Sweet Testing: Date Butter Tart & Apple Green-Chili Pie With Cheddar Crust and Walnut Streusel

Back in November of last year, The New York Times put together an amazing slideshow of unique pies and tarts that appeared on their website. I was instantly taken with each and every pie and have being longing to make one ever since! Unfortunately, it just never happened, despite my best attempts to force these beauties upon other people, no one seemed quite as taken with the idea of green chili apple pie, but me! Well, I am happy to announce my pie dreams finally came true recently when my mom made not one, but two of the slideshow pies for my birthday! And I have to say, they were a huge success! So yummy and different! Normally, I have a little bit of a meltdown if I don't have ice cream with my pie, but, in this case, I actually ate around the ice cream, choosing instead to eat the pie in all its naked, untouched glory. Maybe the next time I eat a date butter tart, I'll eat it with ice cream, but this time I wanted nothing but pie! Oh, and while these pies do come with their own individual crust recipes, we opted for the fantastic Whole Foods gluten-free crust, which is a really good pie crust and, of course, it's gluten free, which makes it fun for the whole family! For the apple pie, which contains cheddar cheese in it's crust, my mom simply put the cheese on top of the crust. Click here to check out the recipe for Apple Green-Chili Pie With Cheddar Crust and Walnut Streusel and here for the Date Butter Tart. {Thanks, Mom!}

Chipotle Cheddar Biscuits

I know that right about now you're probably thinking, Erin, a chipotle biscuit doesn't really qualify as dessert. At first, I was thinking that exact same thing, but then I changed my mind. Here's why.

1) This recipe is from the Baked cookbook and 99% of the recipes in that book could be served as a dessert.

2) Biscuits are pretty much a dessert food. I mean they are a fairly large component of strawberry shortcake, which is undeniably, a dessert.

3) Biscuits are usually eaten with breakfast, most often with a sugary jam on top, and let's face it, unless you're eating bacon and eggs, breakfast is basically dessert.

So, there you have it. Even though we ate these biscuits during a meal and not after it, I think I've made a pretty strong case for including them on the dessert menu. The biscuits themselves were mighty yummy. The chipotle giving them a nice, comforting, smoky flavor. The only thing I would change the next time around would be to maybe use a little less chipotle powder. Baked actually recommends using less spice, if you don't have much heat tolerance. I went with the full dosage, and the chipotle powder that I used was fresh, so the biscuits ended up being a little too spicy for me. That said, they were so yummy that the fact that my mouth was a little burny didn't stop me from eating three of them! I just think it would have been a little more enjoyable with less powder, but it all depends on what you can handle.

You can find the complete recipe after the jump.

The Dessert Truck

I wrote this post ages ago and kept forgetting to post it. Then, last week, I saw this article on the Wall Street Journal online, and decided that I better post this before the truck trend completely fizzles out. So, without further ado, here is the post. Better late then never.

Yes, it's true. I'm obsessed with the Dessert Truck. I know several other versions of these sugar carrying vehicles have popped up in NYC and other large cities lately, but I think the appropriately named Dessert Truck is my favorite. Maybe it's because one of the people behind the Dessert Truck is a former pastry sous chef at Le Cirque, and that sounds fancy or maybe it's because the desserts they offer aren't typical truck fare (i.e. slow-baked apples and cinnamon [see pic above] and goat cheese cake). But, really, when you get right down to it, I think it has a lot to do with my childhood love of ice cream trucks. How could I resist?

If you too would like to relive your latent childhood fantasies involving magic trucks jam packed with yumminess, click here to find out where and when the Dessert Truck will make it's next stop. Or, if simpler snacks are more your thing, check out the Treats Truck, right here. (Food pics by Eugenio Garcia-Palacios)

Lemon Mascarpone Mmmmm

My mom made this delicious Lemon Mascarpone Pudding over the weekend. It doesn't look like much in the picture, but trust me, it was sooo good!

It features two of my favorite dessert components: a cookie crust AND lemon curd. Just add some mascarpone cheese and you've got the perfect summer treat! Oh, and my mom put it in a bowl, instead of parfait glasses, so everyone was free to scoop out as little . . . or as much as they wanted. For the complete recipe, visit Relish magazine's Web site.