My Most Favorite Dessert Company Cookbook: Delicious Pareve Baking Recipes
As all its loyal fans will tell you, there is only one place to go in New York City for great pareve desserts: Doris Schechter's My Most Favorite Dessert Company. For more than twenty years, Doris has provided her customers with delectable cakes, pies, tarts, cookies, and muffins — proving that dairy-free desserts can be delicious.\ With this book, Doris shares the secrets of her renowned pareve baking, offering more than ninety recipes that can be made easily in any home kitchen. Forget the...
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As its loyal fans can tell you, there is just one place in Manhattan to go for delectable non-dairy kosher desserts: Doris Schechter's My Most Favorite Dessert Company. This popular bakery and restaurant has proven that dairy-free desserts can be just as delicious as their butter or milk-made counterparts.With this book, Doris will at last share the secrets of great pareve (dairy-free) baking, offering more than 90 simple recipes for cakes, tortes, sweet breads, pies, cookies, muffins, and more. Also included are special recipes for the Jewish holidays, information on Jewish food traditions, and beautiful photos of the finished desserts. My Most Favorite Dessert Company Cookbook is sure to become a classic in kosher and non-kosher kitchens alike. Publishers Weekly Born in Vienna, later arriving in the U.S. as a WWII refugee from Italy, Schechter was imbued with European baking traditions and determined to reproduce the flavors of her childhood when she opened her first New York bakery in 1982. The question was: could she, as a kosher cook, concoct pareve (made without milk) Linzer Cookies, Sacher Torte, Genoise with "Buttercream" and Hamantaschen without butter, cream, milk or sour cream? Her Continental specialties as well as her all-American Brownies, Carrot Cake and Lattice-Top Apple Pie fly off the shelves at her Manhattan bakery-cafe. What are her secrets for rich-tasting, nondairy loaf cakes, layer cakes, pies and tarts, cookies and Passover specialties? After much testing, she recommends unsalted kosher margarine (which makes a luscious chocolate mousse), vanilla soy milk (for a smooth and spicy Pumpkin Pie ) and powdered coffee "creamer" (in Strawberry Tea Bread and Rugelach). Pareve bakers should be delighted with the results, and Schechter's 90-plus recipes will also please vegans and the lactose intolerant. Instructions are clear and user-friendly, except for the more complicated cakes when one must search different chapters for the components of a recipe. With her creative reworking of many old favorites, Schechter does, indeed, prove that pareve baking can be "delicious and elegant." 16-page color insert not seen by PW. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Linzer Cookies\ \ \ When I baked my first Viennese Linzertorte (page 85), I could not believe how beautiful it was. I feel exactly the same way about these Linzer cookies. They are like little jewels, with their ruby centers of raspberry preserves. You can also fill them with apricot jam, which is equally pretty. The almond dough is short, meaning it is rich, and it is sweet and melts in your mouth. These cookies are among my all-time favorites.\ 1 cup all-purpose flour\ \ Large pinch of ground cinnamon\ 8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted margarine\ 1/4 cup granulated sugar\ 3/4 cup finely ground unblanched almonds\ Raspberry preserves, with or without seeds\ Confectioners' sugar, for dusting\ \ \ \ 1. In a bowl stir together the flour and cinnamon.\ 2. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the margarine and the granulated sugar on medium speed until fluffy.\ 3. Gradually add the flour mixture and beat on low speed until the dough comes together in a ball. Add the ground almonds and beat until incorporated. Scrape down the sides of the bowl, shape the dough into a disk, and wrap it in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for several hours until firm enough to roll out.\ 4. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Line a large baking sheet with parchment paper.\ 5. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the dough 1/4 inch thick. With a 2 1/4-Inch fluted cookie cutter, cut outrounds and place them about 1 inch apart on the prepared baking sheet. Reroll the scraps and cut out more cookies. (When done, you should have about 24 cutouts in all.) Cut out the center of half the cookies, 12 of them, using the wide end of a 3/4-inch-wide pastry bag tip. They will be the "top" cookies. Discard the little bits of cutout dough.\ 6. Bake the cookies for about 12 minutes, or until fragrant and just set. Remove the baking sheet to a wire rack and let cool.\ 7. To assemble: Sprinkle the cutout (top) 12 cookies generously with confectioners' sugar and reserve. Place a level teaspoon of raspberry preserves on each of the bottom cookies. Place a sugared cutout on top. Store, in a single layer, in an airtight container for up to I week, if you are lucky enough to have them for that long.\ Makes 1 dozen cookies\ \ Velvet Chocolate Cake\ \ \ Here is another of my signature desserts. Twenty-four ounces of chocolate make it intensely rich and delicious, almost more like candy than cake. Despite that, I am never surprised when guests ask for Just a "sliver" more. Recently I heard a funny anecdote: A woman confided to her good friend that the only reason she is able to sit through a family seder she goes to is that she knows she will be rewarded with a slice (or two) of this fabulous flourless chocolate cake!