An Out Of Office But With Recipes

Stone Fruit Dacquoise

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When is an out-of-office not really an out of office? As I write this I am sat in a beach side bar drinking a Greek frappe coffee, listening to the waves lap the beach beside me. Common sense says I should probably just take a break, the baking can wait a couple weeks. Instead I have lots of fun content to post while I am away, I just couldn’t leave you without something delicious. This week I have a spin on a classic French dish and next week I have a bonanza of strawberry recipes.

This week we’re going full-on retro, celebrating the unfashionable, the uncool, and making something delicious. For this retro celebration, we are working with a classic French recipe, the dacquoise. To turn this into a fully fledged dessert, the dacquoise is served with a honey mascarpone cream and a mix of nectarine and peach, a great kick off to summer fruit season.

Dacquoise is one of many basic French pastry staples and it can be both an element and the dessert itself. At its core, Dacquoise is simply a nutty meringue but thats underselling it a little. Whilst meringue is generally very crisp and light, dacquoise is closer to a cake, it’s a little soft and almost spongy, with a light crisp outer layer. You make a simple French meringue (egg white and caster sugar) and to that, you fold in a mixture of icing sugar, ground almonds and flour. You can make a delicious version using all manner of nuts but to keep things simple today, I stuck to ground almonds. To be completely transparent, I did have something completely different lined up for you this week, but I lost all of the footage and images of that recipe, and it was a really big deep-dive type of post, so I will need to make all of that again at some point. All of that to say, this is an excellent dessert to make when you’re under a bit of time pressure, it's incredibly quick and simple to make, plus the cake itself is basically made with regular pantry items, the topping can be made from whatever you have on hand.

Talking of toppings, for this cake, there are two elements - cream and fruit.  The cream layer brings everything together, it’s the proverbial glue of this cake. You could keep things as simple as can be, and just use a basic whipped cream but, as usual, I like to take every possible opportunity to layer in flavour, so the cream element is a mixture of cream, mascarpone and honey, all of which are a wonderful foil to both the cake itself and the fruit.

For the fruit, we are in a very good part of the year, summer fruit is starting to appear so I was spoilt for choice. This would have been great with cherries or maybe strawberries (but I have two fab strawberry recipes coming next week), but I went with peaches and nectarines. My local greengrocer had some in and I just couldn’t resist. Buying stone fruit is this country so often feels like a game of Russian roulette, the results are often hard and tasteless, I felt like I had won the stone fruit lottery when these turned out to be juicy and packed with flavour. The beauty about his dish is that nothing is complicated, and the fruit is just that, fruit. Nothing else is added beyond a few drops of lime juice.

If you want to prepare any of this ahead, the dacquoise itself will keep for 3-4 days but once you’ve added the toppings it is best served on the same day, the moisture of the cream will eventually make the dacquoise soggy.