Recipes By Dorie Greenspan
72 recipes found
Gâteau d’Hélène (Coconut Cake)
This coconut cake was adapted from a recipe by Simone (Simca) Beck, best known as Julia Child’s co-author on “Mastering the Art of French Cooking.” She called it “Gâteau d’Hélène: a white cake filled and iced with coconut cream and apricot.” The recipe, published in Ms. Beck’s 1972 book, “Simca’s Cuisine” (Lyons Press, 1998), capped what she called a “carefree lunch” because it could be made ahead. Indeed, this cake is best baked, filled, frosted and refrigerated for at least an hour (or up to two days). Kind of like a madeleine, its layers are purposefully a bit dry, as they need to hold a dousing of orange juice and rum. The whipped cream filling and frosting is soft and dreamy. It’s an elegant celebration cake.
Spiced Caramel Syrup
While this syrup was created by the pastry chef Daniel Skurnick to pour over his Franco-Chinese steamed ginger-milk custard, it’s a good recipe to have handy when you want something to pour over cooked fruit, ice cream or pudding – I like it paired with vanilla, chocolate or butterscotch. It’s a quickly made syrup flavored with peppercorns, cloves, nutmeg and ginger. Mr. Skurnick says you should cook the caramel until its color is “Irish-setter red” before adding the spices – it’s a perfect description of what you’re looking for.
Hot Fudge and Salted Chocolate Bits Sundae
Sundaes are the chamber music of the dessert world. Their composition and construction follow the contours of grand works, but mostly they’re played out in miniature, their delights designed to be shared by a duet or an audience of one, long spoon in hand. The composition of this sundae is classic. There’s ice cream – the flavors of your choice in whatever quantities you want; sauce –homemade hot fudge sauce based on dark chocolate (not chips, please); fresh whipped cream; and two different add-ins, toasted slivered almonds and chopped chocolate bits. It’s the bits that are the big surprise – they’re bittersweet chocolate and salt, melted together, frozen and then cut into morsels. The salt is unexpected, but not dissonant – it’s what brings out the best in the sundae’s other players.
Sweet Tart Crust
This recipe, my trusted go-to, turns out a cookielike crust — sweet, golden and more crisp than flaky. Typically French — it’s a pâte sablée — I use the recipe for my whole lemon tart as well as for the less French bakewell tart. I make the dough in a food processor using very cold butter, and while it sounds like culinary heresy, I roll it out as soon as it’s made. Sandwiched between parchment or wax paper, the dough is a cinch to roll at this point — just make sure to chill it before you bake it (better yet, freeze it once it’s in the pan). I also like to partly bake the crust before I fill it, a step you can skip, but prebaking will give you a crisper bottom crust.
Cranberry-Lemon Eton Mess
This is not a traditional Eton mess, the renowned British dessert usually comprising meringue, whipped cream and strawberries. I made one like that and loved it, but the elements just begged to be played with. For this, my favorite mess for the fall-into-winter season, I’ve added spice-cookie crumbs to the meringue for more flavor and a bit of surprise, made two add-ins — a quick-cook cranberry jam and a lemon curd — and stirred in some fresh raspberries (more tang, more color). Of course, I kept the whipped cream — it’s essential to a mess. Going with cranberries and curd make this a good choice for the holidays. You can serve the mess family style or in bowls, coupes or even canning jars. And if you want a bit more texture and another flavor, speckle the top with chopped pistachios.
Lemon Meringue Cookies
Like their inspiration, lemon meringue pie, these cookies have three elements. They’re built on simple, slice-and-bake French shortbread cookies, rich, buttery and flavored with vanilla. The shortbread base is almost classic, except that the cookies are baked in muffin tins, so they’re straight-sided and deeply golden brown. The “filling” is lemon curd, and the topping is crunchy bits of meringue. You get crumbly, velvety and crackly, sweet and tart in every bite. These cookies were created for an imaginary friend, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, the hero of 16 Louise Penny novels, and a man who considers lemon meringue divine.
