Have you ever wondered what certain deserts were made of? Here is a list of deserts that you have probably heard of, but didn't know what they were.
Angel Food Cake
This cake has a light texture. The batter contains egg whites, sugar, flour and is baked in a tube pan.
Baba
Babas are made from yeast and contain raisins or other types of dried fruit. They are baked in cylinder type molds, like a log, and then soaked with a sugary syrup flavored with rum. These cakes are usually very small.
Baking Blind
Baking Blind is when you bake the crust of a pie before you fill it. It is done by lining the dough with parchment paper or foil. It is filled with dried peas, lentils, beans or other legumes, so that it will keep its shape when baking. Metal or ceramic pie weights are also used. After the pie crust is done, the legumes are replaced with the proper filling.
Bavarian Cream
This cream is made from custard sauce or sweetened fruit puree that is held together with gelatin and then lightened with whipped cream. The most popular place to find Bavarian cream is usually a donut.
Boiled Icing
This icing, is used as a filling and frosting for a several different kinds of layered cakes.
Butter Cakes
Butter Cakes consist of taking 4 basic ingredients and adding them together; butter, sugar, flour, and usually a leavening agent of baking powder or baking soda. There are three ways to make a butter cake , creaming method, combination method, or the blending method.
Buttercream
Is a type of icing used inside cakes, as a coating, and as decoration. Its made by creaming butter with sugar. Other fats can be used, such as oil, margarine and lard.
Caramel
Liquid caramel can be made by simply heat sugar in a pan until it liquifies. The method is used most often when making a traditional flan.
Cream Puff Paste
Cream Puff Paste is a mix between a batter and a dough. Cream puff paste is made with flour, eggs, boiling water, and butter. It is crisp on the outside, hollow on the inside and forms a tube like container good for filling with pastry cream or ice cream.
Custard Sauce
Is almost like a liquid Bavarian cream. It is often served along side souffles. It is a mixture of egg yolks, sugar and milk and/or cream that is cooked very briefly until it forms a custard. Do not over cook or the yolks will scramble.
Dock
This term refers to piercing pastry doughs before baking. The holes allow the steam to escape, preventing the dough from bubbling and becoming distorted.
Foam Cakes
In these cakes, air is beaten into whole eggs and sugar before the other ingredients are gently folded in.
Ganache
Is a chocolate based mixture. Chocolate morsels are heated with boiling cream and stirred till smooth. It can be used in truffles or depending on the consistency used for cake filling.
Genoise
Is a French sponge cake made by beating warm eggs with sugar until the mixture grows to at least 3x it's volume, then flour and butter are folded in.
Glazes
Glazes are used to give desserts a smooth and/or shiny finish. There are several different types of glazes, Caramel, chocolate, fondate, water icing, and tart glazes are to name a few.
Ladyfingers
Ladyfingers are small sponge cakes, about 3 1/2 inches long, used in the well know Italian desert tiramasu.
Lemon Curd
Is a mixture of lemon juice, sugar, butter and egg yolks. It is usually used as a tart filling cream.
Meringue
There are 2 different types of meringue, Italian, and swiss. It consists of beating egg whites and sugar until stiff.
Pastry Dough
Pie dough or flaky pastry is the standard American dough for pies. It can be made with butter, vegetable shortening or lard, but most often a combination of butter and shortening is used.
Petits Fours
Petits Fours are usually thin, delicate cookies often sandwiched with preserves, ganache or praline paste, although plain butter cookies could also fall under this heading.
Phyllo Dough
Phyllo is a tissue-thin pastry dough cut into sheets and is similar to strudel dough. Sheets of phyllo are brushed with melted butter and layered before baking.
Pound Cake
Is exactly what it sounds like, one pound of butter, sugar, eggs and flour --
Puff Pastry
This is the multi-layered buttery pastry in napoleons and palmiers. The thin, crisp, flaky layers are formed when the dough and butter are rolled together, then folded in thirds like a letter and rolled again in a process called a turn; classic puff pastry is "turned" six times, which creates over 1, 000 layers of dough
Royal Icing
This icing is a mixture of confectioners' sugar and egg whites, and it dries hard. It is the traditional icing for English Wedding Cake.
Savarin
Made from a yeast dough, savarins are baked in large or small ring molds, soaked with a syrup usually flavored with rum and then painted with a fruit glaze. The center of the ring is filled with whipped cream or pastry cream, and sometimes fresh or poached fruit is added.
Sponge Cake
Sponge cakes are leavened by beating air into whole eggs and sugar or by beating the sugar with the yolks and whites separately. The cakes tend to be fairly lean, even when they contain butter, and are often split into layers, moistened with a flavored sugar syrup and filled.
Strudel Dough
A traditional Viennese strudel dough contains more fat (oil) than phyllo dough and is stretched to a large tissue-thin sheet before being rolled around a filling to make one strudel. Although prepared strudel dough is sometimes hard to find, phyllo can be used in its place to make small strudels (both can be mail-ordered).
Tart
Tarts are shallow and straight sided (as opposed to sloped-sided American pies) and usually have only a bottom crust, but this is by no means the rule. They are baked in pans with removable bottoms or in flan forms (frames that support the sides of the tart as it bakes on a baking sheet) and are usually served unmolded. Tarts can also be baked free-form on a sheet.
