A donut "tiramisu" trifle

What do you do when you find yourself with over 50 donuts in the house?

This past week, I've been working on a collab with a donut shop & bakery (can't wait to share more... soon!) and was left with about 54 donuts in the house after the shooting was done. There was no way the two of us could eat all that many donuts, even after sharing plenty with friends. By day 4, I was left with some rather dry and stale donuts.... which are perfect for a donut "tiramisu"! Tiramisu is in quotes here because it's not a real tiramisu, with eggs. I used whipping cream instead, so it sort of makes this one a tiramisu-flavoured trifle. 😅

"D" is for post-shoot donut disaster

Most common suggestions for stale donuts involve donut french toast or donut bread pudding, but donut tiramisu, I feel, is the optimal way to go because what better flavour to pair donuts with than (boozy) coffee! *pats self on back* We also made a kimchi grilled cheese sandwich with one of the leftover croissant-donuts that was ... really good, but probably not the healthiest of workday lunches one could imagine. 

Unfort, I have no picture of the final tiramisu for you (there's one uber-grainy photo, on instagram stories--not worth enshrining here!), since I made it super late into the evening in some to-go containers and immediately distributed it around LA to friends who replied to my last-minute text of "who wants to eat my donut experiment?" But after one friend labelled it a "Best of Pandemic" dessert (it's a bop!), I felt like I should at least share the recipe with you here!

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Read on for recipe....

Morning hazelnut plum tarts

It's been a long (or too short?, depending on how you look at it) summer of dissertation writing, but I'm almost there. My oral defense has now finally been scheduled (meaning I've somehow convinced my thesis chairs that I'm worthy of attempting the last rite of earning a PhD), and now it's just a matter of final details, filling in the blanks in the argumentation, and writing the intro and conclusion. Almoooooost.

This is the first dessert I've made in months. Given my self-imposed thesis hermitude, I've missed so much of summer's great fruit, so I wanted to take advantage of the tail end of stone fruit season before it disappeared altogether. This hazelnut plum tart is sort of a hybrid of a cake-y tart, with a thick, almost linzer-torte-like base and slices of fruit baked in on top. The secret to this "morning" tart is that the dough itself is spiked with orange zest and just ever so subtle of a hint of Turkish coffee and cardamom--enough to give the tart a dark and complex depth without stealing the scene with too much coffee flavor. It's a barely-there roasted spice flavor that helps to enhance the hazelnuts, alongside the brightness that the orange and plums provide.

It's going to be a bit slow-going while I try to reacclimate to "normal" life after my myopically-focused dissertation summer, but hopefully this also means the beginning of many more desserts coming out of the kitchen again.


(P.S. See that teacup in the photos? It's a UC Berkeley Wedgewood set! that I found at the antique fair a few months ago. I first saw these Berkeley Wedgewood place settings when I had dinner at the Chancellor's House as an undergrad, so I'm quite excited by the fact that I now too have a tea cup designed especially for my college alma mater. :D #geekpride)

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The Café au Lait Tart, for breakfast for dessert

Well, here's one for recursion: it's dessert for breakfast for dessert! :) This idea has been floating around in my head for quite a while now, but I hadn't had a chance to properly realize it until a friend requested this week to have "breakfast for dessert," since she found herself too busy to ever properly have breakfast for breakfast. I'm never one to let friends go hungry, and so, at last, the café au lait tart was born.

My inspiration behind this tart was to make it a beautiful homage to the first meal of the day, pulling together the flavors and textures that we'd normally associate with breakfast into dessert form (minus the scrambled eggs and bacon--that's so overdone). The crust has a hint of nutty sweetness from a tinge of oat flour, and then there are layers of milk jam, whole-fruit wild blueberry jam, and espresso dark chocolate ganache, all topped with golden oatmeal praline and flaked seasalt. (You can see my diagram of the dessert in the planning stages here.) The end result is at once rich and bitter and crunchy and creamy and sweet and salty--pretty much one of the most sophisticated ways to start your day, all compressed into a single bite.

[for larger image, click photo above]

...Now, if all days started this way!

