French Silk Pie

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French Silk Pie

French Silk Pie

In high school, for one brief day, I fancied myself a pastry chef. There was no reason for me to believe this bold statement; this was four years before I discovered a passion for baking (and six years before I baked professionally). Even so, as a friend and I were sitting bored on the couch on a Saturday afternoon, I imagined inventing new recipes couldn't be that hard. Up until this point, my only experience with baking was with box mixes, but I didn't let this simple, though glaring, fact deter me.

Not when I was craving strawberry pie, anyway.

French Silk Pie

My friend and I set out to engineer our own strawberry pie from scratch. For the crust, we pulled out butter, flour, and sugar, wildly throwing amounts into a mixing bowl without regard to measurements (or consulting a real recipe). The dough was greasy and sticky but, with a little elbow grease and a lot of flour, we managed to roll it out into two round circles. It wasn't perfect, but it gave us the confidence we needed to move on to the next step. See? I told you this wouldn't be hard, I remarked to my friend.

We grabbed a package of frozen strawberries for the filling. I wondered how I could elevate the simple pie. Chocolate, I thought wistfully. Chocolate covered strawberries were delicious, so shouldn't they be delicious in a pie? I relayed this to my friend and she agreed. Though unusual, we had high hopes for our little pie. We filled the bottom crust with filling, but, as the juice from the thawing strawberries pooled in the bottom of the pie pan, we thought it may need something more. Would marshmallows soak up the juice? Maybe. We threw a few in for good measure and sealed the top crust with the remaining dough.

French Silk Pie

As it baked in the oven, the house began to swirl with wonderful scents of butter and strawberries affirming our sincere, but completely wrong belief that baking could be done without recipes or any honest knowledge of how ingredients interact to create sinful treats. The first warning sign came when the top crust held the unusual shape of the marshmallows that jutted out from beneath, leaving us to wonder if the marshmallows simply weren't melting. The second warning sign came when the top crust was completely browned only twenty minutes into the oven. Did pies bake in only twenty minutes?, we wondered. Maybe. We pulled the pie from the oven, let it cool for an agonizing length of time, and finally cut into our masterpiece.

The pie immediately sunk. Once the first piece was removed, the strawberry juice began to pool in the bottom of the pan. Our marshmallow trick hadn't worked, it seemed. We hesitantly took our first bites. Though the top crust was overdone, the bottom crust hadn't even begun to bake, leaving raw dough to form the base of the pie. The strawberries were good, but the chocolate flavor wasn't right and the hint of marshmallows was really too much. My friend managed two bites before tossing it out; I managed three.

It seems we weren't quite the pastry chefs we imagined. Despite this obvious setback, I have gotten much better at baking and inventing recipes since then, thank goodness. This French Silk Pie is a little dream, completely worth the effort of putting it together and waiting for it to emerge from the refrigerator in it's subtle, but charming glory.

French Silk Pie

French Silk Pie is a classic for good reason. A flaky pie crust is filled with a seemingly impossible smooth chocolate mousse and chilled until the mousse sets and the flavors develop. The chocolate mousse is just rich enough for this pie to taste sinful and chilled enough to make for a fitting summer dessert. Topped with whipped cream and chocolate curls, this is a pie to share with the boys (and girls) in your life.

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Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

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Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

We are in the midst of the dog days of summer. The days are long, the sun is bright, and the nights are cool and fresh. In the summer, I'm drawn to fresh foods, light dinners, and chilled treats. Though my usual desserts during the summer are ripe fruits, some days I just need something a little different. While ice cream can be oh so nice, sometimes it's just too rich to eat by the side of the pool.

I recently rediscovered popsicles after buying a popsicle mold. For the last few years I simply haven't found any hidden away in the freezer, but I can already tell it is going to get plenty of use (especially this summer).

