Chocolate Puffed Rice & Ricotta Fruit Tart

This dessert is a fun twist on a fruit tart, featuring a chocolate puffed rice crust and fresh fruit.

Crunchy and soft, tasty and light: sweets with puffed rice are easy and quick to make. Puffed rice, in fact, is an extremely versatile ingredient but it’s in snack and dessert recipes that its taste and texture is most successfully enhanced. Moreover, preparing desserts with puffed rice is very easy as the only cooking required is the one needed to melt a little chocolate!

Puffed rice and crisped rice (like Rice Krispies) are both made with rice, but each have distinctive tastes and textures. The making of crisped rice cereal involves sugar in the popping process.  Puffed rice is made by dry roasting white or brown rice kernels alone, hence the difference.

This tart base is made with ‘puffed rice’ as it is great for the crunchy base of creamy desserts like cheese tarts.

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Puffed Rice & Ricotta Fruit Tart
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Servings
Ingredients
Fruit
Servings
Ingredients
Fruit
Votes: 1
Rating: 5
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Instructions
Base
  1. Finely chop dark chocolate with a knife & place it in a microwavable dish. Melt chocolate on high for a few seconds, then remove the dish & mix with a spoon. Place the chocolate back in the microwave & heat for a few seconds & mix again. Repeat this until the chocolate is completely melted.
  2. Heat the puffed rice in the microwave for 30 seconds to avoid thermal shock once the two ingredients are combined. Place the hot puffed rice in a large bowl with the melted chocolate & stir to mix them well.
  3. Transfer the mixture to a 14 x 4-inch rectangular tart pan with a removeable bottom. Distribute the mixture evenly in the pan, pressing it down to compact it as much as possible. Place in refrigerator for at least an hour to become firm.
Filling
  1. In a food processor, pulse ricotta to become more of a creamy texture, add powdered sugar. Cut the vanilla pod lengthwise & with a knife extract seeds to add to the cream to flavor it. Blend well. Fill puffed rice pastry shell with half of the ricotta cream & spread into a smooth layer. Place remaining cream in a pastry bag with a star tip nozzle.
Fruit
  1. Wash nectarines/peaches & slice thinly keeping the peel. Wash & dry grapes. Slice each in half.
Assembly
  1. Line sides & ends with sliced nectarines/peaches. Pipe a creative pattern of ricotta cream down the center of tart. Add a few clusters of halved grapes & some fresh mint leaves for decoration.
Recipe Notes
  • The cold ricotta tart can be kept in the refrigerator for 2-3 days. Freezing is not recommended.

Cardamom Roasted Persimmons

Persimmons are in season between November and February. Mildly sweet and juicy with a slight crunch reminiscent of a cross between a peach and a pear. Since there is only a short window in which you can enjoy this exotic fruit, persimmons make up for it by working well in both sweet and savory recipes.

The two most commonly available varieties are Fuyu and Hachiyas. Some recipes prefer one over the other. Treat them like you would an apple and turn them into jams, puree, tarts and cakes. Paired with pork adds a nice fruity and caramelizing sweetness.

Fuyus are squat and round whereas Hachiyas are acorn shaped and have a pointed bottom. When buying persimmons, look for the unblemished skin with the green leaves and top still attached. The texture should be like a tomato-firm but a bit of give without being to soft. Persimmons are usually sold unripe, so leave them on the counter for a day or two until the skin deepens to a rich sunset orange.

Cardamom is a complex flavor that can be used in any of the usual autumn and winter recipes. There is nothing subtle about cardamom, so when used in all but sparing amounts, it will dominate whatever its paired with. Cardamom has been used in Christmas baking in Germany since the middle ages.

You can eat roasted persimmons hot or cold. For a quick breakfast, make a batch ahead of time, then just reheat in the microwave or eat cold.

