Never with mango though… it never crossed my mind really as my wife is not a big fan of mangoes, she finds them a little too fibrous and sweet for her taste. However my next door neighbor rung my doorbell holding a few of those Honey Mangoes, as a gift. They were nice, ripe and very aromatic, I swear I felt the aroma even before opening the door and when I cut one open I knew I had to somehow share them with my everyone in the household. There’s no better vehicle for all that as a fool, so here goes.

The ingredients are quite simple, I thought going after a sort-of Thai-ish vibe here with the aromas of ginger, cardamom and lime. Lime will also help tame the balance of sweetness bringing in a bit of zing and freshness.

The base is 35% cooking or whipping cream. In my household cooking cream is preferred as it has less additives. Maple syrup will play second fiddle on the sweetness role and will tie in nicely with the rest of the aromas.

The mango’s flesh is blended along a thumb sized piece of ginger, chopped in smaller chunks to make the blender’s job a little easier. Cardamom according to taste follows, plus a splash of maple syrup, as liquid help. I blended this on high until the resulting purée was smooth and silky.

Nothing better than my stand mixer to whip the cream to semi-hard peaks, point at which I started adding the mango purée and continued whipping until the cream was holding semi-hard peaks again.

Two things are helping this process: really cold ingredients and a good mixer, also with a cooled bowl. This Kitchen Aid monster we got never ceases to amaze me. It mixes, beats and whips things with the same ease Pavarotti was hitting the most difficult notes in the most difficult arias.

Anyway… this is the best not to mention the final opportunity to adjust the taste to your own liking, using a splash of lime juice for more brightness or perhaps more maple syrup.

All that is left to do is to divide the resulting “fool” in serving glasses or cups and top it up with some fresh fruit or some preserves or whatever tickles your taste buds.

In my case I used blueberries, a few lime slices and also a little bit of zest. Needless to say we inhaled them.

Also needless to say, is not only how easy this comes together but how such a base can be used with a broad range of fruits and aromas and such. Only your imagination is the limit.

For instance some instructions for my 5qt. capacity bowl say 1kg of flour should be no problem. Other however will limit this capacity to 500 or 750 grams. A simple empirical measurement will give credence to the lower numbers, especially considering one will have to add more ingredients to make a dough. Once I’ve come up with this answer, my Mom-in-Law decided to shut down the project. In flames. And that was that.

Unfortunately I’m of an engineering background and once my little mental gears get themselves going, I have to follow thru until I find a satisfactory answer. So the result and what follows here, is a recipe designed specifically with a stand mixer in mind, compiled from several sources but using some engineering logic to try and determine what combination of ingredients and technique will yield the best results. And record them for posterity, fame and fortune. Here goes.

I usually follow NYT’ Sam Sifton’s philosophy and don’t necessarily provide quantities in my recipes but this is baking … So for the dough:

• 500g of Tipo “00” flour.
• 8g Active dry yeast.
• 75g brown sugar (I’ll make some notes about this lower)
• 200-225ml Whole milk, preferably something with 3-4% fat.
• 100g of softened or melted butter.
• 3 egg yolks.
• 2 good tsp of orange zest.
• A pinch of salt, 10g or so.

Most recipes I’ve encountered also include oil which here is missing. The consensus of the sources I consulted look for around 50ml of some form of vegetable oil but I decided to avoid the complication and substitute a little more butter instead towards the end of the kneading. Anyway, here are the ingredients for the “filling”.

• 150g of minced walnuts or pecans or a mix of both.
• 50g of brown sugar.
• The 3 egg whites resulted from the dough. No waste here, OK?
• 2 tbsp Cocoa powder.
• 2 good tsp of orange zest.
• 1 tsp vanilla extract.
• 1 tsp rum extract.
• 60g of sultanas.
• 5g of salt.

All of the above needs to be room temperature or slightly warmed.

I sifted the flour three times, as the canon requires, but I bet good money once or twice would have been good enough, considering we will use the mixer. Just before sifting the flour, I activated the yeast closely following the instructions on the little pack. When the yeast was activated I set it inside a little “well” created in the flour to receive it.