[My apologies on the short post, but hopefully the recipe makes up for it. I find myself far too lacking in words these days, having used up my quota for work purposes.]



Read on for recipe....

Salted Dark Chocolate Espresso Cookies

First off, I want to thank you all for your amazing and supportive comments on my last post! I love that I have such an inspiring and talented group of readers for this blog, and it makes me so proud to be able to connect with you all through this forum. The post has just been republished on my school's main arts site!, with the hopes that it'll engender even more awareness and discussion and might help other students in similar situations. It's a bit nerve-wracking for me to have the post published on the school's website, since I'm so accustomed to hiding my arts life from my academic life. But, I'm trying to live my life more unapologetically, which means learning to be braver about sticking my neck out there. Courage, people!

Second, I want to extend wishes and thoughts to everyone on the East Coast right now--I hope you all weathered the giant Frankenstorm alright and are all safe and sound (and have power and water!).

Meanwhile, I *just* realized late last night (I guess technically it was early this morning, but I have a strict rule that "night" doesn't end until I go to sleep :)), that it's Halloween today! Happy Halloween! And where the heck did October go??? Usually I love to celebrate Halloween. Not only is it an awesome holiday in its own right, but it also kicks off two months' worth of holidays, all the way through January, and I love the buzz of celebration and excitement that you feel starting October 31 all the way up until New Year's Eve.

This October, however, I fear that I've been living under a rock in a cave, buried deep under piles of papers and essays and commented versions of essays to turn into papers and more deadlines for papers and essays (much to the glee of my dissertation committee, it seems....). I've barely even touched my kitchen, except to make tea or to heat up whatever leftovers I'm fortunate to have in the refrigerator. Although, you shouldn't pity me too much--my leftovers have been a decently tolerable combination of Indian food, Asian fusion, and awesome Chantal Guillon macarons. :). Luckily, deadline season will come to a close soon, and hopefully life can return to some more semblance of "normal," whatever that may be.

So finding balance in life isn't easy! This week, I could feel the cracks starting, that creative part of my brain tick- tick- ticking away from disuse while it's been shoved aside for academic deadlines. I could feel my eye actively start framing the world around me in photographs wherever I looked, I became inseparable from my camera phone, my normal doodles in the margins of papers became even more involved, and I started having un-suppressible, obsessive thoughts about dark chocolate with port-soaked cherries. And then it happened: writer's block. BAM. Right in the middle of a streak of productivity, there was an essay that I just. couldn't. write. No matter how many days I spent or how many new drafts I started--nothing. Argh!

So finally, deep into one night of frustrated non-writing with deadlines looming, I walked away from the computer and into the kitchen, pulled one of my current cookbook favorites off of the shelf, and flipped to the deepest, darkest chocolate recipe I could find. I can always count on Alice: these dark chocolate espresso cookies (with a few slight modifications from her original recipe) were exactly what they sound like, the very essence of chocolate. Made completely with unsweetened chocolate (make sure to break out the good stuff in your cabinets), these amazing bites come out of the oven so perfectly melty, with the giant chocolate chunks in their molten centers wrapping you up with this warm bittersweet hug in such a good way you never thought bitter, unsweetened chocolate could. After they cool, the cookies are still perfectly gooey. I used coconut oil instead of butter in these, and if you eat a cookie ever so slowly, you'll get just the faintest hint of sweet coconut flavor come through like a streak of sunshine. Then, the hit of smoked sea salt flakes sprinkled on top brings everything together--really, chocolate just shouldn't be eaten without a bit of salty sophistication to it! Be forewarned that these cookies are rich. I don't normally drink milk, but I needed a shot of milk next to these.

I guess the million dollar question here is whether these cookies cure the stubborn affliction of wrtiers' block? Well.... the next day, I wrote my essay! Of course, I'm not quite sure if it was eating these cookies that did it. Or, if it was baking these cookies and then bringing a box of them to my advisor's office, where she sat and ate them while offering sage advice on how I should approach my essay. I guess ultimately, it doesn't matter. Writer's block is gone, and so are the cookies now. :)

Here's wishing everyone a Happy Halloween! I guess I'll celebrate it a few days late after the deadlines of this week are past, but at least that lets me take advantage of all the 2 for 1 deals on leftover Halloween candy on November 1. Mwahaha! :)

P.S. Also a big thank you to my good friend Priscilla, who is an uber-talented knitter, and made me the cup/bottle warmer.

