One of my new favorite cheeses to cook with is feta. Sure I’ve used it for years in Greek salad and enjoyed it on pizza as a special treat, but other than tossing a few crumbles on grilled chicken on occasion, that was pretty much it.
When Hubby and I discovered borek (click HERE for my recipe), made with Bulgarian feta, well that was just the cat’s meow. Teaching myself to make borek at home opened up more opportunities to use feta cheese and the opportunities keep on coming. Continue reading
As much as I prefer to cook and bake everything from scratch, there are just some days I am not up to it or, let’s face it, in the mood. This isn’t even bringing up the issue of time, which using convenience foods shortens considerably.
Monkey bread makes an excellent presentation whether prepared to satisfy a sweet tooth or a savory one. This particular recipe is sure to satisfy the sweetest of tooths and has a little bit of everything in it. When Hubby tasted it for the first time he declared, “If this was served at a Bed & Breakfast, this would be gobbled up like nothing else.” This one definitely gets added to my Bed & Breakfast-Worthy Recipe Arsenal. Continue reading
Strawberries are one of my favorite fruits to use in desserts. Every year, beginning in mid-May, strawberries start headlining the sale papers at our local grocery and fruit markets. Sure they are available pretty much all year, but the best, sweetest, and cheapest ones are found from mid-May through possibly August because that’s when they are truly in season. Continue reading
When I found myself with just a few strawberries to use up from our recent trip to the strawberry patch, I had to decide whether to selfishly stuff them in my mouth when no one was looking or use them in a recipe. Being always on the lookout for a new favorite recipe, I just had to find something to make with them.
The choices are really endless. There’s of course shortcake or pie, but there wasn’t enough of them for either of those — at least not to serve the entire family. Crepes and cobbler were out for the same reason. With just enough to make one cup of chopped strawberries to add to a recipe, my options were more limited than I had thought.
Scones sounded good, but although these strawberries were very sweet I didn’t think they could hold their own against the biscuit-type batter of a scone. A quick bread sounded interesting, but I wasn’t in the mood for bread. A small batch of cupcakes was getting closer to what I was looking for, but still not quite there.
COOKIES! That’s what I wanted. COOKIES!
My only concerns then were whether or not the strawberries would be sweet enough on their own and how to keep the strawberries from turning to mush while mixing. These concerns were remedied by the addition of a few white chocolate chips to my cream cheese cookie base and then coating the chopped strawberries with a little flour before carefully hand folding them into the batter just before putting them on the cookie sheets.
The results were strawberry bliss! Sort of like bite-size strawberry shortcakes, these gems didn’t last long at our house.
Hubby and the kids devoured them within a day and a half, and for this I am — Simply Grateful.
Ingredients
Directions
Cooking Note
Note: These cookies can either be dusted with raw or sanding sugar prior to baking or with powdered sugar after they have cooled.
My original recipe called for cream cheese, but I was out so opted to try the mascarpone. It worked beautifully. I will definitely be swapping these cheeses on a regular basis when the occasion arises.
These cookies are very moist. In order to keep them fresh, if they are around for any length of time, be sure to refrigerate them.
A couple of months ago, Grace and I stopped off at a sushi restaurant that a friend of hers had told her about. She was told that this restaurant made a deep-fried fruit sushi that was really good. We ordered one and were not disappointed.
The fruit sushi from the restaurant had strawberry, kiwi, mango, and cream cheese wrapped in rice and noir and then it was dipped in tempura batter and deep-fried. The sushi was then served with a black sweet sauce that neither of us could figure out what it was. All we knew was it was good. I admit though that the noir, or seaweed wrap, was not my favorite part of this dessert. I like it on other sushi wraps, but for dessert, I thought it somewhat took away from the presentation.
As with everything I find in a restaurant that I like, I immediately began my search for a recipe for this type of sushi. All the recipes I found consisted of sweetened rice and fruit, with the occasional one having noir wrapped around it. Unfortunately, none of them were deep-fried and none of them had a sauce. It was disappointing, but still I figured something had to be better than nothing.
