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!

P.S. Please keep in touch and stay up to date on my food adventures behind the lens by joining my new newsletter!

Read on for recipe....

Berries'n'cream Chocolate Chip Trifle

Oh, berries, berries....

I know that trifles are traditionally a Christmastime dessert, but since berry trifles are so deliciously good (I mean, the combination of berries and cream... right? right?), I associate the dessert much more with the summertime.  Also, the red and blue vibrant colors against the white--of course I couldn't resist a little berries'n'cream chocolate chip trifle to celebrate July 4th.

There's something about growing up in the U.S. that really imprints a love of Americana on you.  I'm sure everyone's associations of Americana must be subtly different, but at the core, I like to hope that there are certain details and little affinities that we all share in our definitions of Americana.  Like chocolate chip cookies (and road trips).  For some reason, these cookies just seem terribly American to me, so here they are, in this trifle (instead of sponge cake, which is arguably not in my definition of Americana).  So happy, Happy Birthday, oh amber-waved and purple-mountained country, you.

Read on for recipe....

Ginger White Chocolate Strawberry Trifles, and (not) paying attention in class

I space out in class.  There! I said it.  It's actually quite a problem, because when I get spacey, I start thinking about things that I happen to have lying about the refrigerator and the kitchen, like leftover white chocolate creme anglaise or beautiful chunks of crystallized ginger or egg yolks.

And then, I start thinking, "Oh, what a shame it would be if all these things went to waste!"  And then--here's where it gets dangerous, I start thinking about what I could do with all of these ingredients.  At this point, I'm sure my professors are utterly and completely fed up with me because I really should be paying attention to the diachronic origins of morphological ergativity in Indo-Aryan languages and dialects (which actually is interesting, I promise).  Anyways, here's what I came up with:

Ginger, white chocolate, and strawberry trifles.  Oh boy!  I sure to wish all of my daydreams turned out so well, with layers of ginger genoise cake, white chocolate creme anglaise whipped cream, and fresh strawberries.

The genoise cake recipe that I used here is an all egg-yolk genoise, from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Cake Bible.  It's one of my favorite genoise recipes because, with all of the egg yolks, it's much more moist than your average whole egg variety--and, it's a great, yummy way to use up leftover egg yolks.  To adapt Beranbaum's recipe to a ginger genoise, I added ground ginger to the batter and also huge, rough chunks of crystallized ginger.  When it came out, the cake was magnificently studded with all of this sweet and spicy crystallized ginger and then I brushed it with some homemade ginger syrup that I had sitting in the fridge (that stuff also makes great homemade ginger ale).

To use up my white chocolate creme anglaise, I folded it into whipped cream.  It was actually quite a discovery when I found out that the white chocolate creme anglaise sets up nicely in the fridge, to almost the consistency of a light pudding!  With the creme anglaise folded in, the resulting cream is thick and luscious, packing just the right amount of sweetness and an incredible vanilla taste.

Combining the cake and whipped cream with fresh strawberries and more crystallized ginger made for the perfect antedote to mid-winter blues.  These were so good that I (accidentally!) inhaled two of them myself, despite the fact that I kept trying to save them for others to try.  Oops...

So, let's see... what is the moral of this story?  Daydreaming in class won't get you anywhere in terms of grades, but it will result in something utterly delicious to eat.  (Wait, is this really going to help me graduate?)


Read on for the recipe....