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

When I was growing up, popsicles were part of the daily culture at daycare. After playing outside all afternoon under the hot sun, my daycare provider would show up in the backyard with a box of popsicles in half a dozen flavors. She'd watch as we carefully made our color selection, breaking up the arguments that popped up when everyone decided they wanted the same flavor. Back then, popsicles weren't about the flavors, they were all about the colors.

Blue was my favorite flavor simply because it would dye my lips and tongue a bright shade of the sea—a fun accessory for any seven year old.

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

Most days we'd eat them on the front steps, trying to eat them faster than they could melt, a respectable feat on the warmest of days. Other days we were foolish and we'd let our popsicles melt completely in the sun, in their little plastic tubes, until they had turned into a very expensive Kool-aid. We would down the sweet juice in seconds, curiously wishing we had more.

Nowadays I savor popsicles, licking them instead of biting, hoping they last into a little slice of forever.

Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles

These Mango Coconut Striped Popsicles have a bold and fresh taste. The popsicles alternate between flavors of mango, coconut, and orange; the variety is clean and energizing, which keeps your taste buds on their toes. The alternating stripes of flavor and color are fun. Though it does take a little longer to make these popsicles because of the freezing time between stripes, the final product is gorgeous and the flavors are lovely. This is a lovely treat to cool you down on a hot summer afternoon.

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Summer Berry Pavlova

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Summer Berry Pavlova

Summer Berry Pavlova

Heat is oppressive. It wasn't until this summer that I fully began to understand the effects of a never-ending swelter. With a heatwave lasting the length of the sunny season bearing down on me, cool air has seemingly become a luxury of the past. I now realize just how often I took air conditioning (and a hundred other little things) for granted since I moved into a new apartment in a new city.

I used to think heat was glamorous. After reading books set in the deep south such as The Secret Life of Bees and watching movies like Gone With the Wind, my perspective has become skewed. I imagine pretty girls in patterned dresses drinking lemonade on the back porch and fanning themselves with a good book to stave off the sultriness of summer.

Oh, was I wrong.

Summer Berry Pavlova

My apartment is on the top floor of a building; when temperatures rise, the heat in the building rises, and I'm left with a kitchen that could pass for a sauna. The blazing sun has become an unwelcome sight in my windows. Keeping the blinds closed has become something of a survival tactic, as my apartment converts into a stifled cave when I struggle to keep out the heat. I have a small wall air conditioner, but it is useless against the rising heat of the building, scarcely lowering the temperature after running for most of the day.

The heat rarely registers below ninety degrees in my living room and I am starting to understand how food roasting in the oven must feel. At night the temperature impossibly rises as I strip the bed of sheets and fall into a fitful sleep in the path of an industrial fan. I've suffered bouts of heat exhaustion simply from lying on the couch in a heat induced stupor for too long, exhausted and dehydrated from doing absolutely nothing.

Summer Berry Pavlova

There is nothing glamorous about heat. I couldn't have been more wrong in my fantasies of the women of the south and their glasses of lemonade and magazine fans. Now, after living in my own little "deep south," I can appreciate how much people do suffer in the heat, with humidity so high that it suffocates and air so still it feels like a boa constrictor slowing wrapping itself around your body. Heat is really just sweat, frizzy hair, and dreams of crawling into the freezer next to the frozen vegetables.

Last weekend, my parents held a small summer party and I offered to make a couple desserts. Outside in the hot summer air, these Summer Berry Pavlovas were a cool treat to serve and impress. They are light and delicate, which is a lovely quality during the dog days of summer when a bowl of cold cereal is good enough to call dinner.

Summer Berry Pavlova

This Summer Berry Pavlova is sweet, light, and fresh. The pavlova is a large meringue with a crisp exterior and a soft, marshmallow-like interior. When the pavolva cools, the center collapses, revealing a cavity that is filled with a white chocolate whipped cream. The pavlova is topped with fresh raspberries, blueberries, and blackberries, with white chocolate shavings and a dusting of powdered sugar. These are a cool delight when the heat is high and friends are near.

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