WHITE CHOCOLATE PANNA COTTA WITH RASPBERRY SAUCE
Any guesses what this would cost at a posh restaurant?
Ok, guys. I have a confession to make. I know a bunch of you think I don't know how to make dessert. I've stated a bunch of times to my real life friends that I don't like sweet things, and that I can't bake dessert because I have no taste for it.
That's not entirely true.
This one is drawing on a lot of my cooking skills at once. Skill with alcohol, cream manipulation, and the most important aspect: plating. This dish really only works if you put it on the plate in an amazing, beautiful fashion.
If this doesn't make you hungry, you're not human.
Ingredients:
1 cup heavy cream
3/4 cup whole milk
1/4 cup creme de cacao (not the dark stuff, white chocolate godiva liqueur would work, too, really.)
3/4 cup sugar
1 package unflavored gelatin
sauce:
at least 1 1/2 cups of raspberries
2 tblsp triple sec
1 tsp lemon juice
Grab some ramekins. If you have no ramekins, buy ramekins. If you're feeling romantic, this looks amazing in a martini glass. Personally, though, I prefer it turned out.
Warm up a sauce pan, medium heat. Put the milk in the saucepan, and sprinkle the gelatin over it. Stir it until the gelatin breaks down and dissolves. Add the cream, creme de cacao, and 1/3rd of a cup of the sugar. Reduce the heat to low, and stir until the sugar's broken up. Take it off the heat, cool it, and pour it into ramekins or glasses. Cover it, and refrigerate it for at least 6 hours.
In another sauce pan, heat 1 1/2 cups of the raspberries, triple sec, lemon juice, and the rest of the sugar. Stir it until the sugar's dissolved and the raspberries are all soft and gooey. Then, pour it through a seive and press it down to get all of the juice out of the raspberries. There's the topping.
To pull the Panna Cotta out of the mold, just soak your ramekins in hot water for a few seconds to loosen the dessert, and invert onto a plate. To top this, there are 3 ways you can do it that I find appealing. Obviously, experiment.
The first is to lay down a pool of the sauce, and plop the panna cotta on top of it. Use a spatula to invert the panna cotta. Top it with a few fresh raspberries. The second is to plate the panna cotta, and do what is in the picture, and garnish it with a few raspberries beside it. The third is nouvelle cuisine. Plate the panna cotta, and run a line of the sauce around the outside edge of the plate, 3/4ths of the way around the plate, and throw a few dots of sauce off of one of the edges, then put a small swirl of the sauce on top of the panna cotta. The nouvelle cuisine looks the best, obviously, setting it on the base of the sauce probably has the best flavor. The picture is a good marriage of the 2.
For other dressings to this, shave a bit of milk chocolate and white chocolate and dress the top of the panna cotta with them. You can also go with a tiny dollop of chocolate ice cream.
Take out the liqueur and you can really do anything with this base. Panna cotta is only limited by what you can dream up, and it's a great base to experiment with cooking with alcohol.