Quotes

If you want to sing out, sing out, and if you want to be free, be free, cause there's a million ways to be, you know that there are.
--Cat Stevens

Friday, April 29, 2011

Dessert Wars-Vanilla



The secret ingredient for this month's Dessert War is Vanilla. Now don't get me wrong I love vanilla. Vanilla Ice Cream, vanilla frosting, vanilla
cake--as far as desserts go it probably my favorite flavor, but vanilla can go in just about any dessert as a "flavor enhancer". It's never the star of the show. I was kinda hoping that we'd have an April Fools theme this month because it's always fun to make food that looks like something else but is really an awesome dessert.
I guess we decided to attempt to make vanilla the star of the show and have some April fool's fun.
We made dessert poutine. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, poutine is a dish consisting of french fries topped with fresh cheese curds, c
overed with brown gravy. Our poutines consisted of sweet potato fries dredge in cinnamon sugar, feta cheese and vanilla caramel. This all sounds deceptively simple.
Our first hurdle was the fries. Sweet potatoes make notoriously soggy fries so in an attempt to crisp our fries, we attempted to use the double fry method. DISASTER!
We fried them for 3 mins at 350 and removed them, drained the oil and let them cool down and then did a second fry at about 375 and with in seconds they went from limp and lightly browned to totally burnt.
We then did more research and after looking at more blog postings about sweet potato fries than any one would care to count. We decided that we would soak them in ice water for thirty minutes before putting them through a single 4 minute fry at 375. It worked pretty well. They were reasonably crisp and didn't go limp the secon
d they started to cool down.
So one the next hurdle. Caramel Sauce. I can't make it. Or at least I couldn't until a few days ago. I have practiced making caramel sauce and tried out several different recipes over the years and they were up and till recently all unmitigated failures. Then I found Kittencal's Caramel Sauce, so easy even Amy can't mess it up. I made it even more delicious by ditching the store bought vanilla extract and steeping 2 vanilla beans in the cream before adding it two the sugar and butter.
So without further ado I will introduce you to our sneaky dessert poutine.

6 comments:

  1. Wow really interesting combination! I adore sweet potato fries. Good Luck!!!

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  2. What a creative dish with sweet potatoes! They lend themselves so well to desserts. Thanks for entering!

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  3. Thank you for going through the pain and agony to create this dish - because you truly melted my Canadian heart. Seriously badass!

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  4. That was so creative! good luck.

    http://agirlinherkitchen.blogspot.com

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  5. wow, that is super creative, love sweet potato fries! Sounds like you found the way to make them crisp up too.

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