"In a steakhouse, especially in summer, a rich, heavy dessert is a hard sell.
At the Dessert Professional awards, all ten pastry chefs gathered for a crowd of roughly 300 food media and fellow industry professionals, for a dessert tasting that even the most die-hard dessert-aholic would have found overwhelming.
The long Wisconsin winters produce lily pads frozen "harder than dessert plates atop their breakable stems" and deposits of ice shoved into "jagged sunset-hued cliffs".
— Maria Newman Medium: An excerpt from the graphic novel "In the Kitchen With Alain Passard," involving a five-minute strawberry-and-crushed-hard-candy dessert that you can feed to your date with your hands (if you're so inclined).
He feeds them dog food and powdered-sugar donuts — and, as dessert, hard candy dispensed directly from his own lips.
After reading about all this (to say nothing of eating it), you may find it hard to contemplate dessert.
This isn't a recent development: My mother, whose father was an unrepentant Anglophile, often made a roast on Christmas and sometimes followed it with plum pudding and hard sauce for dessert.
Apples and more apples: there were a half-dozen apple ciders on hand, both sweet and hard, and my favorite dessert, which made up for the strangely wan chocolate bread pudding, paired doughnut holes with an apple-cider syrup for dunking.
With flavours of spices, nuts and hints of citrus, this is a fabulous match for hard cheeses and desserts such as almond tart.
A good espresso can end a meal here nicely, but it is hard to ignore the dessert carts, which are refreshed often.
The ultimate ice cream sundae for two will be familiar to diners who have gone to one of Tom Schaudel's restaurants and tasted his signature dessert: a hard chocolate bag containing a banana split.
