Ann Amernick: Art of the Dessert

By ALEXANDRA GREELEY (special to Super Chef) A well-known and highly regarded pastry chef who has fed and pleased a generation or so of Washingtonians, Ann Amernick has a long and worthy baking pedigree. Ann has served as a pastry chef in the White House. She has worked with the renowned Jean-Louis Palladin at his famed Jean-Louis at the Watergate restaurant. She has owned several bakeries in the metro Washington area. Her desserts are so famously gorgeous that just scrolling through her website is a bit like viewing classical artwork in an abbreviated (and edible) museum. So it’s no surprise to find out that Amernick has been nominated five times for the coveted James Beard award for Best Pastry Chef and that she has been named as one of the ten best pastry chefs in America. Thus fans of Ann Amernick must rejoice at the release of her latest book, The Art of the Dessert (Wiley, 2007). Amernick’s book is a delight for the eye and a temptation for the palate with full-color illustrations of beautifully presented cakes slices, strudels, and terrines. Each photo is evocative of a dessert celebration, where you can imagine forking into at least 2,000 calories per mouthful. To balance the color, the designer uses black-and-white and beige-and- white photos of assorted pastry tools, from brushes and rolling pins, to pastry bags and even how-tos of pressing out dough or of neatly peeling a naval orange for sectioning into a garnish. Conscientious of details, Amernick also laces the text with enough narrative to make the book both readable and very approachable, prefacing recipes with personal and professional commentaries. She also scrupulously explains techniques and tools, leaving no detail behind or uncovered. If you are stumped by how to make strudel dough (p. 114) or how to make a towering soufflé (p. 245) or even the best way to assemble a trifle (p. 206), you’ll find some answers. But a word of caution: Amernick’s pastries are sublime, but the recipes are really meant for the serious—and that means totally dedicated, semiprofessional—baker. If you are looking to whip up a batch of brownies on a lazy Sunday afternoon, you won’t find much solace here. For many of the recipes you will need time, patience, techniques, tools, and a stock of primo ingredients. But that said, you may ease into haute baking and dessert making with her not-so-complex Turkish Rice and Rose-Water Pudding (p. 212), a relatively simple one-pager that a competent and eager home cook can pull off in an afternoon. Best of all, its sinful list of ingredients includes two quarts of half-and-half, fragrant basmati rice, and sensuous rosewater, assuring the cook that this will make a big impression on company. And, if you can master some more complicated techniques—and have the time to spare to clean up after any missteps—you might consider the Goat Cheese Cheesecake Sandwiches with Pumpkinseed Brittle (p.320). Yes, it’s lengthier than the pudding recipe, but if you have ever made a cheesecake and custard, you’ve already mastered two components of the dessert. Besides, it sounds enchanting, and if fattening, you can figure out how to make your sandwiches bite-sized. In the end, if you still wonder about Amernick’s credibility as a pastry chef par excellence, just look at the cover line quotes: from Daniel Boulud, Patrick O’Connell, François Payard, and Gale Gand. They say it all. Previous articles: [Cookbook Reviews - complete] Technorati Tags: superchefblog, Juliette Rossant, super chef, celebrities, chefs, food, restaurants, cooking, branding, cuisine, blogging, food blogging, cookbooks, cookbook reviews --> back to Cookbook Reviews --> back to Super Chef