Vanilla Marshmallows
Homemade marshmallows should have their own dreamy name, something that makes it clear that they’re different from the supermarket stuff. When you make this recipe by Christine Moore of Little Flower Candy Co., you get puffs that are soft, tender, languidly stretchy and delicately sweet, and a lesson in the transformative power of heat and air. To make these, you beat together roiling-hot sugar syrup and gelatin, and watch as the mixture goes from murky to opaque, from beige to white, from thin to billowing. For this magic to happen, it takes almost 15 minutes, plus a very large bowl and a sturdy mixer. (I use a 5-quart stand mixer.) You need no special skills, just patience — you have to wait a few hours for the whipped mixture to dry — but you’ll be rewarded with singular sweets good for toasting, s’mores, snacking and wrapping up as gifts.
Poppy Seed Tea Cake
Poppy seeds belong to the small-but-mighty clan of ingredients: Their flavor is nutty, their aroma earthy, and their color, a gorgeous blue-black, dramatic. Even though they’re minuscule, they crack pleasantly under a light bite. Sprinkle poppy seeds over something sweet or savory and you add interest. Give the seeds a star turn and you add surprise. Although this simple loaf cake includes vanilla extract and lemon juice, it’s the flavor that you get from an abundance of poppy seeds that brings everyone back for more. The cake can be served plain, but it’s pretty spread with white icing and speckled with seeds. Remember that because poppy seeds are oily, they can go rancid — store them in the freezer and taste a few before using them.
Cocoa-Cornmeal Biscotti
Everything about these biscotti tends toward crunch – their signature double bake, of course, but also the addition of almonds and some cornmeal, which doesn’t lose its appealing roughness under heat. (Don’t think, as I mistakenly once did, that using a polenta-type cornmeal will improve these cookies — it will only make them gritty; choose a fine-grain meal.) The chocolate chips are there to reinforce the deep chocolate flavor the cookies get from being made with cocoa. I like these very crunchy, but if you prefer them less set, give them a shorter second bake. And after the first bake, when the logs have cooled for about 20 minutes, use a long serrated knife and a gentle sawing motion to slice them into cookies about 1/2-inch thick. Hold on to the inevitable crumbs and any little bits that might break off — you’ll be happy to have them over ice cream.
Egg Mayo
Egg mayo — or oeuf mayo, as it’s called in France — is simply hard-boiled eggs coated with seasoned mayonnaise, but it’s so beloved in France that it has a society to protect it: Association de sauvegarde de l’oeuf mayonnaise. You could season store-bought mayonnaise for this recipe from Priscilla Martel, but at least just once, you should make your own. It’ll be delicious, and you’ll feel like a magician. The dish is beautiful served plain, and tasty dressed with anchovies, capers, snipped chives or other herbs (choose one or more). It’s good as a starter, with a pouf of dressed greens, or as part of a platter of small salads (hors d’oeuvres variées), a picnic on a tray.
Gâteau Basque
Bixente Marichular, founder of the Musée du Gâteau Basque in Sare, France, says the pastry is part of Basque patrimony: Every family has a recipe, and every family thinks theirs is the best. This version, made with ingredients from an American supermarket, follows the tradition of sandwiching two rounds of rolled-out dough with jam. In the Pays Basque, where the filling is sometimes pastry cream, the jam is usually local black cherry. Once baked, the texture of the “cake” — never mind that it’s about as much cake as Boston cream pie is pie — is a mix of crumbly, tender and chewy. Since gâteau Basque is a casual treat, eating it with your fingers is allowed.
Earl Grey Madeleines
Cédric Grolet, the pastry chef of Le Meurice hotel in Paris, is famous for his Instagram feed, which has nearly a million and a half followers, his tattoos and his title: Best Pastry Chef in the World. Mostly, and most rightly, he’s famous for his elegant pastries, so I was surprised when he asked me if I’d tasted one of his simplest, his madeleines. Small sponge cakes baked in shell-shaped molds (metal pans give you the best color and crust), madeleines are known for the impressive bump that develop on their tops. These madeleines, adapted from a Grolet recipe, are made with brown butter and flavored with Earl Grey tea and honey. Like all madeleines, they benefit from a rest in the refrigerator before they’re baked. (Good for the mads, convenient for the baker.) If you can arrange it, serve the madeleines just minutes out of the oven — it’s when their fragrance and texture are at their peak.
