Sauce

Ganache is one of the great creations of the chocolate world. It is a very versatile emulsion of melted chocolate and cream. It can be poured as a glaze, whipped to make icing, piped to decorate cakes, shaped into truffles, thickened with butter, flavored with alcohol and herbal infusions, or blended with fruit. While you can certainly make ganache by hand with warm chocolate, warm cream, and a whisk, the food-processor method, below, is favored by many pastry chefs and chocolatiers. The rapid action of the machine’s blades creates a smooth texture and a very stable emulsion. Immersion blenders work well, too. If you envision a cake with thick icing layers and decorations, double this recipe.

Many recipes for this Latin American caramel sauce suggest using a can of sweetened condensed milk. But if you make dulce de leche from scratch, as this recipe specifies, you’ll get a delicate sweetness from cooked sugar and fresh milk no canned product can ever match. It is very easy but takes a long time—about 1 1/2 hours, even though all you have to do is give it an occasional stir. Here’s the trick: choose a time when you’ll be in the kitchen awhile—maybe a weekend afternoon or a night you are making another slow-cooked sauce. This version, untraditionally, is flavored with milk chocolate. Serve over ice cream or pound cake.

Sugarplums, made famous by the “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” in Tchaikovsky’s ballet, The Nutcracker Suite, is an old-fashioned English word for candy. It evokes the sweet glory of a dried plum, also known as a prune. Lately, body-cleansing properties of prunes have made them embarrassing. But so what if they are healthy? They are also beautifully sweet like candy, full of wrinkle-fighting antioxidants, and charged with fiber and vitamins. In this recipe, with an assist from dark chocolate, prunes regain their rightful place as sugarplums. This sauce makes a fine duet with ice cream or a slice of pound cake (see Breakfast-in-Bed Pound Cake, page 26).