Also while the yeast was activating I’ve mixed the salt in the egg yolks. In a few minutes the salt will brighten the yolks colour nicely. It is also probably a good idea to dissolve the sugar in the slightly warmed milk before setting everything, along with the orange zest in the flour. The only dough ingredient left over is the butter, its turn will come very soon.

Got the dough together using the mixer’s paddle accessory using the stir speed (the very first one). The mixer is capable of some particularly vigorous mixing action, the dough came together in like 15 turns or so. I didn’t count, but it was surprisingly quick. On with the hook attachment.

Here I followed Kitchen Aid’s advice to use the mixer’s second speed for kneading, while slowly adding the melted butter. Kitchen Aid boasts that 2 minutes of mechanical kneading equals 15 by hand. They also say the dough is supposed to come off the sides of the bowl, form a ball and climb the hook when it is ready. That may be true for a harder dough which this isn’t.

Moreover, because the gluten is not developed yet, a small portion the dough might stick at the bottom and separate from the rest. Fortunately God has invented silicon spatulas so we can easily scrape the non-cooperating dough from the bottom and add it back to the rest.

Perhaps the biggest danger here is over kneading the dough, which is simple enough to do while using this beast of a stand mixer, resulting in a hard dough which won’t develop well while resting. The best thing to do is to check for the desired dough’s consistence/ elasticity every half a minute of kneading or so. The total kneading time here was around 5 minutes, pauses for checking included.

Remember I was talking about oil above somewhere? It is good to note that substituting a little bit of soft butter at the end of kneading resulted in the dough you see in the image. It is nice, elastic and comes off the hook and the mixer’s bowl with ease. We’ll leave it to rest and develop in a bowl set in a warm kitchen spot, covered. It needs to at least double in size.

Another observation here is the need for patience. Most places say it takes 30 minutes to an hour of resting to get this rise but that’s pretty far from being written in stone and reality may prove significantly more fluid. They are way too many variables in consideration here to be able to predict how long the resting process will take. Better adopt a Zen like attitude of “It is ready when it is ready”. It is more important what kind of structure develops so I find how it rises to be more relevant here than the time it takes to get there. All in all, it took around an hour and 15 minutes. Not that you have nothing to do while the dough rises…

On to the filling, starting with beating the egg whites to semi-hard peaks which the mixer did completely effortlessly. This is one of the things I love about this monster: it has an air of assured, confident inevitability about anything you set on processing its bowl. It breezes thru everything without breaking the slightest of sweats.

We can now add the rest of the filling ingredients and carefully incorporate them. The sultanas were supposed to be re-hidrated in warm water but I decided to use Irish whiskey instead. Because why not?

I’ve split the dough roughly in two parts. As I was mentioning before, looking at the structure developing in there I’m quite happy. It is soft, fluffy, a bit elastic and moist without being sticky.

My Mom-in-Law uses a rolling pin to flatten these halves to about 1/2” thin. I know no one is asking, but I found using such a pin a bit counterproductive, in the end we’re looking for structure and air in the dough, by rolling it we’re destroying some of it. I gently used my fingers instead to spread it, then I laid on top half of the filling and rolled the result into a sort of sausage. I did the same on the second half but I’m afraid I got quite excited by the apparent good progress thus far, so I made a bit of a mess. Next time this step needs a bit more precision.

The two halves were “knotted” together and laid in a baking pan as you can see in the image. Also from the same picture it is pretty evident I won’t win any beauty awards with this thing… let’s call the aspect…ummm… rustic, OK? We’ll set it aside covered, to rise again for about an hour or so.

This is how it looks after around an hour of resting/ raising. Again patience is a virtue here mainly because whatever rise we get in this step is the one in the final product after baking. My Mom-in-Law and Internet sources posit “the Thing” will continue to raise while baking, however I can’t see how this growth could be more than maybe 5%. Logically speaking baking will only fix the existing structure, nothing else. Anyway, all that’s left now is to eggwash the top and set it in the oven

The proof is in the baking as they say. The process was started with the oven preheated at 350F and set on convection baking but after around 10 minutes it already started to smell good and done, so, contrary to the advice on the net, I opened the oven door, noticed the top was already staring to brown and decided to lower the temperature to around 325F. The process seemed to settle nicely so I let it in peace for around 30 minutes. Upon checking it I decided to keep it in for another 8-10 minutes.

