As part of the pastry program every class hosts a Night of Desserts. We invite friends and family for two shifts of dessert service. We create our own menu and each team of two makes one dish. My partner and I were assigned the chocolate dish and came up with a chocolate and Guinness pastilla with creme fraiche ice cream. It was incredible!
A pastilla is a savory Moroccan dish made with chicken in a flaky dough (I believe it's a relative to fillo dough) flavored with cocoa, cinnamon, and sugar. I've only had a proper one once, when I lived in the UK, because they--like good Moroccan food in general--are difficult to find in the States.
What we did was make it a proper dessert. First things first, we got rid of the chicken and upped the chocolate content. Instead of using cinnamon we decided to get a rich, deep, nearly spicy flavor from Guinness. So we baked a batch of plain old, fudgy, chocolate brownies and cut them into squares. We topped them with a Guinness and dark chocolate ganache and wrapped them in layers of buttered fillo dough. We kept them in the fridge until we were ready to use them the following class when we baked them until the fillo was golden.
We served them with chocolate Guinness sauce that we made by thinning down the ganache with extra heavy cream and creme fraiche ice cream held in place on a pile of brownie crumbs. We also used freshly made raspberry coulis, fresh raspberries, and a tiny basil leaf for color. Yum!
It was delicious and we got rave reviews!
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