My Peanut Dacquoise a la Bon Appetit

Have you eaten–or pitched–all the Easter candy?  Is it too past the point to tell you about the dessert I made for the bunch I went to?

Fed up with creating failed recipes out of my own head, I turned to Bon Appetit for a recipe I could actually follow.  I found Peanut Dacquoise with Peanut Butter Mousse in the April issue, and decided to try my hand at that.

Of course, being me, I couldn’t actually follow the recipe verbatim.  Where it called for Spanish salted peanuts with skin on, I used dry roasted peanuts left over from making brittle at Christmas.  I roasted them a little more, just to give me the illusion that they weren’t plain old peanuts.  And instead of the chunky natural-style peanut butter the recipe called for, I used chunkless natural-style peanut butter, otherwise known as smooth.  That too was already in my larder, so  I felt like a proper hausfrau making the most of what I already had on hand.  To give the peanut butter some bite, i.e. chunks, I chopped a handful of the dry-roasted peanuts and tossed them in.

The results were, well, okay-ish.  Not, I hasten to add, because my substitutions affected the final dish.  The meringue layers tasted just fine and were, remarkably, easy to do.  The peanut butter mousse was equally fret-free.   Here’s what it looked like when I was finished:

Those speckles on the top are fleur de sel. Okay, not actually fleur de sel, which the recipe called for, but Himalayan pink salt, which I had on hand (the hausfrau again).   And that slight substitution wasn’t responsible for the ‘ish’ either.  In this photo of the Dacquoise as I served it, you can see the problem: The ‘ish’ came from the chocolate glaze.  There was simply too much of it.  This is meant to be a light dessert, the airiness of the meringue and the mousse balanced by the heaviness of the peanut butter.  I thought that the glaze would weigh in on the airiness side of the equation; it’s made with whipping cream, after all.  But what I ended up with was more  a spreadable butter cream icing than a drizzleable glaze.

So if I were to make this again, I’d thin out the glaze so that it truly was just a touch of chocolate with the peanut butter.

Tagged as: Bon Appetit, dessert, food, holiday cooking, peanut butter, recipes