Read on for recipe.....

Turkish Coffee Ice Cream with Rosewater Raspberries

Some recipe ideas always seem to take longer to come to fruition than others.  Take, for example, this Turkish coffee ice cream.  It's a recipe idea I've been turning over in my head for quite a few months now.  It started out way back in early 2011, when my good friend Nadeen and I were brainstorming ice cream flavors that we wanted to make together (she suggested Earl Grey with condensed milk, which for some reason, led me to think about Turkish coffee--food association works in mysterious ways).  Then, when Nadeen moved away (sadness!), she kindly bequeathed me with a generous bag of Turkish coffee, so for months, I've had all of the ingredients to make said ice cream just sitting in my refrigerator, waiting.  But, I've just never been able to think up the right dessert for which to make this ice cream--until now!  Finally!

Enter, the raspberry.  Actually, back that up.  Enter the French Laundry, where I had the pleasure (or the great fortitude and honor?) to go last Friday night.  I think the French Laundry in and of itself deserves a special, dedicated post, so I won't share too many details right here.  But suffice it to say for now that the word "delicious" barely does it justice.  Anyways, one of the dessert courses (yes! there were multiple dessert courses--though not enough of them, in my humble opinion) had a few lightly glazed raspberries sitting delicately on the side, and perhaps they got into my subconscious somehow because that night, as I was sleeping off my intensely satisfying food coma, I dreamt about Turkish coffee ice cream... with raspberries.  (It really says something about how good that meal was, since usually good food can inspire me to cook, but rarely do I get inspired even in my sleep!)

Raspberries ended up being the perfect pairing for the Turkish coffee ice cream, especially after they macerated in a dash of rosewater, lemon juice, and a light sprinkling of sugar.  The raspberries were delicate and summery and fresh, with a touch of the floral brightness from the rosewater, which was exactly what the rich and dark ice cream, heavily spiced with cardamom and teeming with the extra fine coffee grounds that's so characteristic of Turkish coffee, needed.  Ah, sigh--add in a touch of warm weather, and the slanted light of a summer sunset....  (P.S. why is it already mid-August?!)

I promise--more to come on the French Laundry soon.  In the meantime, enjoy the Turkish coffee and raspberries!  (Nadeen! I wish you were here!)


Read on for recipes....

Everything but the Kitchen Sink Cookies

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Quick!  It's Friday!  Open your cupboards and grab any and all sweet nothin's you've got stashed in there, chop 'em up, and mash them into a cookie that's larger than your head.  Sit back, grab a warm, straight-out-of-the-oven cookie, and relax with all of the crappy-but-addictive summer television programming you've missed out on during the week.  Plus, you've got Saturday to be productive and work it off, right?

(NB: these cookies ain't pretty, but they sure are delicious.  Extra points for adding spices and a little somethin' salty--like pretzels--if you've got that laying about.)

Weekend plans?  Past week heartbreaks or/and triumphs?  Share below, please!


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Mocha Dobos Torte-lettes, and Rosanna, Inc. Giveaway Winners!

This post is so long overdue--I must apologize!  Deadlines popped up at work and friends came into town for the summer, and so I ended up with one very belated birthday cake.  But no matter! cake is welcome at any point in time. :-D

First off, I must thank you all so, so much for sharing all of your birthday cake ideas with me.  Even though I physically baked my own cake, just seeing all of your thoughtful ideas really made me feel like the Baker's Curse was gone.  And boy, did you all have wildly wonderful cake ideas!  Some of my favorites included a lemon thyme cake with honey mascarpone whipped cream; an Earl Grey cake with kumquat marmalade and almond buttercream; a lime cake with blackberry-elderflower buttercream; tres leches cakes; an icebox cake with chocolate chip cookies (this actually inspired my last post); a champagne and strawberries cake; and on and on!  Let me tell you: it was so hard for me to make a decision that I waffled back and forth between cakes for days.  But finally, I decided on megcjones's idea for an espresso-spiked dobos torte, so here it is: raspberry mocha dobos tortelettes!

