Sunday, June 10, 2012

It was a long week, albeit good. I had fun at my new job, back in nursing, at least per diem. When Jordan got back to town Friday evening, we went out to dinner with our friend, Ric. We had dinner again at the Gas Lamp. Great food! I had the Italian Seafood Stew with polenta and Jordan had a Steak Ceasar Salad. Ric had the Grilled Pork Chop that is Gas Lamp's specialty.

But I was back to baking this weekend. Saturday I made a Blueberry Mascarpone Cheesecake. I had been given the recipe by The Baddish Group, a PR firm in NYC. Because I am the examiner.com Reno Food Examiner, I get contacted by them intermittently with promotions. May 30 was National Blueberry Cheesecake Day and Driscoll's being one of their clients, they of course offered me a recipe to try and some coupons for $5 off Driscoll berries. Nice! The crust is made up of ground almonds, sugar and a little butter. It then gets baked for 10-15 minutes until golden brown.



The filling is made up of cream cheese, mascarpone, sugar, eggs, one vanilla bean (scraped of the seeds), and liquid vanilla. Mix it all together, pour it over the cooled crust and bake for 1 1/2 hours at 300 degrees. Once it's baked, it gets topped with blueberries that have been cooked in a simple syrup on the stovetop for about 5 minutes.





Today I tried a new Palmier recipe. I still used sugar, although I went with vanilla sugar but brushed the puff lightly with a beaten egg wash. I also cut them 3.4 of an inch, put chopped pecans on half the batch and left the other half plain. I then dipped half of the palmiers into chocolate. I am a little obsessed with making palmiers right now but guess I am going to have to try my hand at home made puff now that I have tried all the store bought puff pastries out there.







We had dinner at a friend's house and I took both desserts over there. They barbecued lamb and flank steak on the grill, which was fabulous. It was a nice evening...