Burlesque

I'm having a rose "scarletini", martini with rose water and fresh crushed strawberries, at the Scarlet Tea Room. I'm here for a Father's Day special burlesque dinner. The desert, a special and the most expensive item on the dessert menu, is a 10" round solid dark chocolate disc infused with rose tea and covered with dried rose petals. It is served with two glasses of port wine and a few fresh rose pedals sprinkled on top matching the restaurant's red decor and the hot red outfits the sexy burlesque dancers are wearing. Red feathery garlands wrapped around the waiters' neck also lace the crystal chandeliers to put the guests in the right mood for the occasion, not to mention that every dish and cocktail served is also adorned with red rose pedals.

The waiter offers three choices of flavors for the special chocolate dessert - rose tea, red raspberries and pink peppercorns - as I watch him describe it with great enthusiasm. He has no idea that I'm intimately familiar with what he attempts to describe with such effort nor can he guess how many hours of labor, patience, frustrations and excitement has gone into making the 30 solid chocolate discs that the restaurant has ordered for their Father's Day special weekend dinners. I'm here to witness our chocolate creation come out of the restaurant's kitchen served on a lace doily as if created by a celebrity chef, and be cracked with a knife into little pieces, then watch the guests' faces as they reach impatiently for a piece glad there's plenty left on the doily. My heart melts with that piece of chocolate as I savor this pride moment.

-Elizabeth

Balanced Life

      

    Today we are experimenting with layering dark chocolate and caramel. We pipe melted chocolate into a mold, then carefully pipe a dollop of caramel in the center and cover it with melted chocolate so that the caramel is completely encased in chocolate. Inspired by a particular restaurant's red decor, we sprinkle dried raspberry powder on the truffle and place a whole raspberry in the center. Pairing chocolate and caramel with raspberry will balance sweet and tart. We experiment with various candy cups to find the ideal size and shape for the truffle so that all three ingredients are in desirable proportions. Using mini muffin tins to support the candy cups, we work together hastily alternating layered piping so we can decorate the truffle with dry raspberries before it sets. These petit and elegant raspberry-caramel jewels are not only a labor of love but also a testament to our great affection and tolerance for each other as we stand heart to heart on a two square foot area of the kitchen bent over a small cupcake mold piping layers of melted chocolate and caramel with such precision, concentration, patience and perseverance as though performing a brain surgery on an insect. At another time of a month this operation may not be tolerated but today it's smooth and fruitful. Fortunately for us, heat is not an issue. Chocolate, as a gracefully aging woman, performs best under ambient room temperature between 65F and 70F. And as true women we have cravings, and with all the caramel we've seen and eaten today, we crave for salt. So our al fresco lunch is made up with smoked salmon on a baguette, with layers of thinly sliced shallots, tomatoes and orange bell peppers, topped with creme fraiche, capers and chives while Elizabeth's son Henry plays Chopin's Mazurka Opus 33 on the piano. We toast to a balanced life! 

Rose Buds

      The rose buds order arrived in time to decorate our rose tea infused chocolates. Only, instead of rose buds our supplier had packed rose hips -  a whole bunch of them! Even though they both come from the same plant, except for the first word these two have nothing in common in terms of culinary taste. We have no use for the misplaced rose hips but our parents would welcome a year's supply of rose hip tea. Instead, we headed to Chinatown in search of rose buds. Our final destination? - a much needed scrub treatment in a Korean spa to shed our chocolate-infused skin. We escaped a few jay walking tickets and faced a few dozen raised eye brows as we hopped from store to store trying to describe the limited English speaking Chinese store staff a rose bud in a combination of words and pantomime. We found it - rose buds with lovely pink and red colored petals Chinese women drink as a healthy infusion. We add them to black tea along with cardamom, cinnamon, orange peel and other spices to create our own blend of tea to infuse our chocolates with. Next we head to Koreatown just in time to subject ourselves to the most rigorous scrubbing our bodies had seen since our mother's gave us a rub-a-dub-dub in our baby tubs nearly a century ago. It's hard to tell what percentage of our shed skin contained the dark chocolate that had made its way through our bloodstream and skin pores, but it was clear from our before and after weight that at least a few pounds of our collective skin had gone down the drain. Renewed and a few pounds lighter we finished our Orient-inspired retreat with a sushi lunch. We now understand the secret behind Asian women's glowing skin - rose buds!