\ 1 1/2 pounds semisweet chocolate, chopped\ \ 15 tablespoons unsalted margarine, cut into chunks\ 1 1/2 tablespoons instant coffee\ 8 extra-large eggs, separated, the whites at room temperature\ 1 1/2 tablespoons granulated sugar\ Confectioners' sugar for stenciling\ \ \ \ 1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease the bottom and sides of an 8-inch cake pan, 3 inches deep. Cut a round of parchment paper to fit the pan and line the pan with it.\ 2. In the top of a large double boiler set over hot water, melt the chocolate with the margarine and instant coffee, stirring, until smooth and glossy. Remove the top of the boiler and let the mixture cool slightly.\ 3. Stir in the egg yolks, 1 at a time, beating well after each addition.\ 4. In the bowl of a standing electric mixer fitted with the whisk attachment, beat the egg whites on high speed to soft peaks. Gradually add the granulated sugar and beat until the whites stand in stiff but not dry peaks.\ 5. With a rubber spatula, stir about one-quarter of the whites into the chocolate base to lighten it. Fold the remaining whites in gently but thoroughly, mixing until no streaks of beaten whites show.\ 6. Pour the batter into the pan. Place the cake pan in a larger baking pan and pour hot water to come halfway up the sides of the cake pan. Carefully transfer the pans to the oven and bake the cake for 35 to 40 minutes (the top of the cake in the center will just be set). Remove the baking pan from the oven, remove the cake pan from the water bath, and let it cool completely on a wire rack at room temperature. Transfer the cake in the pan to the refrigerator and chill overnight or until serving time.\ 7. Unmold the chilled cake, remove the paper liner, and invert the cake right side up. Do not try to unmold the cake before it is fully chilled or it will break. Place a decorative stencil on top of the cake and dust confectioners' sugar through a fine-meshed sieve over the top. Carefully remove the stencil.\ 8. Serve the cake in slices. Some people love it with fresh raspberries as a garnish. (The cake can also be served at room temperature, although it will be softer.) The cake keeps, covered with plastic wrap, in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.\ Makes one 18-inch cake, 12 to 14 servings\ My Most Favorite Dessert Company Cookbook. Copyright © by Doris Schechter. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
\ From Barnes & NobleThe Barnes & Noble Review\ Home cooks searching for good dairy-free desserts will be delighted by the delicious recipes in Doris Schechter's cookbook. Over the years as a professional baker, first with a shop in Long Island, then a store in Manhattan, Schechter perfected the knack of substituting ingredients and reworking recipes to turn out pareve (dairy-free) desserts that still looked good and tasted good. \ Schechter came to this country as a Jewish refugee from Italy, but she was born in Vienna, and her fondness for Viennese-style baking is wonderfully clear. There are recipes for an elegant Sacher Torte, Dumont Torte, Viennese Linzertorte, and sophisticated Viennese Nut Cookies, plus three different kinds of Linzer cookies, including Chocolate-Drizzled Apricot. All-American treats abound in this cookbook, too, from brownies and all kinds of chocolate cakes to fruit pies and tarts.\ Cake lovers will want to pay special attention to the chapters on Layer Cakes and Specialty Cakes. Schechter provides a vanilla, chocolate, and almond g&eactue;noise as the foundations and follows with different "buttercream" fillings, glazes, ganaches, and frostings for a most elegant mix-and-match, including the ultimate birthday cake, Vanilla Cake with Ganache Filling and Chocolate Glaze. Some of the work-arounds are ingenious -- like using eggs and two different kinds of chocolate to substitute for heavy cream in a Chocolate Mousse filling.\ Cooks looking for treats for Jewish holidays will find plenty to love, from hammentaschen, rugelach, and teiglach to jelly doughnuts. An entire chapter is devoted to Passover baking, which Schechter describes as her "greatest challenge as a professional baker. " She solves the problem by adapting old favorites to dietary laws, using such ingredients as matzo cake meal, nut flour, potato starch and egg whites to stand in for flour and turn out many appealing desserts for the Passover table. (Ginger Curwen)\ \ \ \ \ \ Publishers WeeklyBorn in Vienna, later arriving in the U.S. as a WWII refugee from Italy, Schechter was imbued with European baking traditions and determined to reproduce the flavors of her childhood when she opened her first New York bakery in 1982. The question was: could she, as a kosher cook, concoct pareve (made without milk) Linzer Cookies, Sacher Torte, Genoise with "Buttercream" and Hamantaschen without butter, cream, milk or sour cream? Her Continental specialties as well as her all-American Brownies, Carrot Cake and Lattice-Top Apple Pie fly off the shelves at her Manhattan bakery-cafe. What are her secrets for rich-tasting, nondairy loaf cakes, layer cakes, pies and tarts, cookies and Passover specialties? After much testing, she recommends unsalted kosher margarine (which makes a luscious chocolate mousse), vanilla soy milk (for a smooth and spicy Pumpkin Pie ) and powdered coffee "creamer" (in Strawberry Tea Bread and Rugelach). Pareve bakers should be delighted with the results, and Schechter's 90-plus recipes will also please vegans and the lactose intolerant. Instructions are clear and user-friendly, except for the more complicated cakes when one must search different chapters for the components of a recipe. With her creative reworking of many old favorites, Schechter does, indeed, prove that pareve baking can be "delicious and elegant." 16-page color insert not seen by PW. (Sept.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.\ \
