Always Eat Dessert First!!

Or in this case, start with the dessert wine and create an amazing concept for the dessert before you even crack open another bottle!

I mean, why not start with dessert first? It’s sweet and fun and flirty and can truly be taken in so many different directions! As a pastry Chef I am always up for the sweet stuff so it came as no surprise to me when we were drawn right away to the delicious dessert wine, TX Tawny, delivered by Valley Mills Vineyards.

The bottle is a bit shorter than a traditional wine with a lovely dark look to it. Upon opening we first get the hint of plums. Gorgeous, ripe red and black plums hot from the sun right off the tree. The juice that drips down your chin when you rush to bite into it. What a scent and immediatley we think of pairing this wine with figs, and something tart, something sweet and decadent. The wheels turn briefly as we sip and taste and savor the notes on our tongues.

Then what always seems to amaze me, perhaps because we spend so much time together or perhaps because our love of food is what brought us together in the first place, but we seemed to come up with a completely cohesive dish building on eachothers ideas one after the other after the other until its almost as though we had the exact same idea before we even knew it.

Our dessert presentation will be a fresh Mission Fig stuffed with D’Auvergne Bleu Cheese with the most perfect crystals you’ve ever tasted, along side 3 julienne slivers of Candied Orange Peel that is sweet and tart with a perfect chew. We will then wrap this little jewel in Applewood Smoked Bacon and skewer it above a vivid half Orange. I wish we had a picture of the presentation to show here, but something must be left to the imagination and anticipation for the big day!!

Until then, we have much more #wine to sample and many more dishes to create!

Y’all come back soon, the adventure continues!

with love,

AB