Raspberry Danish from Extraordinary Desserts

Of the three things I got from Extraordinary Desserts in October – the Chocolate Pecan Tart, the Chocolate Streusel Cake, and the Raspberry Danish -, the danish was by far the best. I admitted in an earlier post that I preferred fruit, and sweetness, and melting textures to chocolate, and pastry, and crunch. Well, this danish hit all the right spots. It was also the cheapest, at just $3.50, compared to the approximately $10 cost of the other items.

Karen calls it a danish but it seems more like a fruit pastry to me. Its crust is layered with pastry dough, topped with a wonderfully tart raspberry puree, some perfect vanilla glaze, and some berries for fun.

A daisy on a danish

This was one of the cases where the flower placed on top was truly appreciated. It looks so beautiful there. With the other items, the red and yellow roses against the dark brown hue of chocolate seemed a little off to me, but a red and white pastry topped with white flowers and red berries was truly striking and harmonious.

Mm, raspberries

The raspberry puree had soaked into the pastry dough, softening it with delightful berry flavor. That glaze was just a masterful touch as well. It’s such a simple thing, but it was a great, sticky, sweet contrast to the bright and seedy flavor of the puree. It was just wonderful.

A little gooey raspberry shot for you

You can see the gold foil here, but I honestly did not care in this case because this was so delicious. It was the perfect combination of sweet, tart, soft, comforting, and beautiful. It was so uncomplicated compared to the busy chocolate pecan tart and so light next to the chocolate streusel.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I stopped at Extraordinary Desserts by Balboa Park in San Diego. It has a very good reputation, and as someone who loves dessert, it’s nice to see a place succeed that specializes in it. So often restaurants just drop the ball on their dessert menu, opting for boring favorites – creme brulee, chocolate cake, icecream, and either a brownie or bread pudding. I’d love to see more variation there, like flavored panna cotta, fruit-based desserts, maybe meringues or spice cakes or gingerbread or poached pears with cream. There’s so much out there!

Chocolate streusel from Extraordinary Desserts

I got this chocolate streusel because I don’t think I’ve ever seen one before.  Yes, that’s really all it takes to get something into my mouth. Novelty. I liked how it is an atypical dessert in general, because streusels are usually breakfast items.

Chocolate streusel topped with flowers, gold, and chocolate

As usual, it was topped with flowers, chocolate, a squirt of chocolate ganache, gold, and powdered sugar. That’s five toppings, six if you count the fact there were two different types of flowers – rose petals and a daisy. I wonder how much these accoutrements account for the price. I have to say, I wasn’t wild about this dessert. Streusel is dense and dry in general – it’s pastry, not cake. The chocolate insides were rich and moist, in contrast, but they were too one-note. It was just chocolate, no hint of anything interesting, like spices or fruit. It wasn’t very sweet, either, so it was just simply boring.

It’s a little unfair because this kind of dessert doesn’t fit my flavor profile at all. I know what I like – creamy textures, complexity, sweetness, novelty. This was novel in concept, but not novel in taste, and I really don’t like pastry that much. Croissants, turnovers, pie crust – I’m not a fan. The streusel didn’t really have a chance, so definitely take my review with a grain of salt.

Chocolate streusel, sideview

Apologies, again, for the poor lighting. I had to use flash for these photos due to poor indoor lighting.

How not to use gold

I complained in my last post about the use of gold leaf in the desserts. It was randomly smeared onto a pecan in the chocolate pecan tart. Here, they seem to have dropped it on a flower with no regard for where it stuck. Look, I don’t have a lot of room to talk because I’m not a great styler myself. My sole contribution to the display of this photo was the fork in cocoa powder, which I hacked together using a Swiss Miss packet.  It just seems so strange to me that you would introduce gold leaf, which instantly reeks of pretention, and throw it on a flower, on a dessert, with no care at all exhibited. It really reinforces the idea that it’s there just to look expensive, and I hate things like that. Don’t make it look expensive so it looks expensive and you can charge more. Make it high-quality.

When I planned my trip to La Jolla and San Diego in October, I started by researching things to do (the zoo!), places to eat, and then houses, flights, and cars. I like to make sure I have at least one great dinner when I’m on a vacation, and, because I run this site, I also like to make sure my list includes at least one good bakery. I was in luck because a quick perusal of Trip Advisor showed an eatery called Extraordinary Desserts on the first page for San Diego restaurants. Sold! Say no more. When I asked for recommendations on Good Taste Photography’s Facebook page, Extraordinary Desserts came up again in several comments, so it was 100% certain I’d have to set foot in this establishment.

On Saturday evening, I went to the location by Balboa Park because I had just spent my day there. We planned to get dessert, keep it in the car, then go to the Gaslamp district to get dinner. I found parking right outside the restaurant and was surprised to see a great many tables outside and in, lit with candles and possessed of a bistro-like ambiance. I had expected a bakery or cupcake atmosphere with limited seating and a lot of take-out, but Extraordinary Desserts was in fact a cafe that only sold dessert.

