How to Develop a Dessert
Author and Photographer: Juliet Goswami
Maybe you grew up watching The Great British Bake-Off and spend your days scrolling through pastry TikTok. Maybe you have never really thought twice about desserts other than that they look delicious. Either way, you have definitely thought about at least one of the important components of how to build a dessert! I started making desserts in my early teenage years – I first began to make birthday cakes for family members; then I added in Halloween desserts that I would bring to parties; now, I am making Christmas entremets every year. Recently, I realized that I have begun to follow a certain outline whenever I am approaching a new dish; I wrote it down last year, and now follow it to a T. With this structure, I am able to think through all the elements necessary to create something delicious and have it look unique.
These are recommendations – of course, you will need to follow your own instincts and creative process to make it your own! However, following some sort of plan helps organize your thoughts and allows your creative juices to flow.
Chocolate Mousse Cake
Steps
Initial inspiration
Balancing flavor and texture profiles
Structure and color anatomy
Initial Inspiration
Why are you making the dessert? Is it for fun? Is it for someone’s birthday or some other holiday? Who does this need to serve? Is each person going to get an individual serving, or will it be cut from a larger body – that is, you need to decide what the central element of the dessert is (cake, brownie, ice cream, etc.). Once you have the barest bones of the dish, I recommend deciding on a major central “theme” of the dessert; this could be the structure itself, or it could be a flavor. Flavors sometimes dictate form – if your initial inspiration is “chocolate,” you can go in many directions with it. As such, the two initial elements are equally important and must be considered in tandem.
Initial Sketches
Balancing Flavor and Texture Profiles
Again, these are two elements that you need to consider in tandem, as one often informs the other. I have drawn up non-exhaustive lists of each profile characteristic:
Flavor Profile: Sweet, Sour, Bitter, Spice, Acidity/Tang, Savory (including Herbal, Salty, and Buttery)
Texture Profile: Cream, Crunch/Crisp, Flake, Ice, Lightness/Airiness, Jelly
For both of these profiles, you need to balance the characteristics without overcomplicating your dessert. One element often contains multiple profile characteristics, and, in my opinion, is best practice to highlight these elements. I have bolded the elements that I find most essential to include in a dish. While each element should temper the others, I recommend choosing one or two characteristics to be “dominant.”
For the flavor profile, the most common dominant flavor is “Sweet.” All of the following characteristics and major flavors temper it, and I recommend choosing at least a few to balance out sweetness in a dessert.
For the texture profile, I recommend including at least one creamy element and one crunchy element. The two complement each other well and serve as the foundation for most desserts. The rest of the textures help add additional notes of complexity to a dish and avoid issues of one-note or flat consistencies.
Of course, as you add additional characteristics to the dessert, as you introduce more elements, but a good rule of thumb is that all elements should be able to meld well in one bite.
Structure and Color Anatomy
While color and shape are, in my opinion, the least important parts of a dessert, they are still pieces that you need to consider as you put together your elements. How should the lines of the dessert flow? How should the colors contrast, or do you want a monochrome palette? Here is where you can get creative, and can really do whatever you want!
Thanksgiving Dessert Example
Below, I have walked through my process for building a dessert. I show that while I follow the outline, I take detours and revise as I go, which is all part of the organic process of building a dessert.
Initial Inspiration
As my family’s resident baker, I always make the dessert for holiday dinners. I started planning this Thanksgiving dessert in early November and wanted to make something a little different this year. I’ve been experimenting with mini entremets and single-serving desserts and want to use more interesting and complex flavor profiles. However, I also wanted to incorporate some of my personal favorites to ground the dessert.
I started out with a few nebulous plans: I wanted to make a single-serving Thanksgiving-themed dessert with multiple elements; I knew I wanted one of those elements to be a brownie made from a specific recipe that I really enjoy. From there, I developed several iterations of the dish before ending up with my final design.
Balancing Flavor and Texture Profiles
As I mentioned above, I wanted this dessert to be complex and have some non-traditional elements and flavors. After playing around with several flavor combinations, I decided on the following for the flavor profile, ordered from the most to least dominant flavors:
Dark Chocolate (Sweet, Bitter)
Pumpkin (Sweet, Savory)
Pecan (Savory, Sweet)
Rosemary (Savory)
White Chocolate (Sweet)
Vanilla (Sweet)
Cranberry (Tang, Sour, Sweet)
Once I had these flavors and my base brownie recipe, I developed my texture profiles. Below are some fun ideas to spice up a dessert:
100-hour brownie with pumpkin cheesecake swirl (Cream, Crunch/Crisp)
White chocolate pumpkin namelaka (Cream, Lightness/Airiness)
Pecan cranberry lace cookie (Crunch/Crisp)
Rosemary cranberry pecan nougat (Lightness/Airiness, Cream)
Rosemary whipped cream (Lightness/Airiness)
Chocolate decorative disc (Crunch/Crisp)
Structure and Color Anatomy
Once I had the basic elements, I decided on the colors I was going to emphasize. The main two colors were going to be brown (for the brownie) and orange (with the pumpkin elements), with white as the secondary accent (the whipped cream), and red as the tertiary accent (brought out by the cranberry and perhaps decorative discs).
Having these colors and elements in mind, I drew out some sketches of the dish. I then used a finalized drawing as the basis for actually assembling the dessert. I thought about the general shape, given the plates that I had, and what the best dimensions would be.
I settled on a rectangular shape with curving accents.
Improvising
Lastly, once I was actually making the dessert, improvising became essential as I needed to troubleshoot or use up ingredients. Here are just a few of the changes I had to make to my initial formulation that resulted in the final dessert:
Pecan Ice Cream: I realized that I had all of the ingredients to make a simple brown butter pecan ice cream and that its addition would add a nice icy/creamy element to the dessert as well.
Nougat: Unfortunately, the nougat never firmed up to my preferred texture. As such, I had to improvise by putting it on top of the brownie and then adding a thin layer of chocolate ganache.
Brownie: My pumpkin swirl was not as pronounced as I wanted it to be, so I was not upset when I had to cover it in assembly.
Cranberry Jelly: I wanted to bring out the cranberry flavor more, and I had a lot of extra dried cranberries. To add a more tangy flavor and jelly-like texture, I made a quick cranberry pseudo-jelly that I used as a topping.
Namelaka Piping: My piping work was not as fine as I wanted it to be for the dish, so I thought on my feet and changed the piping shape.
Overall Anatomy: I did not want to overload the final dish, so I made the elements have three distinct regions on the plate. However, I kept the shape profile the same.
Overall Impressions?
I liked it, and I think my family did too! Not to mention, I was able to try out some recipes I have been intending to make for a while now. I do think that I may have gone a bit too complex – the dish was a little crowded, and while all of the flavors taste good together, I think scaling the dish back to four main flavors would have made each punch more impactful.