A friend once told me chocolate is for girls and butterscotch is for guys. If he is correct, I can only say I have come up with a very manly dessert today that ought to appeal to many guys. This interactive dessert platter invites one to play with the food with bowls of creamy butterscotch pudding, crunchy buttered pecans, and slabs of salty buttery cookies. The cookies came from a recipe from Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table, aptly named Salted Butter Break-Ups. As the name suggests, the cookie is meant to be served in a big slab and broken up into rustic pieces. So much fun, no?
The cookie is a straight-forward buttery dough with a nice hit of fleur de sel. The shiny golden hue with its characteristic criss-cross pattern is glazed with egg yolk wash. It was easy to make but other than the unique presentation, I have had better butter cookies. They sure are photogenic though!
The butterscotch pudding and butter pecans are also recipes from Greenspan. They come from her earlier book Baking: From My Home To Yours. The butterscotch pudding is rich and decadent, better suited in small doses. This old-fashioned dessert gets its butterscotch flavour from brown sugar, butter, and a healthy shot of Jack Daniel. Cream, milk, and egg yolks help to round out the creamy texture. The butter pecans are simply pecans tossed in melted butter, sugar, and fleur de sel before roasting to mahogany colour.
I think this dessert would be wonderful to serve at casual get-togethers such as board game nights or poker nights. You don’t need to pay undivided attention to this dessert platter yet you can nibble on it along side whatever entertainment is happening. As much as I enjoy food that makes me think, I believe there is a time and place such that food plays a supporting role to other activities. It can enhance and elevate the activity to be more memorable but ultimately, it remains in the background.
Curious about the Salted Butter Break-Ups? Check out other versions made by French Fridays With Dorie group! Are you a fan of butterscotch or chocolate?
Here’s something I thought of this morning. Ever notice how many of the recipes in Around My French Table calls for 7 tablespoons of butter? Or 1 cup plus 2 tablespoon of flour? If you do the standard volume to metric weight translation, you’ll quickly notice that 7 tablespoons of butter is 100g. Or that 1 cup plus 2 tablespoons of flour is 150g but 1 cup minus 2 tablespoons of flour is 100g. Goes to show the roots of these recipe were intended for metric weight system.
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