Call it beginner’s luck but the results turned out quite exemplary. I got praise even from my Mom-in-Law and that is rarer than rain in the Atacama Desert. Essentially it is aerated, a little moist and not too sweet.

Next time I may play with more aromas, perhaps some different dried fruits. Maybe adding some good quality dark chocolate? At the very least I have a decent starting recipe in which the mixer does all the heavy lifting.

And this is my favourite breakfast on Christmas or Easter Morning, a slice of Cozonac and a cup of warm milk. Sometimes I spread a little butter on top… to make it even smoother. Not too bad I might add.

As you can see, minimalistic is the word here. We have whipping cream and strawberries providing the body of this desert with maple syrup for sweetness plus cardamom and mint for contrasting aroma.

Here we dice about three quarters of the strawberries, then we add two tablespoons of maple syrup and the cardamom. The most time consuming part of this recipe and the hardest to resist “sampling” is allowing the fruit to macerate. Around 20 minutes would do but the longer the better. I decided to forgo using sugar and do maple syrup instead. Its aroma will play well with the one of the strawberries and cardamom. The process will still be the same and take about as long as it would with sugar, with the advantage of the aromas being able to mix and develop a little better.

The rest of the strawberries will be used for decoration so they are sliced nicely and will follow the same maceration process. Only about a teaspoon of syrup is used here, it is enough to get a sheen on the slices and have them glossing nicely.

I used my small food processor to puree the diced strawberries as well as possible.

I love my stand mixer. It took a grand total of 5 minutes to whip the cream to hard peaks, then fold the strawberry purée in. Yep, that’s the whole philosophy of this desert. We’re essentially done. It is worth noting here that the whipping cream should be as cold as possible, I would say straight from the fridge as it “holds” air better, making whipping it to hard peaks more reliable not to mention much faster.

All that is left to do is dividing the whipped cream between glasses or serving bowls and decorating them with the strawberry slices and some mint. The result is a rather refreshing dessert which is not all that sweet and works perfectly at the end of any meal. As I was mentioning before, there’s a myriad of combinations possible with this dessert. I made it with blueberries, peaches, apricots… you name it.

Apart from the existing homemade whipped cream, cheese cream and phyllo pastry, we also have raspberries and blueberries for freshness, pistachios for added crunch plus maple syrup and honey for a bit more sweetness and aroma. I want the balance of this dessert to tip slightly on the sweet side, with the good aromas of maple and cardamom providing the lift.

Jamie provided this idea of sticking four phyllo sheets together using a bit of a honey drizzle in between them and putting the pistachios on top to roast at the same time. Genius idea, thanks Jamie!

What do you do when you have a few sheets still left over? Why, fill them with ricotta and thyme, then use the last of the broken sheets in a haphazard ripped decoration over the top, so it doesn’t go to waste.

This is the phyllo pastry after around 20 minutes in the oven preset at 375F. I sat it aside to let it cool off. The pistachios were crushed, but not too much by can do it any way you want as long as the results are coarse.

Yep, them amuse-bouche ricotta pastries baked perfectly along the phyllo. Once slightly cooled off, they sort of disappeared, “melted”away as if they were made of butter. In short they were just perfect, we inhaled them.

The cheese cream was already made semi sweet, but I thought the final balance of the dish requires a bit more sweetness and more maple aroma. About a tablespoon of maple syrup marbled thru is enough to do the trick.

For the final assembly I first poked my fingers thru the phyllo pastry to produce some randomly shaped shards. The cheese cream was evenly split and used as a base, followed by a few fruits then the whipped cream, also equally divided, topped by another handful of fruits. A few “strategically” placed phyllo shards complete the desert. They look a bit “out there” so I’m tempted to show each one individually.

