Desserts and desserts

The huge variety of dessert preparations demand a system to classify our recipes when

planning that final sweet course. Most of the sweets we commonly prepare fit into the following

nine categories:

Cakes and tortes

Cookies and bars

Pies, tarts, cobblers and their cousins

The mousse clan

Crêpes

Yeast-leavened desserts

Frozen sweets and ice creams

Fruit desserts

Desserts outside pigeon-holes

I recommend you get comfortable by practicing a recipe or two from several of these

categories. Then you can pick a dessert from your recipe files for any occasion to fit into your time

frame, the season, the event, the type of meal and the ingredients on your shelf. Mastering the

technique and being at ease with a few fundamental techniques are essential, for instance, preparing

pie dough, cooking custard, working with chocolate or frosting cakes.

Sweet prerequisites

Preparing a scrumptious dessert, particularly baked desserts, requires a completely different

culinary expertise than other kitchen tasks. It is far more exacting with little latitude for error. A

soup can often be corrected if you forget a step in the preparation. A yeast bread is still edible, even

good, if you add one tablespoon of sugar instead of one teaspoon. In baking, a small error can lead

to a frustrating cake, cookie or pie pastry that only the cook will eat, and then only when starvation

is imminent. Despite this, many excellent desserts are reasonably easy and quick to make. There is

just no place for a freeform cook in a pastry kitchen. And that may be the reason that many, many

good, competent home cooks completely abstain from dessert preparations, except baking simple

coffee cakes with ice cream on the side.

Even the training of pastry chefs is a separate branch of culinary schooling. Many chefs not

trained in pastries do nothing but the simplest of desserts. But you don't need pastry schooling to

prepare excellent home desserts. For serious dessert-makers, there are several excellent cookbooks

that dwell on the varied art of dessert preparations. I am not going to compete with them. What I

offer here is a broad and detailed summary of dessert making, the basics of the hows and whys with

sprinkling of physics and chemistry (that virtually all cookbooks omit), and a discussion of the pros

and cons of various ingredients and techniques. It is a detailed collection of references. Knowing

these takes extra effort on your part but makes you a better, more confident pastry cook.

Many, if not most, dessert preparations require specific techniques that take experience and

practice. Take a simple thing like preparing a pie dough. Unless you do it often, you tend to forget

about the small but important points that are so necessary for success. Get into the habit of writing

down techniques and your own findings on your recipes as a reminder for next time. Armed with

these, you should at least be able to define what went wrong when the results are not up to your

expectations.

The work becomes easier and the product more professional looking each time you repeat

Serious Kitchen Play