Dessert First

In the competitive world that is kids’ birthday parties, Liv and Kaye Hansen can help any mom stand tall. Their Westchester, N.Y., bakery, Riviera Bakehouse, boasts boldly colored (surely an understatement), topsy-turvy cakes, many of which are easy enough for home bakers to attempt. Some of those cakes were showcased in their first book, The Whimsical Bakehouse, and readers hoping for more inspiration will be glad to see Kids’ Cakes from the Whimsical Bakehouse: And other treats for colorful celebrations from this mother-daughter pair.

Those readers need to pay extra attention, though, to the subtitle of this book, noting the “and other treats” part. Kids’ Cakes (from Clarkson Potter, released June 1, 2010) offers ideas for eight themed parties, including an “enchanted tea party,” a sleepover, and a circus party. Thus there are just 13 finished cakes, including a cheesecake. The book also offers some decorated cupcakes and cookies, chocolate shells to fill with pudding, flan, brownies, pancakes, and cinnamon bread for French toast.

Trendy cakes these days often get covered in fondant, which forms a beautiful, smooth shell. Fondant’s utter lack of flavor, though, means diners usually peel it off to get at the cake underneath—which will have just a bare covering of the buttercream frosting most people want. The Hansens believe all parts of a cake should be edible, so they generally ignore fondant in favor of decorations made either of frosting or melted wafer chocolate.

Wafer chocolate, also called confectioners’ chocolate, compound chocolate, or chocolate coating, isn’t real chocolate because it lacks chocolate liquor and replaces cocoa butter with vegetable oil. Real chocolate must be tempered—a somewhat fussy process in which it gets melted, cooled, and slightly reheated—so that it stays shiny and firm after setting up, but not wafer chocolate. It can be melted, tinted with food coloring, and piped, poured, and brushed into designs. Using it, the Hansens produce all sorts of edible, fanciful decorations, from simple hearts to circus horses to a detailed reproduction of a child’s portrait.

Kids’ Cakes gives full directions and templates for all of those; non-artists may want to avoid the portrait, but the rest are less intimidating, and many require little more than an ability to trace a simple drawing with a pastry cone instead of a pencil. A host of animal faces for cupcakes, for example, come together fairly easily in melted chocolate, far easier than trying to pipe the details directly onto a cupcake in frosting,

The book does, to the authors’ own surprise, offer a recipe for marshmallow fondant to use in one recipe. If a cake forces you to use fondant, marshmallow is the way to go for ease and slightly better taste, and the Hansens offer a standard recipe (though without offering the far easier option to knead the fondant in a stand mixer than by hand).

The cake and filling recipes are fine, if not especially exciting; experienced bakers will likely use this book more for decoration ideas than recipes. Sugar cookies, for example, could use a flavor boost, and many bakers will cringe at the buttercream recipe that uses high-ratio shortening (useful because it produces more vivid colors, but many bakers may choose to stick with the Italian meringue buttercream at the expense of color).

The authors provide nice tips throughout the book, such as good advice on immediately using their tasty cookies and cream filling (Oreos folded into stiffly whipped cream) so it doesn’t collapse, and “kids can” sidebars that note where children can help.

An emphasis in the introduction on not getting hung up on the details should come as a welcome reminder that these are, after all, cakes meant to be eaten. Too much time spent looking at cake books that focus on fondant and other inedible decorations will intimidate most home bakers; these photos are beautiful, but you can still see where the spatula swept across the icing. All is not perfection, and for most bakers, that will be the most perfect recipe for success.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.

Can a cook’s shelves hold too many ice cream books? Not with summer looming, and not if there’s still space for The Ciao Bella Book.

Fans of Ciao Bella, which sells gelato and sorbetto in groceries across the county and has shops in California and Manhattan, will find about 100 recipes based on those offerings in this book, by F.W. Pearce and Danilo Zecchin. (Clarkson Potter, May 2010).  Although they’re not quite as quick as whisking together cream and sugar, the recipes keep things lazy-summer simple.