[click on photo for larger image.]

Oh boy, oh boy.  These tortelettes were so delicate and yummy--a perfect balance between cake and chocolate, with just a whiff of espresso flavoring in the cake.  Unlike many other sponge cakes, these were so moist and yet still very light, and I loved the drama of all those layers stacked up inside a tiny little cakelette.  I took the liberty of substituting fresh raspberries for the more traditional caramel topping, too, because we all know how much I adore raspberries. :-)  And, counter to how they may look, these took almost no time to bake up at all--two half sheet pans in the oven for about seven minutes each, and you're done!  Woohoo to easy yet impressive-looking cakes!  (Yes, I'm terribly lazy at heart, especially around my birthday.)

Congrats to megcjones for winning the Rosanna, Inc. Le Gateau cake stand!  There are also two more winners of Petite Treat cupcake pedestals from Rosanna, Inc.  Drawn at random, these are Anna and Jessica Lynn.  You all should receive emails soon--if not, please contact me at s [at] dessertsforbreakfast [dot] com.

I really want to thank everyone again so much--and the folks over at Rosanna, Inc.--for helping to make this an absolutely wonderful birthday cake year!  :-D

Read on for recipe....

Double chocolate espresso pound cake with rose-scented cream cheese frosting

After Christmas, New Years, and the December holidays are over, I'm always spending January counting down the days to Valentine's. Sure, there are lots of people who grumble about Valentine's Day, citing that it's become this Hallmark holiday, but I still maintain a very romantic notion about it and most other holidays (ah, romantic in the 'idealization' sense).  After all, life's too short not to be celebrating the happy things in it! and I'm a firm believer that we should celebrate everything we love on Valentine's Day, not just significant others.  (I'm such a holder of this philosophy that I think, the dork I am, that I even wrote an essay arguing such in eighth grade.)  Finally, when it comes down to it, through all of that lovey-dovey hubbub, Valentine's Day is the holiday of desserts, so what's not to love?

This double chocolate espresso pound cake with rose-scented cream cheese frosting is one of the desserts on my Valentine's Day radar this year.  The combination of rose and chocolate is just so classic that I can't ever really escape it, especially ever since watching Like Water for Chocolate.  The key here balancing the light sweet scent of the rose in the cream cheese frosting with the robust dark chocolate espresso pound cake underneath--my friend who tried the cake called it the perfect "breakfast cupcake," given how dense and buttery but not-too-sweet the cake is.  Oh, and why are these called "double chocolate"?  Because they also have a healthy handful of bittersweet chocolate chips thrown in to the mix.  Despite what Hallmark says, really Valentine's Day is about celebrating chocolate.  (Though I don't doubt for a second that there's a Hallmark card out there that says just that!)

So here's the countdown: 19 days left until Valentine's Day, the holiday of desserts!  What are you making to celebrate what you love?


Read on for recipe...

Candy Salad and Devil's Food Affogato, and a Simple Halloween Menu

Didya miss me?  ;-)  It's very unlike me to be absent from the blog for long and to miss my usual weekly Monday midnight/Tuesday early morning posting time.  Alas-- however, this week, life just caught up with me, and I had to throw my hands up and just let something go.  It turns out that juggling concurrent classes and research at two universities simultaneously (not to mention the commute hours hopping back and forth across the San Francisco Bay) and attempting to squeeze two years' worth of graduate work into a single semester while still trying to maintain some semblance of sanity isn't such a hot idea.  Yeah.  But, don't worry about me--I'm having a ball doing it all (seriously) and absolutely love it.  I know.  I'm crazy.

But wait--you're going to think I'm even crazier when you see the recipe I'm going to try my hardest to convince you about today: candy salad.  (Boy, I sure hope your kids aren't reading this one, because you might hate me if they pick up on this idea!)  This was a completely accidental discovery on my part, but it's turned out to be an absolutely wonderful one.

