Fruit Dessert

The tristar strawberry, pear sorbet, and goat froyo desserts are variations on a theme. Every pastry chef and department has a successful formula to piece flavors and textures together into desserts. This is ours: ganache + sorbet + textural element = plated dessert. These types of desserts highlight the way that Milk Bar components, which might seem kind of jokey (like Ritz crunch) or weird (like pumpkin ganache), can be brought together in unexpected ways as thoughtful, delicious, grown-up desserts. The composition of these dishes can be looked at as guides for ways to put together fancy-looking plates at home. If you are baking out of this book a bunch—making liquid cheesecake or crunches or cakes and ending up with leftovers—you will see that plates like these are actually quite easy to assemble just from your scraps. Think of these recipes as your Milk Bar final exam for all things sweet yet savory. Bonus points if you use chilled plates to serve the desserts.

This was one of the first spring desserts we made for Ko. It is simple but somehow hits home in just the right way.

The acid from the grapefruit juice and citric acid will naturally thicken the sweetened condensed milk, which is one of the coolest things to watch happen right before your very eyes.

This cobbler is sooo good and sooo easy. It’s unbeatable topped with vanilla ice cream. You can substitute peaches or pineapple tidbits for the pears.

Serve this as a starter: It’s nice to have on the table as a beginning for a brunch. You might also serve it as a summery dessert.

This is a great fruit dish in the autumn, when the apples and pears are at their peak. Make it a few hours ahead of time, if you like, and leave it at room temperature until ready to serve. You may want to heat it briefly in a 300°F oven before serving. Choose a tart apple, such as Granny Smith, or any good local apple. This could be served as a side dish, as a starter, or even as dessert!

Adapted from a recipe by Julia Child, this country French dessert is made by baking a fresh fruit layer in an eggy pancake, then serving it hot with plenty of confectioners’ sugar and lemon or with whipped cream or ice cream. Choose your fruit according to the season: In the winter, use apples, and in the summer, any berries or pitted cherries.

In summer, look for blueberries on hikes in temperate parts of the country. Last summer, I found enough for an entire pie on a hike in upstate New York. Wild blueberries can be even sweeter than farmers’ market berries, while store-bought berries can have high pesticide residues. So if you get the chance to pick them yourself, you might end up with a healthier and tastier cobbler. Serve with good-quality vanilla ice cream.

Start this recipe the night before serving it so that the lavender can soak in the cream and impart a strong flavor. Use fresh or dried lavender, but stay away from ornamental lavender, which is usually treated with pesticides. If you prefer, substitute peaches or nectarines for the apricots.

Quince smells wonderful, like a pear with notes of citrus. But resist tasting the raw fruit—it is highly tannic until cooked through. Quince require a long cooking time to soften to the point of being edible, and a sharp knife is needed for slicing through their hard flesh, but their delicate flavor is worth the wait and the work. Quince grows in much of the United States—I’ve even picked some in Central Park—and they are sold at many markets throughout the winter. Serve this dessert on its own or with vanilla ice cream and the easy crunch topping from the Pear Kanten with Pecan Crunch (page 101).

There’s an ancient pear tree at the edge of Mama’s driveway. The pears have thick green skin, are very aromatic, and have an intense pear flavor. Most certainly a now-nameless heirloom variety, they appear to be similar to an Anjou or a Bartlett. Remember the canned pears often served with cottage cheese in the school cafeteria? Those are Bartlett pears. Anjou pears are distinctive in that they remain green even when fully ripe. Meme and Dede preserved the pears from the yard in quart containers packed in heavy syrup. Meme served them chilled for dessert and topped with grated Cheddar cheese for “salad.” One of our favorite treats was the deep-fried, half-moon-shaped pies she made with pureed pears and biscuit dough.