I printed off three different recipes, compared them, and discovered that they all prepared the rice the same. So, I followed the recipe as written. When I went to assemble the sushi however, I found the rice less than cooperative to work with. Although I was able to get it to loosely hold together around the fruit, there was no way to cut it without it falling apart.
Okay, so things weren’t going as planned. Still, I decided to scoop up some of the mess and taste it, if it was good, maybe there would be some way to salvage this. The rice was somewhat sweet but still basically flavorless. The strawberry and kiwi I used in the rice was sweet, but the combination of the rice and fruit was definitely nothing to write home about.
Now whether it was because I hate to admit defeat or because I chose to try this recipe on the last day of 2015 and could not stand the thought of ending the year on a sour note (or failed recipe in this case), I decided there was no way this dessert sushi wasn’t going to be a success. What I needed was something to bind the rice together and something to form a sushi roll other than the traditional noir. It didn’t take me but a minute to figure out the answer to this dilemma — cream cheese filling and crepes.
So here’s my version of dessert sushi. It turned out to be a cross between rice pudding and strawberry crepes and it’s absolutely awesome — if I do say so myself. You could just ask Grace, Zeb or Hubby though because they all devoured this without hesitation.
Fresh Fruit Dessert Sushi
For the rice:
1 1/2 Cups Sushi Rice
2 Cups Water
3 Tbsp. Sugar
1 Cup Coconut Milk
For the cream cheese filling:
1 Cup Heavy Cream
1 8 oz. Package Cream Cheese, softened
1 1/4 Cups Powdered Sugar
1/2 tsp. Vanilla
For the crepe:
1 Cup Flour
3 Eggs
1 1/2 Cups Milk
2 Tbsp. Melted Butter
1 Heaping Tbsp. Sugar
Pinch of Salt
Fruit:
Strawberries, kiwi, pineapple, mandarin orange slices, banana or any fruit you desire sliced into thin strips
For the rice: Rinse the rice to remove the milky coating. Place rinsed rice in saucepan with water, sugar and salt. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to low, cover, and cook 15 minutes until rice is tender. Remove from heat and add coconut milk. Stir to combine. Immediately spread rice on parchment lined cookie sheet to cool.
For the cream: In a small bowl, beat the whipping cream until stiff peaks form; set aside. In a large bowl, beat the cream cheese, powdered sugar, and vanilla until smooth; fold in whipped cream. Chill until ready to assemble sushi.
For the crepes: Combine all ingredients in a blender and blend for 30 seconds. Heat small fry pan or crepe pan over medium-high heat and spray with cooking spray. Pour just enough batter in pan to cover bottom. When batter is dull and cooked on one side, flip and cook for 30 seconds more. Remove from pan and cool.
To assemble: Place a piece of plastic wrap on sushi mat. Lay a cooled crepe on plastic wrap and spread a thin layer of cream cheese cream on crepe leaving 1/2″ on one end clean. Spread 1/2 cup rice on top of cream. Lay sliced fruit about 1″ from bottom of crepe on rice. Start to roll the crepe, using the plastic wrap and sushi mat to control the roll and keep it tight. Place roll on its seam and refrigerate before cutting.
We made this sushi on New Year’s Eve afternoon and by evening it was firm enough to cut and absolutely perfect. The following day I served some of the leftovers after dinner and much of the cream filling had been absorbed into the rice and the flavor was nothing like the night before. Hubby still loved it, but I do believe this is a dessert best served the day you make it.
The only other change I would make is to add possibly a teaspoon or two of vanilla to the rice with the coconut milk in the hope that it would kick up the flavor of the rice a touch so if the cream does get absorbed, some flavor will still remain.
2016 is here to stay and so is this new recipe for dessert sushi, and for this I am — Simply Grateful.
Ingredients
For the rice:
For the cream cheese filling:
For the crepe:
Fruit:
Directions
Simply Grateful Cooking 