Parisian Cookie Cake
A cross between an American chocolate chip cookie and a French shortbread, this treat was inspired by one created by François Perret, the pastry chef of the Ritz hotel in Paris and its patisserie, Le Comptoir. Chewy and crunchy, this cookie as big as a cake is as much fun to eat as it is to make. The base is sweet, tender and caramel-flavored from turbinado sugar. You also catch a bit of nuttiness: That’s the almond butter that’s mixed into it. It’s delicious and intentionally plain because all the excitement is on the top of the cookie, which is paved with chopped almonds and chunks of chocolate, dabbed with caramel and sprinkled with fleur de sel.
Chocolate and Almond Tiger Cake
This almond cake is based on financiers, the small, usually ingot-shaped cakes first made in Paris in the late 1880s. The pastry chef Lasne created and named them for his stockbroker clients, keeping them easy and neat to eat on the run — no fuss, no muss. Made with egg whites, ground nuts and a lot of melted butter, the recipe is invitingly riffable. My favorite take is the tigré, a round, chocolate-speckled cake topped with a dab of ganache. Years ago, I misread the name, and I’ve called them tiger cakes ever since. My play on the tiger is a large cake, a little less rich than the original, run through with chopped chocolate and covered with enough ganache to leave telltale smudges. Stockbrokers beware.
Black-and-White Cupcakes
There’s a lot to like in a little cupcake. There’s the joy of having a cake all to yourself. The pleasure of getting creamy frosting and tender cake in every bite. And the fun of decorating, or not: Plain is good, too. This cupcake has two more things going for it: It’s easy enough to make with kids or to have kids make themselves, and it’s both childishly appealing and sophisticated — the cake is not very sweet and the chocolate frosting is deep and rich. There’s enough frosting for each cupcake to be finished with a few thick swirls. If you have turret-type topknots in mind, multiply the recipe. Whatever you do, keep mixing the frosting after the cold butter goes in so that it thickens enough to spread.
Roman Breakfast Cake
Of course this cake is good at lunch, at dinner, after school, afternoon or after midnight, but I call it a breakfast cake because it reminds me of a lemon cake I had with coffee every morning that I was in Rome. The cake is tall and golden, lightly lemony and most like a sponge cake — it’s soft and stretchy: Pull it gently, and it will tug itself back into shape. If you have a tube pan, use it; if you don’t, choose a Bundt pan with as few curves, crannies and crenellations as possible (fewer nooks make unmolding easier). When there are berries in the market, I fold them into the batter at the end. During the rest of the year, I go with straight lemon, although you could certainly make this cake with orange or a mix of citrus. Like so many of my favorite recipes, this is one that you can play with.
Slow-Roasted Tomatoes With Olive Oil and Lime
Inspired by a meal at Le Jardin des Plumes in the French town of Giverny, where the artist Monet lived and worked, this dish is as beautiful as it is unusual: It’s simply a tomato gently roasted and basted with olive oil. It tastes vegetal and rich, as you’d expect, but it’s also sweet and citrusy. The surprise is at the core, which gets filled with sugar and lime zest. During the hours in the oven, the oil, sugar and zest find their way into every fiber of the tomato, technically making it a kind of confit, a dish usually cooked in fat or sugar — or, in this case, both. Serve the tomato warm or at room temperature as a starter, perhaps with a tiny salad, or, for your most adventurous friends, serve it chilled for dessert, topped with vanilla ice cream, a drizzle of oil and some flaky salt.
Miso-Maple Loaf Cake
This cake, adapted from “Baking With Dorie” (Mariner Books, 2021), is comforting and surprising. The ingredients that give it its name, miso and maple syrup, are strong characters, but they prove themselves good team players. When baked, their flavors are warm and satisfying, mellow and not immediately knowable at first. They hover in that space between sweet and savory. Coarse-crumbed — admirably so — and sturdy, the cake is easy to slice, easy to serve at breakfast and easy to pick up and nibble in the afternoon. It’s as good with butter and jam as it is with a little cheese. And it keeps well: It’ll hold at room temperature for about 4 days.