Here's how it all started.  When one of our friends came over for our Halloween dinner, he brought along a bag of Skittles.  (My policy for Halloween parties is "I make the food, you bring the candy.")  Now, Skittles aren't my usual candy of choice.  In fact, I don't even remember the last time I had Skittles or voluntarily sought them out.  But there they were, a pail of them sitting on the kitchen table amongst the fixings for dinner.  So, as I was putting together the salad I was making, my hands instinctively hovered over the colorful bowl of candies, reached in, and tossed a few into the salad.  I'm no stranger to unusual and untraditional combinations of savory and sweet, but even I was skeptical at first about what I'd just done.  But the minute I took the first bite and sunk my teeth through the leafy greens and into a burst of chewy candy flavor, I was sold.  Skittles, it turns out, are the perfect finishing touch to a salad of spicy wild arugula leaves, accented with leaves of deeply fragrant purple basil, crunchy shaved fennel,  and nuggets of juicy pomegranate seeds.  Skittles contribute the final texture and flavor to tie everything together: the slight toothiness in the candy's center and the bright sweetness to balance out the herby taste of the fennel, arugula, and basil and slightest tart to enhance and highlight the sweetness of the pomegranate seeds.  The key, of course, is a small, light-handed sprinkling of Skittles--just enough so that it brings a bit of nuanced novelty and surprise to an otherwise straightforward autumn salad.

a Simple Halloween Menu

Candy salad

wild arugula, shaved fennel, purple basil leaves, pomegranate seeds, skittles

Garlic-baked chicken drumsticks

with paprika, fresh rosemary and thyme, lavender salt, and worchestershire

Sweet potato and squid ink gnocchi

with a nutmeg and gorgonzola cream sauce

"Heaven and Hell"

devil's food chocolate cake affogato

For dessert, I did a play on a heaven and hell theme, especially since I had this new devil's food cake recipe I'd been wanting to try out for some time now.  For the actual dinner, I served both devil's and angel food cake with plain ice cream, but the day after, I had some more devil's food cake left over, and it turned out to go beautifully in a devil's food, espresso, and vanilla ice cream affogato--so much so that I wish I'd served it this way instead as dessert on Halloween!

The cake, from the new book Baked Explorations (one of their pastry chefs was on Top Chef: Just Desserts!), is nice and dark and chocolate-y, yet still surprisingly light and fluffy and airy--and moist, too.  I don't know how well it pairs with the frosting suggested in the book, but it goes so well with vanilla ice cream--its crumbs sort of melting into chocolate goodness in the cream--that I'm not sure I'd ever serve it any other way!  Hot espresso poured over it all makes it definitely a heaven-worthy dessert.  (okay, I couldn't resist! :P)

Anyways, I hope you all had wonderful and fun Halloweens!  Happy November, everyone!


[Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of Baked Explorations to review but was under no obligations to post about it.  As always, I will never tell you about something that I don't love myself.]


Read on for recipes...

the Raspberry Rhapsody, and a Summer-to-Autumn Menu

I hereby officially declare that this summer was "the Summer of the Raspberry."  After starting the summer off with a string of raspberry delights and then putting the blog on a bit of a raspberry diet, I just couldn't resist ending the summer returning to this wonderful berry and finishing with a big raspberry bang.

So when a good friend came over for dinner, I presented her with a trio of late-summer raspberry desserts, or something that I like to call the Raspberry Rhapsody.  Or, alternatively, what another friend perhaps more appropriately named it: "Everything Stephanie can think of to do with raspberries."  Yeah.  That one pretty much sums it up!  But first, before we get to the Raspberry Rhapsody, I have to tell you what the menu for dinner was, because I feel like you'll then fully savor the curation of this meal in its entirely, wrapping up with the trio of raspberry desserts.  The whole theme of the night was celebrating the summer-to-autumn transition, perhaps one of my favorite times of the year when the markets are bursting forth with the most succulent late-summer and crisp early-autumn produce.

