Today's Baked Sunday Mornings recipe is Icebox Towers, a stacked concoction of homemade chocolate cookies, chocolate pastry cream, and whipped cream. There's no photo of the dessert in the cookbook and I was having a difficult time trying to visualize it. Fortunately the headnote mentions that the recipe was featured in Food & Wine and the magazine website has a photo of the assembled towers.
The recipe requires you to wait for several components to chill, so it's best to start a day ahead. The chocolate cookie dough is a mixture of butter, powdered sugar, egg, vanilla, cocoa powder, salt, and flour. You chill the dough until firm and then roll it out and cut it into 2.5-inch diameter rounds. The recipe says to roll the dough to a thickness of a quarter inch, but I could tell that I wasn't going to be able to get enough cookies to complete the recipe if I did that. I tried rolling it to 3/16" and even that looked like it was going to be cutting it a bit close. So I rolled the dough to 1/8" and I got 42 cookies after re-rolling all of the scraps; you need 30 cookies for the recipe. The dough was sticky and I needed a fair amount of flour to roll it out, even though I rolled it out between two sheets of parchment.
To make the pastry cream you cook half and half with a tempered mixture of egg yolks, sugar, flour, and salt until the custard is thickened; add vanilla and melted bittersweet chocolate; put the mixture through a sieve, and refrigerate the pudding until chilled. The last component is heavy cream whipped with a little bit of powdered sugar and vanilla to stiff peaks. You use most of the whipped cream as is, but you also take out a small amount and mix it with some chilled pastry cream to make a light chocolate whipped cream.
To assemble the towers, you put each of the fillings (the chocolate pastry cream, the whipped cream, and the light chocolate cream) into a pastry bag with a large plain tip, pipe the fillings onto the cookies, and stack them into towers. As you can see in the photo above, I overwhipped my heavy cream. I kept the assembled towers in the refrigerator overnight before serving.
I was not a fan of this dessert. First, it's just impractical. Even though the cookies soften up overnight in the fridge, the towers are incredibly difficult to eat. My cousin's children managed to consume them by peeling off one layer of cookie and filling at a time, but trying to get a fork through the entire tower was pretty much impossible. But more importantly, the flavor was underwhelming. Overall, I didn't think the dessert was sweet enough, and the cookies in particular were disappointing. They were not good plain. Eating the cookies with chocolate pastry cream (which was delicious) and whipped cream definitely helped, but not enough to make me want to eat an entire tower. This dessert reminded me of the Rainbow Icebox Cake with Homemade Chocolate Cookies from Baked Occasions, except that the chocolate cookies from that recipe were better.
Making these icebox towers is not actually that difficult -- but regardless, I didn't think it was worth the effort.
Recipe: "Icebox Towers" from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.
Previous Post: "Baked Sunday Mornings: Rainbow Icebox Cake with Homemade Chocolate Cookies," June 7, 2015.
The recipe requires you to wait for several components to chill, so it's best to start a day ahead. The chocolate cookie dough is a mixture of butter, powdered sugar, egg, vanilla, cocoa powder, salt, and flour. You chill the dough until firm and then roll it out and cut it into 2.5-inch diameter rounds. The recipe says to roll the dough to a thickness of a quarter inch, but I could tell that I wasn't going to be able to get enough cookies to complete the recipe if I did that. I tried rolling it to 3/16" and even that looked like it was going to be cutting it a bit close. So I rolled the dough to 1/8" and I got 42 cookies after re-rolling all of the scraps; you need 30 cookies for the recipe. The dough was sticky and I needed a fair amount of flour to roll it out, even though I rolled it out between two sheets of parchment.
To make the pastry cream you cook half and half with a tempered mixture of egg yolks, sugar, flour, and salt until the custard is thickened; add vanilla and melted bittersweet chocolate; put the mixture through a sieve, and refrigerate the pudding until chilled. The last component is heavy cream whipped with a little bit of powdered sugar and vanilla to stiff peaks. You use most of the whipped cream as is, but you also take out a small amount and mix it with some chilled pastry cream to make a light chocolate whipped cream.
I was not a fan of this dessert. First, it's just impractical. Even though the cookies soften up overnight in the fridge, the towers are incredibly difficult to eat. My cousin's children managed to consume them by peeling off one layer of cookie and filling at a time, but trying to get a fork through the entire tower was pretty much impossible. But more importantly, the flavor was underwhelming. Overall, I didn't think the dessert was sweet enough, and the cookies in particular were disappointing. They were not good plain. Eating the cookies with chocolate pastry cream (which was delicious) and whipped cream definitely helped, but not enough to make me want to eat an entire tower. This dessert reminded me of the Rainbow Icebox Cake with Homemade Chocolate Cookies from Baked Occasions, except that the chocolate cookies from that recipe were better.
Making these icebox towers is not actually that difficult -- but regardless, I didn't think it was worth the effort.
Recipe: "Icebox Towers" from Baked: New Frontiers in Baking by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.
Previous Post: "Baked Sunday Mornings: Rainbow Icebox Cake with Homemade Chocolate Cookies," June 7, 2015.
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