Here’s the first…

…the second…

….and the third. They all look sort of distinct even though the quantities of everything in each are roughly equal. Not boring! And speaking of leftovers, Sandra crushed the remaining shards a little smaller and used them to add interest in our weekly oatmeal breakfasts. One of the great, albeit still rare cases in which we end up using everything! Cool stuff!

This time around the result earned universal acclaim in Casa Radu, that is including from my Mom-in-Law which is rare, considering her Type 2 diabetes, thus her having a propensity of avoiding any deserts I’m trying my hand at, even though I make really good efforts to produce really balanced sweets which are not all that sweet.

Anyway, this Thing A Majing earned its place in a pretty special celebration, one which we hold for my dearly departed Papi, my late Father-in-Law. It’s a new family tradition which he suggested, specifically having a bottle of good Champagne on his birthday to remember the good times we had together. Now, having just Champagne on an empty stomach goes directly against Papi’s “Bon Viveur” creed and the “good living” Casa Radu principles he was instrumental in setting, therefore we added some stuff to gobble, this and that, including this particular desert, all “pour la bonne bouche”. So now we got the proper setting to remember his great, wise and magnanimous soul.

It does look like a large ingredient huddle but if we split them into categories, it all become quite simple really. In the “filling” category we have cream cheese, 35% whipping cream and creme fraiche, which we will use to make two “fillings”. For sweeteners we have raw plantation sugar and maple syrup. For aroma we have cardamom and lime zest but the maple syrup and the berries will contribute their own, of course. And of course we have store bought puff pastry. See? Not all that complicated.

A good stand mixer is a Godsend in this case. Here I’m making the cheese cream mix, out of cream cheese, creme fraiche, sugar and cardamom. Once done, I washed down the bowl and made the “whipped cream” in it. For that I used 35% cream and creme fraiche sweetened with a hint of maple syrup. My stand mixer made short work out of those tasks, they were done in mere minutes.

Two little things to share here. First, whipped cream comes together much easier if all the ingredients are cold, as cold as possible. Whipping it to hard peaks while adding maple syrup to it becomes almost trivial.

The second thing is about the maple syrup in case here. Its aroma degrades as the syrup heats up and disappears almost completely past its boiling point. There’s a good reason I haven’t use it in the cheese cream mix as that will go in the oven. There’s also a good reason why good maple syrup should be kept in the fridge… In any case if you’re making anything on the stovetop or the oven you’re better off with sugar or molasses instead and if you must have the maple aroma, you better figure out a way to incorporate it later, once whatever you’re making has cooled down significantly. Anyway…

I split the puff pastry in 4 portions and I used a sharp knife to set some superficial, maybe 1 millimetre deep margins on each of those, will see why in a jiffy.

Inside those margins we’re setting the cheese cream. One can definitely do a better job than I did with an offset spatula, however micrometer precision is not what I’m after, but rather a more “handmade” look. A little sprinkle with raw sugar and in the pre-heated oven it goes, on the lowest rack. My oven was set on baking at 375F.

Here it is after around 20 minutes in the oven, all nicely puffed and browned, with a little crust on the cheese. As you can see, only the surroundings of the cream have risen and now trap it inside. By putting it on the lowest rack all of the bottom has a chance to actually cook. We set the tray aside to cool nicely before the final assembly.

Ah! Every time I work with puff pastry I’m left with either corners or little unusable strips which I stretch then roll a little bit of something in it and bake along the main dish. The result is a little starter, amuse bouche sized as the French say. The filling for these is either some melting cheese or ham or a combination of both or a little piece of leftover something… Whatever the combination, my little beloved “gators” love these things.

And here it is, the Thing-a-Majing fully assembled. I’ve set blueberries and raspberries over the cheese cream, a good dollop of that whipped cream followed, topped with yet more blueberries and raspberries plus a lime zest garnish. It is the kind of desert which is a bit sweet, a bit savoury, a bit sour, but full of great complementing aromas. It goes down nicely too helped by all the different textures present. My Mom-in-Law mentioned that this desert is good, professional patisserie level. Wow, that felt incredibly good as this sort of praise comes from her about as often as rain in the Atacama desert. Positively chuffed, I am.

