This Passover, Finish Strong With Five-Star Desserts
No more stale macaroons ever.
These four delicious Passover dessert recipes—raspberry curd Pavlova,
chocolate-dipped figs with sea salt, pear-chocolate cake and macaroons actually
worth eating—make for a much sweeter Seder
By Leah Koenig in the Wall Street Journal
WHEN MY MOTHER was growing up, her family coined a term for Passover
desserts: Pesadrek. It’s a play on the Yiddish “Pesadik”—meaning,
roughly, “good for Passover”—incorporating “drek,” the slang for garbage.
(Though some Yiddish speakers would provide a saltier translation for “drek.”)
Mom’s family wasn’t the only one to
groan over the proverbial rotation of dusty matzo-meal brownies,
teeth-shatteringly sweet fruit jells and macaroons that taste more like their
aluminum canister than cookies. Culinarily speaking, this is a holiday of
prohibitions—particularly of leavened foods like bread. Flour is off limits. If
you plan to serve chicken or brisket at a kosher-style Seder, where mixing meat
and milk is verboten, then butter and cream are out too.
What’s left is matzo cake
meal—essentially matzo that’s ground and employed as a flour substitute. If not
used judiciously, it tends to produce pastry with more than a passing
resemblance to Spackle. And the store-bought sweets are rarely more inspiring.
“I find it shocking that supermarkets start displaying packaged Passover
desserts a month or two before the holiday,” said Paula Shoyer, a pastry chef
and author, most recently, of “The New Passover Menu.” “How good can they be
after sitting on the shelf for that long?”
Fortunately, things are looking up.
Gluten-free bakers, for instance, have raised the profile of flourless sweets,
many of which are actually perfectly traditional. “There are so many fruit
desserts and European cakes that have been around forever that use egg whites
and ground nuts instead of flour,” said Deb Perelman of “Smitten Kitchen,” an
influential blog that includes many Passover recipes. Meanwhile, the quality of
many Passover-certified ingredients, from vanilla extract to baking chocolate,
has improved in recent years.
Why focus on the prohibitions when
there are so many possibilities—like, say, this showstopping Pavlova I came up with? To top the egg-white meringue base, I
whisked the leftover yolks with raspberries into a ruby curd. Topped with more
berries and curls of bittersweet chocolate, the Pavlova possesses a Technicolor
dazzle and sweet-tangy flavor that make this dessert a star of the Seder table.
For cookie-tray nibbles, I offer jammy dried figs dipped
in chocolate and sprinkled with sea salt, and cinnamon-almond macaroons. The latter redeem the category with their crackly coconut
outsides and tender, almond-perfumed centers.
And I decided to tackle the
matzo-cake-meal challenge head on, with a pear-chocolate cake to snack on throughout the week of Passover. The key: Use
just enough matzo meal to bind the batter. Brimming with juicy pear and
threaded with a jumble of walnuts and chocolate, it tastes just like Passover.
And for once, that’s a good thing.
Recipes
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