peach

Pretty Rosette Peach Tartlets

August 5, 2016

If you are looking for an impressive dessert you can bring to your Summer parties, I have got the recipe for you! Don’t let these little peach tartlets fool you, they are actually really easy to make and only require six ingredients.

Peaches

Puff Pastry

Mascarpone

Sugar

Cinnamon

Nutmeg

I’m sure it wasn’t the ingredient list that concerned you about this recipe. What you are probably thinking to yourself is, “there is no way I can make these look like a rosette!”. Ok, you may not be thinking that, but that’s what I was thinking. I was willing to give it a try, but was convinced that they would end up looking like crap.

Sure the first one wasn’t my best, but I got the hang of it really quickly!

I’ll show you exactly how I made them.

First, I sliced a couple peaches into very thin slices. Like, I sliced them just about as thin as I could. In hindsight, using a mandolin would have been a good idea to get consistently sliced peaches.

Next, I unfolded a puff pastry sheet and rolled it out so that it was pretty thin (it should be thinner than what you see in this picture). Then I cut it into 6 strips. I spread out the mascarpone mixture onto each strip.

Now comes the tricky part (hint: it’s not that tricky). To make the pretty rosette pattern with the peaches, I layered the peach slices one on top of the other along one half of the puff pastry strip making sure that a significant portion of the top of the peach was sticking out. On some of the tartlets, I added a second layer of peach slices just below the first. Not only did it help me use up all my peach slices, but the ratio of peach to puff pastry was much better.

Then I folded the other half of the puff pastry up and rolled the entire thing into a tight spiral. The trick to getting the peaches to roll is to put your thinner peach slices on the end that will be in the center and the thicker ones on the outside.

I placed each of the tartlets in a muffin tin then sprinkled some more sugar and nutmeg over the top of the peaches. All that was left to do was bake them and pray they still look like rosettes afterwards.

And once they were out of the oven I breathed out a big ol’ sigh of relief because they turned out super cute! Not to mention, they are delicious with a side of some vanilla ice cream!

Don’t they look like they just walked out of a bakery? You could totally impress your friends with these pastries, don’t you think?

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National Pancake Day

September 26, 2014

I think children are like pancakes. You sort of ruin the first one, and you get better at it the second time around.
– Kelly Ripa

Happy National Pancake Day! I wanted to share some of my favorite pancake recipes with y’all since they are definitely my favorite breakfast food. I will be celebrating the day after National Pancake Day with a nice tall stack of my own.

Chocolate Hazelnut Pancakes

Peach Ricotta Pancakes

Sugar Free, Gluten Free Pancakes with Strawberry Syrup

Protein Power Pancakes

Gingerbread Pancakes

Pumpkin Pancakes

And even though this is National Pancake Day, there is no sense in discriminating against international pancakes.

Dutch Baby (Pancake) with Berry Compote

Whole Wheat Crepes

What is your favorite type of pancake?

Peach Ricotta Pancakes

August 22, 2014

No matter how old I get, pancakes will still be my favorite breakfast food. They are simple and sweet and remind me of Saturday mornings watching cartoons as a kid. Even though there is nothing wrong with plain, unadulterated pancakes, they might be my favorite breakfast food to experiment with. A great foundation to add whatever sorts of flavors I like. And being that it is summer and peaches are in full supply here in the South, it seemed like an obvious choice to me!

This also seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out a ricotta pancake recipe. A ricotta pancake batter is very similar to normal batter, except that part of the milk is replaced with ricotta cheese, making the resulting pancakes very creamy. Once the batter was mixed, I folded diced peaches directly into the it.

I poured about 1/4-1/3 cup of batter onto a griddle heated up to 375 degrees. Once the pancakes formed bubbles on top, I flipped them over to cook the other side. Each side took about 2 minutes.

For me, pancakes aren’t complete without butter and syrup. But syrup just didn’t seem right for these pancakes. So instead, I sprinkled a bit of powdered spiked with nutmeg and cinnamon over the top.

The powdered sugar adds the sweetness that you would get from the syrup and the cinnamon and nutmeg are the perfect compliment to the peaches.