Nothing exotic in the ingredients with the possible exception of the crème fraîche which is essentially a fatter sour cream, 40%, and less sour and “fresher” tasting which works well with deserts, fruits or even omelettes or scrambled eggs. I find the brand in the picture at Coppas all the time so it is not rare or hard to come by. Anyway the base of the desert are pitted medjool dates to which we are adding, pecans, pistachios and slivered almonds plus lime or lemon zest, cardamom and mint for garnish and aroma.

Each date is opened and filled with a pecan, then closed back up. A portion would be made out of 4-5 of those dates, set next to each other on a “bed” of crushed pistachios and topped with creme fraiche, around one and a half teaspoons per date. Garnish with slivered almonds, cardamom and citrus zest plus a bit of mint. You’re done! This is one well balanced tasting desert, equally sweet, fresh, creamy and crunchy. I told you it was simple, didn’t I? Well, I guess one could top fresh or canned fruits with a dollop of whipped cream and some aromas, nothing would be simpler than that, right? Well… isn’t this what I did here?

As soon as I started thinking about it, I got hit with a lot of other ideas, to the point where, as witnessed by the above image, the cinnamon is entirely absent. In the more or less serendipitous list of ingredients I ended up with store bought puff pastry, orange (the zest only), walnuts, pecans, pistachios, butter and honey. It does indeed read more like baklava ingredients than anything else. At this point I haven’t figured the flavor profile completely but something will come up shortly. It always does.

Yea, I know, the big flavor surprise… coming from waaay left field is… cardamom. Big surprise, yes. It is only one of my absolute favorite spices, it makes even aspirin taste better, I love it! Joke aside, the more I thought what direction I’m going to take flavor wise the more cardamom made sense. It’s not unlike cinnamon in brightness so it will match well here, yet is a little unfamiliar to combinations such as this one so it might play a little neat surprising trick with your taste erefore the orange zest was mixed with a generous amount of cardamom. Come to think of it, lime zest would have been also great… oh well… next time…

It’s become quite apparent where I’m rolling with this one, eh? I laid the pastry nice and flat on parchment paper, slathered it thoroughly with melted butter, topped it with the nut mix and around two tablespoons of honey swirled all around to cover. The nut mix went loosely thru my knife once just to break it up a little. It could be minced further, ground in the processor even and the taste will be the same. I was however after a bit of crunchy texture so, what you see size wise in the image is what I settled for. There’s room left on both sides of the pastry, one to start the roll and the other to “glue” at the end. Let’s see how that went.

Rolling this thing is as straightforward as it can be. Fold the clean end over the start of the nut mix and continue rolling until get close to the end. Brush on some more butter over the end of the pastry and the roll, press it all nicely to stick, turn it around, get it back into more or less round shape and voila, roll is done. I cut it first in half then those pieces in half again and stopped to decide whether to split these in two again or perhaps three this time around. Splitting those quarters only in two seemed to result in bigger rolls that would have a hard time baking uniformly so three it was, for a total of 12 “mini” rolls. And it was all handmade, no? The Holy Grail! Topped the rolls with a little nut mix I set aside for this purpose and in the oven they went.

This is the result after I have no idea how many minutes in the oven set on baking at 400F. I was watching them as a hawk to avoid burning them after a certain point, maybe 20 minute-is into the baking process, that’s why I have no clue as to how long it actually took. It’s irrelevant anyway, they are done when they are nice and golden and crispy, however long that may be. I squeezed a bit of honey on top of each the moment I took them out of the oven. The rolls were good and crunchy and flaky both warm the same day and cold, the day after. One thing to observe here is that honey has a tendency to drain out of the rolls while baking. You end up with some delicious caramel in the tray, of course, but it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to add some more on top maybe toward the end of the process. I might try some raw plantation sugar instead of honey next time, I’ll let you know what happens.