Apple Pie, Circus-Style
This winter in Paris, my husband went out every morning, walked to Circus bakery and returned home with an apple pie, a really good one. The rustic pie — a cross between an American open-face pie and a French galette — is made with a sturdy, rather wet dough. Chill the dough overnight and it will be a dream to work with. The filling is a generous mound of unpeeled, thinly sliced, lightly sweetened apples, flavored with an abundance of lemon juice and zest and, so surprisingly, not a speck of spice. At Circus, the palm-size pies are pentagonal. The dough is lifted up around the apples, pinched and pressed into shape. To learn to make the pastry at home, I watched Circus’s bakers at work. I loved how each had a particular way of forming the pies. But, most of all, I loved that no matter how they shaped them, in the end, they all looked beautiful. My pie looks beautiful and yours will, too.
A Spice Cookie to Share
The only thing better than a plate of cookies is one big cookie meant to be shared by everyone around the table. It’s the kind of dessert that will encourage your friends and family to linger at the table and to keep the conversation going. It’s a brown-sugar cookie redolent of ginger, honey, cinnamon and clove that carries the scent of the season and tacks between crisp and slightly chewy, between gingersnap and gingerbread. That it has ground coffee in it marks it as a sweet for grown-ups. It’s a roll-out cookie, but not a fussy one – any shape works and ragged is better than perfect. I usually sprinkle the cookie with sanding sugar, but you can drizzle it with melted chocolate or frost it, if you’d like. For extra fun, put out chocolate or caramel sauce (or both) and invite everyone to dip.
Lemon Goop and Vinaigrette
The first time I made this lemon concoction, I called it “goop,” and still haven’t found a better name. My inspiration was an offbeat lemon jam I’d had in a Paris bistro. The jam, which I think was served with mackerel, was thick, velvety, salty, tangy, only a bit sweet and made with salt-cured preserved lemons. Haunted by the flavor and not patient enough to wait a month for lemons to cure, I cooked ordinary lemons, some with their peel, in a sugar-and-salt syrup, then blended them into a kind of marmalade, the goop. It’s excellent swiped over cooked fish, seafood, chicken or vegetables. The syrup, fragrant and full flavored, is terrific in marinades and great mixed with a little goop, sherry and cider vinegars, honey and oil to make a vinaigrette for beans, grains and hearty salads. I guess that goop is technically a condiment, but I call it a transformer. It’s that good.
Daniel Skurnick’s Franco-Chinese Steamed Ginger Custard
This custard, a mix of French and Chinese techniques and tastes, comes from the New York pastry chef Daniel Skurnick. Because Mr. Skurnick is responsible for the desserts at the French restaurant Le Coucou and the pan-Asian restaurant Buddakan, this kind of blending comes easily to him. Here, he uses just five ingredients to make a dessert that is packed with the flavor of ginger and has the quintessential jiggle and litheness of custard. It reminds me most of an oven-baked French crème caramel, but it’s steamed, the way many Asian desserts are. If you have a bamboo steamer that fits over a wok, this is the time to use it – its flat bottom is perfect for this job. If all you have is a steamer insert, don’t despair – just make the dessert in two batches. Once chilled, the custards are lovely plain, but for a bit more polish, pour over a few spoonfuls of spiced caramel syrup.
Whole-Lemon Tart
My grail is a simple dessert that both satisfies and surprises. This tart, adapted from a recipe that was originally given to me by Jean-Marie Desfontaines of the Paris patisserie Rollet Pradier, has all that I look for in a dessert. The filling is the surprise — it’s made with every part of the lemon except the seeds, and so its flavor is exuberantly full. It’s also easy to make — it all happens in the food processor. It bakes to a creaminess that teeters between custard and pudding. Alone, it’s interesting, but with the sweet crust (think butter cookie), it’s deeply satisfying. To get every lick of flavor and the best texture out of the crust, don’t roll it too thin and make sure to bake it well — you want the color to be truly golden brown.
Tumble-Jumble Strawberry Tart
I first had a strawberry tart like this one more than 10 years ago at the Paris cafe La Palette, and I’ve been making my own version of it ever since. It’s simply a crust slicked with some jam and then topped with an abundance of berries; whipped cream or crème fraîche is optional. The recipe is straightforward, but the construction is genius. You bake the crust, which is both crisp and tender, to a beautiful golden color and then set it aside. (Use the scraps of dough to make cookies; sprinkle with sugar before baking.) When you’re ready for dessert, you cut and finish only as many servings as you need, ensuring that the crust will always have great texture and the berries will always be fresh and bright. You could use a store-bought crust, but there are so few components in this dessert, it’s good to make each one count.