERY DAY A CELEBRATION

Contents

M y love affair with chocolate makes me want to celebrate every day. More than a momentary sensation of pleasure, chocolate has enriched and distinguished my life. When I was a child, my mothers chocolate treats illuminated every conceivable holiday, including birthdays and Christmas, as well as everyday occasions such as staying home from school on a snowy day, or celebrating a cousins return from the navy during the Korean conflict. As the years progressed, and this culinarily curious teenager turned his after-school work into an avocation, chocolate started speaking in different ways. More than a treat, chocolate became a passion.

However, my subsequent studies at The Culinary Institute of America, then located in New Haven, Connecticut, did not include much chocolate. The curriculum instead required us to learn the basics of culinary classics such as hollandaise and bouillabaisse. Baking and pastry making at that time were a modest part of the two-year program and mostly consisted of learning techniques from the primarily European instructors of making such staples as croissants, puff pastry, and pastillage (a modeling paste used to make elaborate decorations).

Although ganache made its entry later in my nascent career, by the time I reached the Culinary, I had learned enough about the mystique of chocolate from my mother that it became my entree to wooing the damsels of New Haven. Pity the neighboring Yalies, for chocolate set me apart. Instead of studying together, my dates and I made chocolate treats, and we made sweet time.

After Id graduated from the Culinary, Manhattan beckoned. Working with the best cooking talent in the country opened my eyes to ganache and its offspring, truffles. I knew I had found my calling. Alas, after only a few months into this part of lifes journey, another call camethe draft. I had always dreamed of Paris, but not Parris Island, South Carolina. The flavors and aromas from the kitchens of New York were a far cry from those of the mess hall, where three times a day, indistinguishable monochromatic mush was plopped from a metal spoon onto metal plates held by grunts all in a row. And even more wretched, no chocolate (much less anything else pleasurable) could be found in boot camp.

Then came an all-expenses-paid trip to a former French colony in Southeast Asia, where chocolate again achieved supremacy, thanks to care packages from my mom filled with her chocolate chip cookies. Sharing those cookies made every package a celebration and gave me more prestige than my three stripes.

After my military meanderings, I found myself in Williamsburg, Virginia. Marriage, children, new jobs, birthdays and anniversaries, events such as the Kentucky Derby, and all manner of holidays (both secular and spiritual), gave me myriad opportunities for chocolate making and giving.

Now my life seems to be defined by chocolate. Books such as Death by Chocolate have brought success, infamy, and more reasons to create, consume, and enjoy chocolate. With Celebrate with Chocolate , I hope to persuade you that life is a celebration. And, all celebrations deserve chocolate.

E QUIPMENT ,
I NGREDIENTS, AND
T ECHNIQUES

E QUIPMENT

When I graduated from the Culinary Institute of America in 1965, I never dreamed that I would become a cookbook author. My chef fantasies encompassed a world of impressive kitchens outfitted with eight-burner cooktops, stacked ovens, five-foot-tall stock pots, sparkling stainless steel walls, and many busy hands producing exemplary food. My dream became a reality. I have been working in such kitchens, including the kitchen in my own restaurant, The Trellis, in Williamsburg, Virginia, for more than twenty-five years. I sought additional challenges; owning other restaurants was not a consideration, so when I wrote my first cookbook in 1987, I knew I had found another calling.

When I wrote my first five cookbooks, all the recipe testing was accomplished in the home I share with my wife, Connie. Most cookbook authors I know also work from their home kitchens to make certain that consumers will get the same results as the author promises in his or her book. This can only be accomplished by using the same equipment and by cooking surroundings similar to those found in a typical home kitchen (of course, saying typical opens up a rather large bag of flour). Although I enjoyed working in my home kitchen, the constant recipe development and testing was taking its toll on my equipment. So in 1995 my business partner, John Curtis, and I bought a piece of property in James City County, Virginia, located about four miles from The Trellis (and two miles from the historic settlement of Jamestown).

Celebrate with Chocolate is the fourth book I have completed in a 1,600-square-foot building dedicated only to cookbook recipe testing. All of the equipment we use at Ganache Hillwhich is what I named the more than one-acre hilltop on which the test kitchen is perchedis found in an average kitchen. The cooktop, ovens, the small appliances such as food processors and electric mixers, and miscellaneous equipment such as baking sheets and bowls, were purchased from local kitchen equipment outlets, department stores, hardware stores, and supermarkets.

Although the following list of equipment is not complete by any means, as many items as possible should be in your kitchen so that you can produce the magical desserts we make at Ganache Hill and in this book.

BAKING SHEETS AND CAKE PANS

All of the baking sheets and cake pans used for testing the recipes in this cookbook were for home rather than professional use. Most were purchased at local Williamsburg stores. The exceptions were the 63-inch aluminum anodized-finish cake pan for the Just for the Two of Us Birthday Cake, the 62-inch aluminum anodized-finish cake pans for both the Pretty in Pink Cake and Brett and Kellys Commitment Cake, and the 41-inch nonstick springform pans for the Chocolate Banana Rum Raisin Ice Cream Cakes. (These pans were purchased from Wilton Enterprises at www.wilton.com.) Our baking sheets all have nonstick surfaces and most are 1015 inches. They all have sides for extra rigidity (to prevent them from warping when they are in the oven). Although we always use nonstick baking sheets, we often butter and sometimes line sheets with parchment paper or wax paper to ensure quick release of a baked product, be it cookie or cake. Some batters, especially those with lots of sugar, will stick even to nonstick surfaces. Not only will buttering and papering assist in the effortless release of a product from a pan or baking sheet but will also put a smile on the pot washers visage, as the task of cleaning will be palliated. I recommend the following manufacturers for quality, value, and accessibility: Ekco Housewares, Inc. (Bakers Secret), Lodge Manufacturing Company (Lodge Cast Iron Cookware), Nordic Ware (Bundt Brand Bakeware), Farberware Inc. (Professional Series), and W. F. Kaiser & Co. (Noblesse Kaiser).

BOWLS

I recommend both stainless steel bowls, which are noncorrosive, and economical glass bowls, also noncorrosive and easy to clean. The stainless steel bowls are better conductors of heat and cold, so use one when setting up an ice-water bath. Glass bowls are necessary for use in a microwave oven. These bowl sizes correspond with those recommended in this book:

small = 1 to 2 quarts