A cook needs just a saucepan, a thermometer, and an ice-cream maker for most of the recipes, and cooks with experience in making a custard sauce could skip the thermometer. Although the authors note that an expensive machine with built-in refrigeration allows multiple batches to be made in a day, they reassure readers that inexpensive makers with canisters that must be kept frozen will still produce terrific desserts.

The book offers two base recipes for gelato, which differs from ice cream by using more milk and less cream, and by having less air churned into it. For plain and chocolate bases, a cook makes a custard by whisking hot milk and cream into egg yolks beaten with sugar, then heating the mixture until it thickens slightly. Readers will have to plan ahead a bit, to chill the custard for at least 4 hours (overnight is better, especially for the canister makers) before churning.

The base recipes each make a tasty quart of gelato on their own, but then the variations begin. Some require further cooking, such as one that combines rice pudding with gelato, a luxurious combination. Most, though, need just a few mix-ins, such as extracts, chopped chocolate, and nuts.

The stracciatella method of drizzling in melted chocolate to a plain base (barely scented with vanilla; I wished for a bit more, just as readers accustomed to American excess will wish for more chocolate) makes an easy, delicate chocolate-chip gelato. Although the suggestion of drizzling in the chocolate just as the gelato finishes churning seems easier, follow the recipe’s preferred method of folding it in by hand for a more even result. (Pet peeve alert: The recipe calls for folding with a rubber spatula. The accompanying photo shows a metal spoon. Yes, it’s minor, but if the point of a photo is to demo the recipe, why doesn’t it follow the recipe?)

Cinnamon gelato, using the plain base plus cinnamon and a touch of vanilla, came out full of flavor on its own; variations include a ribbon of caramel swirled in or crumbled oatmeal cookies added at the end of churning. Mint chip gelato was also a hit, although it was too mild with just ½ teaspoon peppermint extract; the authors suggest increasing to ¾ teaspoon, and mint lovers will want even more than that. The recipe’s ¼ cup of chopped chocolate also seemed a bit scanty; ½ cup made tasters happier.

Mixing the plain or chocolate base with peanut butter yields a very kid-friendly, sweet gelato, made even better with a swirl of strawberry jam. Calling for “sweetened smooth peanut butter” may confuse some readers; presumably it means Jif or Skippy or something similar, not “natural” peanut butter. The recipe was tested with regular Jif; note that reduced-fat peanut butters, which have even more sugar, would make this gelato far too sweet.

Because the recipes are so simple, cooks will soon feel free to experiment on their own; try crossing the peanut butter-plain base gelato with the stracciatella gelato’s method of drizzling in melted chocolate, or substitute the peanut butter-chocolate version in the book’s recipe for a s’mores gelato.

While most of the recipes are fairly tame (despite the assertion that the lower fat content makes gelato more intense than ice cream, many of the flavors here are quite mild), the book does offer some more adventuresome ideas. Gelati with black sesame seeds, ginger, green tea, saffron, or chai prove interesting but not bizarre, and an “adults only” section will get cooks started on liqueur experiments.

Some of the more intense flavors in the book come from the sorbetto recipes. A sorbetto, made from a simple syrup (water simmered with sugar) and, usually, fruit, will be perfect for the fat-phobic, but it’s more than a diet dessert. Its depth of color—from raspberries, strawberries, mangoes, watermelon—foretells the flavor to follow. And sorbetto doesn’t have to be fruity; try the chocolate, made in a flash by melting dark chocolate in the sugar syrup, adding cocoa and a smidgen of rum and vanilla, then chilling overnight—good enough to explain a bowlful out of the churn at 9 A.M.

The book ends with a few suggestions for getting fancy, including gelato “truffles” and gelato cakes and sandwiches, all of which provide inspiration for experimentation. But the focus isn’t on tarted-up desserts, just recipes with a straight shot to summer happiness—just in time.

This review first appeared online at the New York Journal of Books.