They had waiters. Wow.

We stepped in line, which was already edging out the door despite it being pre-dinner at 6 PM or so. I knew what I was getting into, but the man in front of me did not. He stepped back into line with his female companion after perusing the selection ahead and said, “$10 for a creme brulee? No way.”

She just looked at him. It was The Look. This particular one was particularly withering to the male species, because, in that moment, what I felt radiating from her was an aura of “So you’re cheap?”. She said nothing, and he tried again, realizing his mistake. “The line is really long, and I don’t like anything here.”

Another moment passed. She finally said, “So you want to leave?”

“Yeah, let’s go somewhere else.”

“Fine.” Mama wasn’t happy.

$10 for a dessert is a lot. They were all pricy, except for my favorite one – the raspberry tart, which was only $3.50. However, if you’re already there, and you’re surrounded by people eager to eat these $10 items.. I don’t know. I’d stay. (That said, I was in Delicious Orchards recently, and I found some sea salt caramels, which I am always on the lookout for. I was positively going to buy them until I flipped over the box and saw it was $12 for 5-6 caramels. For sugar, cream, and salt! I can understand the man’s outrage.)

But back to Extraordinary Desserts, they left, and we stayed, passing by a display of teas and coffee until we were firmly in Dessert Land. There were about 10 desserts in the case with another refrigerated case under the cash register filled with cakes and parfaits. I picked 3 things somewhat at random: the chocolate pecan tart, because I don’t see that very often, the chocolate streusel cake, because it looked good and Lou likes denser cakes, and the raspberry danish, because chocolate never photographs well. (Yes, I’m always thinking of that.)

Chocolate pecan tart from Extraordinary Desserts

Disclaimer: the lighting in my La Jolla home was not very good. It consisted almost entirely of track lights on dimmers. There were no lamps. The house was a 1930 historic building, so I think its age, plus the fact California should be sunny all the time, made them scale back on such things. As a result, it was extremely challenging to photo anything in this house without flash. I lit candles, I turned lights on, I used my fastest lens, but I was still deeply unsatisfied with the photos.

However, the use of candles led me to this photo, which is very traditionally styled in a way I would normally never do. A glass table, a wine glass, a candle. It was like a Valentine’s Day shoot!

Chocolate pecan tart

Onto the tart. It was the size of a cd and two inches tall, so it was definitely meant to be shared. It was dense, too, packed with nuts and goo. You can see the lattice-work of the crust on top, with pecans peaking out. It was like a pie on the top but a cake on the bottom. The crust was hard, dense like a brownie, and almost like a chocolate-chocolate cookie in taste and texture.

Pecan tart topped with flowers, chocolate, pecans, and gold-leaf

Every single item that Karen sells in Extraordinary Desserts has fresh flowers and gold leaf on it, as far as I could tell. These were rose petals, set in a dollop of chocolate ganache, topped with a toasted pecan that had edible gold leaf laid on it. Rose petals are edible but I just didn’t feel like it. I did  eat some of that pecan but I’m not wild about eating gold, either.

Honestly, I am just not a fan of this look, period. It just seems needlessly gauche, and the application seems sloppy. It screams of a checklist in the back that says. “1. Add chocolate. 2. Add flowers. 3. Apply gold leaf.” They’re just adding the requisite items, not thinking of whether it makes sense or pleases the eye. If half the pecan, vertically or horizontally, was covered in gold foil, or there seemed to be some sort of rhyme or reason to its appearance, I’d be down with it. As it is, this just looks a little pretentious.

Slice of the tart

But how did it taste? Golly, it is it dense. You can see the nutty texture in this photo – chocolate and broken nuts mixed with the gooey mixture of brown sugar, molasses, and bourbon that makes up the base of a pecan pie. It was too much for me, personally. Two bites, and I was so overwhelmed with the richness that I was done. That’s probably great for my diet but a little disappointing for my palate, because I’d like to linger over a dessert, enjoying it for several minutes. If you love pecan pie, and you love chocolate, and you think pie+cake sounds amazing, go for this.

Japanese Kit Kat pile!

I recently heard of green tea and chestnut Kit Kats in Japan. I love to eat weird things, especially Japanese ones, and especially green tea flavors, so this was extremely exciting news. Since I was going to San Diego, and I remembered there being a Japanese community there, I told myself I’d stop at a certain shop and pick some up. I didn’t have to go that far, though, because I found a plethora of Japanese candy in Panninkin’s, a coffee and tea importer in the Gaslamp district. I bought almost every type of Kit Kat they had, in addition to some other Japanese chocolates because I just have no self control.

