Sauce, Ice Cream and Decoration

After passing on the recipes for chocolate and caramel sauce, I thought perhaps it might time for a brief mention of dessert decoration.

Now I am not a dessert chef but an ice cream man, and I tend to think in terms of quality of product, not quality of presentation. It is inescapable, however, that good presentation not only impresses your customers or dinner guests, but it also actually makes the dessert taste that little bit better.

The cool thing about a bit of decoration is that you can take something as simple as a scoop of ice cream and get a certain "wow" factor from the lucky recipients with a tiny bit of effort.

Since not everyone has access to cream dispensers, chocolate cups, sugar sticks, and other tricks of the trade, here's a dead simple tip. Go down to your local shop that sells basic kitchenware and invest in one or more little plastic ketchup/mustard bottles. Make sure they have a narrow tip.

Fill them up with your sauce(s) and you can decorate away to your hearts content, basically drawing patterns! I'm sure you can come up with cooler designs than me!

A bit of fresh fruit and cream would dress it up even further, and with two different sauces you really can go wild.

If you use a big plate as your palette, the dessert will look better. Also, a white plate probably shows off your artistry best.

By the way, our chocolate sauce recipe has so much chocolate that it will go hard when it gets cold. You will need to reheat it, and the easiest way is to stick the bottle in a cup of hot water...

Thanks to Dan for his hand and design in the top photo!

Technorati tags: caramel, sauce, recipe, chocolate, ice cream, decoration