The pressures of coming up with regular specials are very new to me. In my previous restaurant position, all of my new dishes had to meet with the approval of the owner and the director of creative development before they could be placed on the menu. Those two individuals being fairly difficult to pin down, I generally had quite a bit of time to tweak and refine a dish before I could sit them down and get the thing on the menu. Under those circumstances, daily specials were not an option.
Now at No. 7, the restaurant I work at the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, I have free reign to do whatever strikes my fancy. Because we have a pretty limited menu, we try to keep things interesting for returning customers by offering regular specials—dishes that we come up with, more or less on the fly, every few days. It's liberating and exciting, but it's a bit harrowing, too.
With no editors, I feel more exposed and more responsible for my actions. What if I serve up a total flop, and all of our guests run straight home after their meals to post evilness about our restaurant on every message board available just because my dessert—their last memory of the meal—turned out to be god awful? Then again, they're just specials, they're just for a night or maybe a few, so if people don’t like them, how bad can the fallout really be? That's the attitude I had when making cranberry zingers, one of our dessert specials last week, paired with frothy creamsicle soda.
When Tyler came in Friday morning to find me cutting an unfamiliar cake (a vanilla version of the steamed Devil’s food) into mini logs, he asked what I had up my sleeve.
“Cranberry zingers,” I said, expecting to get an enthusiastic response. Instead, he looked at me blankly for a few seconds before asking if this had anything to do with that insipid berry tea.
“No, dude, really? You’ve never had a raspberry zinger? Like Twinkies or Ho Hos, the cellophane-wrapped snacky cakes, but with raspberry and coconut? Really?”
Nope. If Tyler—who is my age, who grew up just an hour from where I did, who has a certain penchant for lowbrow junk foods—had no idea what a zinger was, would our guests be totally confused as well? Would the dish be tasty and interesting enough to stand on its own if they hadn’t ever heard of it?
I already had the whole thing laid out in my head though, and I wanted a new special for the evening, so reminding myself that this was just temporary, I forged ahead. Because I wanted to play up the tanginess of the cranberry sauce that I was going to roll the cakes in, I chose a slightly tangy cream cheese filling instead of a light whipped cream or butter cream. Using a squeeze bottle, I injected the filling into the bottoms of each cake in four different locations, squeezing gently and stopping once the filling started to back up out of the cake. After filling the cakes, I put them in the refrigerator for a while to allow the filling and the cake itself to stiffen a bit before coating.
While the cakes chilled, I made a cranberry sauce using more or less the same recipe as the one provided on the back of the cranberry bag, with the exception of the addition of some orange juice and zest to bridge the cake to the soda in the finished dish. I strained the sauce into a wide, shallow pan, where I allowed the sauce to cool while I prepared an assembly line with the cakes, the tray of cranberry sauce, a tray full of shredded, sweetened coconut and a parchment-lined tray for placing the finished cakes.
Working quickly, I used my right hand to pick up each chilled cake, roll it around in the pan of sauce and place it in the pan of coconut. With the left hand, I tossed coconut over the cake and pushed some up against the ends and sides of the cake to make sure that it was fully coated before transferring it to the parchment-lined tray.
The results looked pretty similar to the store-bought raspberry variety (aside from the slight shagginess imparted by the coarsely shredded coconut that I used), and they tasted even better—fresh, moist and tender, their sweetness mitigated some by the tartness of the sauce and the filling. Whether or not our guests knew what their servers meant when they said “cranberry zinger” that night or needed to have it explained didn't seem to much matter.
The next day, we had only a couple of the cakes left, and I heard no complaints.
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