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Cardamom Roasted Persimmons
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Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 375 F. In a small bowl, combine hot water with 3 Tbsp honey; stir until honey is dissolved. With a sharp knife, split the vanilla bean in half lengthwise & scrape half of the seeds into the bowl. Reserve excess seeds for yogurt.
  2. Peel the persimmons, cut them in half lengthwise & then slice into 1-inch thick wedges. Arrange the slices in a baking dish, drizzle with lime juice & sprinkle with the honey mixture, cardamom & butter.
  3. Roast persimmons for about 45-60 minutes spooning the pan juices over top occasionally. When done they should be tender & easily pierced with a knife.
  4. In a small bowl, combine 1 1/2 Tbsp honey & yogurt. Add the remainder of the vanilla bean seeds; whisk until yogurt is smooth & well blended.
  5. To serve, divide yogurt between 4 serving dishes, top with a quarter of the persimmons, drizzle with any extra syrup & sprinkle the pistachios on top.
Recipe Notes
  • When using extract in place of vanilla bean in a recipe, use 1 teaspoon for every one inch of vanilla bean. Be sure to replace vanilla bean with vanilla extract and not vanilla flavoring or imitation vanilla, which are both a far cry from real vanilla.

Puddingbrezel – Classic German Pastry

The puddingbrezel  is a special kind of pretzel. Made with buttery ‘danish pastry’, filled with a smooth, sweet vanilla pudding. The term danish is connected to a strike among Danish bakers in the 19th century. When bakers from neighboring countries, especially Austria, were invited to work, they brought with them a new kind of dough. As soon as the strike ended, the Danish bakers started to experiment with this new dough adapting it to their needs. 

This dough technique was called lamination. Although the dough is prepared with yeast, it is processed with cold ingredients. After kneading, it is folded and rolled out again multiple times to achieve the desired fluffy and flaky texture. For successful danish pastry, butter is needed as it works to separate the various layers of the dough as they bake.

To put it simply, we have an Austrian pastry that was adapted by the Danes, which is used to make a German delicacy. How is that for ‘interculinary’.

If you like danish, your sure to love these!

 


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German Puddingbrezel

Using the shortcut version of danish pastry eliminates having to 'knead' the dough.

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Course dessert
Cuisine American, German

Servings


Ingredients
Shortcut Danish Pastry

Vanilla Pudding

Course dessert
Cuisine American, German

Servings


Ingredients
Shortcut Danish Pastry

Vanilla Pudding

Votes: 1
Rating: 5
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Rate this recipe!


Instructions
Shortcut Danish Pastry
  1. Dissolve sugar into lukewarm water & sprinkle with the yeast. Allow to stand 15 minutes. In a food processor, combine flour, sugar & salt; pulse in cold butter cubes. Mixture should resemble pea sized chunks. Remove mixture from food processor & transfer to a large mixing bowl.

  2. Whisk together eggs & whipping cream. Stir in yeast mixture & pour over the flour mixture. Toss together with a wooden spoon, just enough to make dough form. Divide into two portions. Each portion makes about 8-10 pastries so if you don't need it all right away, double wrap one portion in plastic wrap & freeze for later. Refrigerate dough for several hours or overnight.

Vanilla Pudding
  1. In a small dish, combine cornstarch with 1/4 cup milk & beat until completely smooth. Slice vanilla bean lengthwise & scrape out the seeds. Cut the remaining pod in half crosswise.

  2. In a saucepan, add remaining 2 3/4 cups milk, sugar, salt, vanilla pulp & pod. Place on stove over high heat. As soon as the mixture begins to boil, remove from heat & add cornstarch mixture stirring constantly. Return saucepan to stove, continue cooking ONLY until bubbly & thickened. Remove from heat & take out vanilla pod. Cover with plastic wrap to avoid forming a skin as it cools.

  3. To make PUDDINGBREZELS: Roll a portion of the dough into a 12 x 18-inch rectangle. Cut strips on the long side of the rectangle, about just over 1/2" wide. Twirl two of the strips together & form into pretzels. Transfer carefully to a baking sheet lined with parchment paper, with some room in between to expand during baking. Let rise 30 minutes before filling.

  4. Preheat oven to 375 F. Using a pastry bag, pipe cooled vanilla pudding into the two holes of each pretzel. Brush each pastry with an egg wash consisting of 1 egg whisked together with 2 Tbsp water. Bake for 15-20 minutes until lightly golden.Timing depends upon the size you chose to make your puddingbrezels.