The pancakes themselves are creamier than normal pancakes, thanks to the ricotta. But they are still supper fluffy! With the peaches mixed directly into the batter, it ensures that there is a little piece of peach in each bite.

What is your favorite pancake flavor? Or do you prefer the basics?

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Summer Sangria

August 7, 2014

Sangria is one of my husband’s and my favorite drinks to make during the Summer months when we are either hosting or attending a party. It can be as simple or as complicated as we’d like and very easily scalable to however many people we are making it for.

For this batch of sangria, we chose to use lots of fresh Summer stone fruit, like peaches, plums, and cherries. Peaches are wonderful in sangria because the really give off a lot of flavor, making the finished product sweet, yet still a bit tart from the wine.

To make this drink even more Summery, we added watermelon ice cubes. We stole this idea from a bar in Raleigh we visited a couple weekends ago, but I will probably be adding watermelon ice cubes to all my drinks for the rest of the Summer. It’s genius! And they are super easy to make: 1) cut up some watermelon into cubes; 2) freeze.

There is no real rhyme or reason to chopping up fruit for sangria. I like to leave the pieces relatively large so they don’t get too mushy sitting in wine for a couple days, but not so large that you can’t fish a piece of fruit out of your glass and eat it, in all its drunken glory.

And for the wine…well, again, there are no standards (at least none that I am aware of). I prefer to use wines that are a little bit sweet and fruity already. But not too sweet. I stay away from Chardonnays and Rieslings. Somewhere in the middle, like a Savignon Blanc or Pinot Grigio. For this batch, we used a Spanish wine (I can’t think of the grape variety for the life of me), which seemed pretty appropriate.

We also like to throw in a splash of whiskey, like Crown Royal (or the Kirkland equivalent, as in our case). Partly because we like the added flavor, and partly because my husband will only drink a fruity drink if there is whiskey in it.

We let our sangria sit for at least two days. My husband wanted me to emphasize TWO days (he literally walked in as I was typing and said, “please put on your recipe that we let ours sit for at least two days”). You definitely could make this the night before and serve it the next day. However, you won’t be doing your sangria any favors. All the flavors from the fruit will not be as fragrant. After two days, the fruit has gotten a chance to break down and release its juices and the bite from the wine is a bit less noticeable.

I think sangria is just the perfect drink for the Summer. The Spanish really knew what they were doing when they came up with this idea. It is just so refreshing and flavorful. However, I can sometimes forget that I am drinking wine…which can be a problem. So pace yourself! One batch can last you a while. If you don’t think you can finish it off after about four days, strain out the fruit and store the rest in the fridge. You can add back in fresh fruit when you are ready to serve again.

What is your favorite Summer drink?

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Grilled Peach and Prosciutto Pizza

July 23, 2014

There are a few things to me that are quintessential to summer. 2 of them are grilling out and peaches.

To kick off my “summer vacation” (the week off I had between jobs), my husband combined those two things with our favorite Friday meal, pizza, to create the grilled peach and prosciutto pizza.

I have to admit, we had never grilled pizza before. So what follows are some guidelines that we should have followed, not exactly what we did do.

We started with some gorgeous and juicy peaches from the previous weekends farmers market haul, prosciutto, mozzarella, basil, and ricotta. I would also highly recommend mixing in some garlic into the ricotta and drizzling balsamic on top. While the pizza was delicious, those two things would have added some more depth of flavor.

The first thing we did was grilled off the pizza dough. We placed the dough right on the grill over in direct heat. What we should have done was heat up the grill with the cover down until the thermometer read 400 degrees. While the grill is heating up, you can prep the dough and all the other ingredients, then once its hot toss the dough on there and cook on each side for a few minutes.

Once the dough was a bit crispy and more crust like, I removed them from the grill and started layering on the ingredients, starting with the ricotta, the prosciutto, peaches, cheese, and then the basil.

We put the pizzas back on the grill over indirect heat and closed the top to let them cook for another couple minutes until the cheese got nice and bubbly.

Grilling pizza really isn’t all too different from cooking them in the oven. I really enjoyed the extra flavor that we got from the direct fire. There is something about that charred flavor from the grilling and the sweetness from the peaches that make this the perfect summer meal.

Do you grill pizzas? What are some of your favorite flavors?

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