Four Fast Dessert Tips

Four Fast Desserts Takes

1. Since chilling numbs flavor, heating is a quick way to reinvigorate supermarket fruit, which has spent time in the cooler. Try poaching, roasting or even grilling fruit.

2. Set up your own home ice cream parlor: put out several flavors of ice cream and some sugar cones. Have ready shallow dishes of miniature chocolate chips, chopped toasted nuts, toasted coconut, crushed malted milk balls, chopped candied ginger, crushed toffee bars, and chopped dried-fruit tidbits. Have everyone roll their cones in a topping. Double-dipping is allowed.

3. For a simple homemade sorbet, freeze a can of fruit in heavy syrup and purée with little lemon juice.

4. Don't feel you have to make everything yourself. Take advantage of the readily available, high-quality products on the market: pound cake, puff pastry, phyllo dough, refrigerated pie crusts, premium ice creams, and cut-up fruit.

Short & Sweet
150 Sophisticated Desserts in No Time at All
By Melanie Barnard
Houghton Mifflin Company
Hardback, $25.00, May 1999
240 pages, 8 pages of color photographs
ISBN: 0-395-90145-6
Reprinted by permission.