I actually didn’t know what I was buying when I bought it. Some of the Kit Kats had English or French on them, but most just had little icons or color cues. (I’d show you a photo of their full Kit Kat display, but they told me I couldn’t take photos of it.. after I bought over $20 of candy and two coffees from them. Come on, guys. That’s lame.)

Domu-kun eats my kit kats

That’s my Domu-kun cup! I got him at 7-11 when they did a promo. It seems really fitting to put Japanese Kit Kats in him. You may know him from the ‘Everytime you do (x), God kills a Kitten’ photos.

Domu-kun!

He is actually the mascot for a Japanese TV station, where he got some commercials.. and then he got his own manga, and his own video games, and internet fame. The 7-11 version portrayed him as ravenously eating everything in the store. In this image, it looks like he is trying to eat the ‘semisweet’ Kit Kat box.

Japanese Kit Kats in a cup

What do we have here? The collection includes white chocolate and semi-sweet, which seem normal enough. There’s also raspberry and cookie-flavored. Still not impressed? How about bitter almond? (Cyanide flavored??) Mixed Juice? Pudding? Blueberry? They’re all here. 

The golden Bitter Almond wrapper on the bottom reminds me of a Twix.

The yellow one in the middle is the Mixed Juice. I had originally seen the shapes as leaves and turkeys, so I hoped that one might be the Chestnut flavor when I bought it. Then I ate it, and it tasted like bananas. It turns out the images were fruit. Oops.

Have a break, have a kit kat.

I don’t remember Kit Kats in America coming in boxes. These all contain two sleeves of two Kit Kats each, for four total. They really go all-out in making the boxes look different. There’s a flavor called Royal Milk  Tea that even uses a British Burberry-like pattern on it. I, alas, did not get to try that one. In fact, even though my loot had a lot of flavors I’ve never seen in America, I missed the ones that were truly Japanese, like miso soup, soy, green tea, and sakura (cherry blossom). I also missed the ones that were truly weird, like corn, sweet potato, roasted tea, beets, and ginger ale. Yes, you can get all that in a Kit Kat. Here’s a comprehensive list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kit_Kat.

Framboise/Raspberry Japanese Kit Kat

Here is the pink interior of the “Framboise” or raspberry. This was probably my favorite. I love the tart flavor of raspberry jelly, and it worked well with the wafer here.

Cookie Plus Japanese Kit Kat

This is the “Cookie Plus” flavor. You can see the extra dense layer on top — that’s where the cookie is. There also seems to be a greenish layer on the bottom.

Cookie Plus Japanese Kit Kat

That leads me to a funny story about Cookie Plus. Like I said, I didn’t know what kind of Kit Kats I had purchased. I spent a lot of time on the internet, looking at photos of other people’s Kit Kats and hoping they had captioned them. This worked for every case except one – Cookie Plus. Since I was desperate, and I’m not entirely unfamiliar with Japanese (I speak some and have been studying the culture since I was 10), I decided to try to translate it myself. There are three written languages in Japan – kanji, which has many, many elaborate symbols, hiragana, which is used for certain words in which the kanji is too difficult or doesn’t exist, or to augment kanji, and katakana, which is used for foreign words. Then, add in romaji, which is when they use roman letters (abc) to write Japanese sounds.

So, I assumed that the name of a Kit Kat flavor would be hiragana or katakana, because the letters didn’t look like kanji and it might be a foreign word. I eventually got ‘washiki purasu’ off the label. As soon as I saw purasu, I was excited, because that was probably ‘Plus’, so it seemed like I was using the write language. Unfortunately, washiki means a Japanese-style toilet. So, this was a “Toilet Plus!” flavored Kit Kat? I mean, it did have a, um, green layer at the bottom, and there were some whacky flavors, but that just seemed impossible. Plus I had already eaten some, so I had a vested interest.

After some more research, I stumbled upon a flavor called Cookie Plus. Alright! Now THAT seemed reasonable. But.. what’s the word for cookie? It’s kuuki. It turns out that the first part of the label used the kanji for cookie, which surprised me for a lot of reasons that I won’t go into here. Well, better than Toilet Plus!

White chocolate Japanese kit kats

These were just white chocolate Kit Kats. You can buy them in America, and they weren’t so exciting. I also tried a pudding flavor, which was good – it tasted like vanilla pudding with a touch of something else like cinnamon or caramel. That was my second favorite. No one died from eating Bitter Almond, either. Mixed Juice tasted like a banana milkshake, so I wasn’t a fan. I don’t remember how strawberry cheesecake tasted, because I ate it weeks ago. Blueberry, alas, is still uneaten, and someone is getting it for Gift Day.

Next on my list.. green tea, sakura, and a wine Kit Kat, if I can score it. Definitely try some if you can!

Japanese kit kats with labels

This last photo is for any desperate Googlers trying to figure out what Kit Kat they have in their hand.