Summer to Autumn Menu

Tomato crostini

heirloom tomato, garlic, oil-packed anchovies atop toasted sweet baguette

Caramelized onion corn soup

rosemary, cave-aged hand-made raw milk blue cheese, 
caramelized onion jam, fresh local yellow corn

Prosciutto-wrapped roasted potato salad

roasted baby purple, red, and yellow potatoes wrapped in crispy prosciutto 
atop wild arugula with honey mustard balsamic vinaigrette

Fig and carrot pitsa

black mission figs, colored carrots, feta, mozzarella, leek, and green onion

"Raspberry Rhapsody"

Fresh raspberries in paradise green tea jelly

Lemon-rose scented pavlova with raspberry-caramel, 
lemon mascarpone cream, and rosy raspberries

Espresso dark chocolate pots de creme with raspberries and raspberry coulis

Okay, got that?  Now, to dessert.  The Raspberry Rhapsody was an exploration of the amazing versatility of the wonderful raspberry, with its sweet tartness encapsulating the range of tastes from sharp to soft more so than perhaps any other berry.  I really wanted to play on the balance that you can use the raspberry to achieve in desserts.

The fresh raspberries in paradise green tea jelly offers the unadulterated raspberry experience.  It's simply raspberries at the peak of their late summer season (they peak twice, so I hear, once at the beginning of the summer and once at the end) suspended in delicately light green tea jelly.  I used Lupicia's paradise green tea, which I absolutely love in desserts because it's this wonderfully fragrant blend of green tea, rose, safflower, marigold, and cornflowers without being perfume-y at all.  The subtle flavors of the tea were the perfect accompaniment to the raspberries magically floating in the jelly.

Then we have the antithesis of the light jelly dessert: espresso dark chocolate pots de creme with raspberries and raspberry coulis.  While the jelly was supposed to be delicate and airy and reminiscent of light summer breezes, these pots de creme were meant to be a forecast of the dark, broody, and let's-huddle-up-under-a-mass-of-blankets-beside-the-fire-and-drink-hot-chocolate days that are ahead of us.  The incredibly rich and bitter 80% dark chocolate and espresso custard--with raspberries baked inside!--is set off by the tartness of fresh raspberry coulis.  And trust me, if you want something terrifically sinful, this. is. it.

Finally, to round off the trio was the perfect balance between creamy and rich and light and airy: a lemon and rose-scented pavlova with raspberry caramel, lemon mascarpone cream, and fresh rosy raspberries.

Oh, its name is a mouthful, for sure, but you won't be able to get enough mouthfuls of the actual dessert!  (trust me, I could barely keep my hands off this one long enough to photograph it!)

(see?)  The hints of lemon and rose flavors are quite subtle in this one, but it really allows the raspberries to shine through in the sweetened raspberry caramel and unperturbed fresh raspberries layered between the crunchy meringue and lusciously thick mascarpone whipped cream.  It doesn't matter how many words I use in the attempt to describe this dessert.  All I need is one: NOM.

Anyways, this is been quite the epically long post, but before I end (and get to the recipes, darn it!), I hope you'll humor me for a tiny bit longer, because I wanted to share how incredibly perfect this dessert was, in a completely nerdy way.  You see, the definitions of rhapsody in the Oxford English Dictionary are as follows (a tad edited in length by me):

rhapsody, n.

1. An epic poem, or a part of one, of a suitable length for recitation at one time.
2. The joining together of miscellaneous unconnected literary pieces, esp. poems
3. An enthusiastic of ecstatic expression of feeling; an instance of this.
4. A free musical composition, usually emotional or exuberant in character and in one extended movement

Now, as you will notice, my Raspberry Rhapsody was quite (1) epically raspberry; (2) a joining together of several raspberry desserts; and (3) an enthusiastic expression of an exuberant love for raspberries.  To top it all off, the friend I had over for dinner studies poetry and music (making her the perfect audience for a rhapsodic dessert), so when I finally looked up the etymology for rhapsody (something that, as a linguist, I'm quite prone to do), I couldn't help but smile to know that I'd put together not only a tribute to the Summer of the Raspberry but also a completely aptly named one!  Ah, now both the linguist and the dessert lover in me can rest in peace in raspberry heaven.


Read on for recipe....