Took myself out for dessert in nyc. I’m at
First up: a rhubarb tart.
It’s simple and perfectly executed. The pastry isn’t better than what I could make, but the rhubarb fabrication is amazing. A perfectly-executed seasonal dessert. It took 45 min to arrive but was warm and delicious.
Next: pistachio affogato. The pistachio gelato is unspeakably good. I wish there was no coffee in the way of it.
What a nice way to treat yourself! 
I wanted to order three things, but felt salty after the first slice of tart took literally 45 min to arrive. so i capped it at two.
I’ve mentioned my obsession with the vegan frozen banana dessert we discovered in Philly here before, and the NYT just happened to publish this recipe fairly recently.
I’d been pestering my PIC to make it, and today was the day 
We even made another quick run to the supermarket just to get melting chocolate for a proper sauce, since I was put off by the commercially available fudge and chocolate (flavored) sauce concoctions that all seemed to list several sugar sources as their first & therefore main ingredients.
Therefore, I present to you: vegan frozen banana dessert with homemade chocolate sauce, salted peanuts, and chopped pecans.
The sauce, made with Ghirardelli dark chocolate melting wafers very quickly turned rockhard, which was a bit awkward, and certainly not like the fudgy sauce I’d had in mind. I also thought the texture of the frozen banana might be improved by the addition of a little bit of coconut milk.
A work in progress. “Work.” 
For your future work I recommend the bittersweet chocolate sauce from Stonewall Kitchen (normally relatively easy to find on the East Coast
For chocolate sauce I just combine whipping cream with dark chocolate. I use that over pears poached in white wine.
We’ve had great (drunken) success melting Lindor truffle balls in the MW to dip a German peanut snack in, which actually worked better. I’m not sure why that melted chocolate almost immediately turned into a hard shell — if we’d wanted that effect, we would’ve purchased a product that does this 
I also thought adding heavy cream or milk might’ve helped, but both had gone bad the day before so there was none in the house.
I’ll see if honkman’s rec is available locally, or any other chocolate sauce that doesn’t have corn syrup, sugar, and HFCS listed as the first 3 ingredients 
Because rapidly cooling melted chocolate makes it set up firm, and you poured it over something frozen.
It set up like a rock in the bowl we melted it in pretty quickly, too, and was impossible to get out. It’s currently soaking in hot, soapy water in the sink.
Perhaps Ghirardelli chocolate wafers are not meant to be a sauce 
I see that one also has corn syrup, pure cane sugar as its first ingredients.
Maybe I should start a thread for homemade chocolate sauce…
What’s the problem with corn syrup and cane sugar - they are used both to get the right consistency and something I would also use at hime to make such a sauce or ice cream
3 sources of sugar in a sauce seems a bit overkill to me, and when we make ice cream at home we never use anything besides (toasted) sugar, cream, eggs, milk.
This David Lebovitz recipe is good. I use golden syrup (e.g. Lyle’s) rather than corn syrup. It does help with viscosity and keeps it from hardening. Note that this recipe has a lot of unsweetened cocoa powder, so it’s really not so sweet.
Not sure if I agree as the number of ingredients don’t have any indication if a product or recipe is more “natural” or better. And especially with chocolate and ice cream you often want different sugar sources to better control melting points and crystal growth
I was under the impression that the ingredients on food labels are listed by content amount in descending order, so anything listed first would be larger amounts than whatever comes next, but happy to be corrected
Our homemade ice cream has never required different sugar sources.
@linguafood That chocolate sauce is my #1 favorite sauce, I’ve been making that since he published it.
He also has a hot fudge sauce which I have not tried.
1.) Maple syrup candied pecans and
2.) Pistachios finely chopped with chocolate
And the winner is…imo, as much as I like candied pecans, the pistachios are far more complementary to the chocolate crème patisserie.
It really isn’t. Each of them have a distinct purpose within the recipe. For instance, w ice cream or sorbet, the sugar is mostly there for taste, yes, but also to lower the freezing point of the mix, allowing for quicker freezing and the smaller ice crystals. Corn syrup also does this, with the bonus that since it doesn’t solidify when frozen, the ice cream/sorbet has a silkier texture and is easier to scoop (but also contributes to more rapid melting )
Corn syrup is also an invert sugar, thus preventing regular sugar from crystallizing.
Mind you, this is regular old Karo corn syrup you can find in any supermarket. It is NOT High Fructose Corn Syrup, which is an industrial product and not generally available to regular people. You probably don’t want any of that.
Holy cow. I’d inhale both in a shot 
