Our advice? It's Valentine's Day. Let yourself go — that extra weight won't show up until later this week anyway.
Chef and restaurateur Jasper Mirabile Jr. is determined to make September "National Cannoli Month." (It's already National Biscuit Month, National Honey Month, National Chicken Month and National Mushroom Month). Mirabile, who is in the process of writing a new book, On the Cannoli Trail, about his search for the perfect cannoli, is exhibiting an elaborate and expensive cannoli creation at Jasper's Restaurant through September.
The edible cannoli — it's a cannoli cake, really — is covered with edible, but real gold leaf and was created by baker Carey Iennaccaro of Overland Park-based Sprinkled With Sugar. The item that really bumps up the price is a $26,000 diamond necklace that comes with the pastry: an Italian necklace owned by jeweler Tom Tivol.
The actual price of the cannoli cake is $26,010. The pastry is currently on display at the restaurant, but the Mirabile family is now keeping the diamond necklace under lock and key: "Our insurance company said we can either build a secure glass case for the cannoli," Jasper Mirabile Jr. says, "or lock up the diamonds."
Last week, Murray Nixon opened her namesake ice-cream and cookie emporium in Westport for her 27th season. Tomorrow she introduces her newest flavor: Red Velvet Cake.
"There's 5 pounds of cake in every tub of ice cream," Nixon says. She adds that her red-velvet cake is a vivid burgundy, but it's made the traditional way: with cocoa.
A month ago, The New York Times reported on a discovery made two years ago of a rare cacao tree, the Nacional, in Peru. The Nacional was thought to be extinct after pure varieties of the tree had succumbed to disease in Ecuador -- the world's largest producer of cacao.
The chocolate made from Nacional cacao beans is also rare -- and expensive. But local master chocolatier Aaron Dearinger, of Annedore's Fine Chocolates at 5006 State Line, really wanted to taste it.
Step 1: Buy this ice cream, unarguably the best flavor of Ben & Jerry's ice cream ever to be packed in a carton.
If you venture into the basement level of Pryde's Old Westport, you can't escape the wonderful smells wafting from The Upper Crust Bakery. The air is thick with the homey aroma of baking, which trails fingers under your nostril pulling you toward the tiny shop in the back of the store.
"How do you avoid crossing the line and being pulled back into the store?" my shopping companion asks one of the Pryde's employees.
"I don't," he laughs, while patting the belly under his apron.
As the temperatures continue to drop, there's no question that one of the best ways to warm up on a bone-chilling afternoon is with a cup of hot chocolate. But Keith Buchanan, the British-born operator of Westport's Teahouse & Coffeepot, is concerned that too many Americans are too accustomed to the processed cocoa-and-sugar beverage made from a mix and stirred with hot water.
His lips actually curl when he says the words "Swiss Miss."
Pastry chefs have long been like Christmas elves -- toiling in the back of restaurants and known only insofar as their creations are magically revealed at the table.
But with the recent run of Top Chef: Just Desserts and an upcoming piece in The New Yorker, pastry chefs might just be the headlining attractions of 2011.
It's time-consuming but not all that difficult to bake a tray of sweet rolls. It's not that expensive, either, especially if you have the ingredients on hand. A box of Pillsbury Hot Roll Mix, the easiest way to make "from scratch" sweet rolls and cinnamon rolls, retails for about $2 a box.
But nothing's easier, insists a really lazy friend of mine, than baking the rolls inside one of those cardboard tubes of refrigerated pastry dough, like Pillsbury Orange Rolls.
When Mother Nature decides to spit freezing rain down upon me, I know only two ways to cope -- salting my steps and stopping for gas-station hot chocolate.
After a yearlong layoff, I inevitably fail to stop holding the button before the cup is full and hot cocoa runs freely into the catch basin beneath. I burn my tongue on the first sip because I don't wait for it to cool. And in truth, the overly sugary drink isn't particularly good hot chocolate. But for me, it wouldn't be winter without a to-go cup of cocoa.
Milk & Honey has the best I've had in KC. http://milkandhoneykc.com/
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