By Allison Gutman
Marcel Desaulniers, award-winning chef and co-owner of The Trellis Restaurant in Williamsburg, Va., has been creating mouth-watering desserts for more than 40 years. Although many of his desserts look too complex to tackle in your own kitchen, Desaulniers' new cookbook, "I'm Dreaming of a Chocolate Christmas," offers scores of relatively simple recipes. Here, he reveals how a good dessert can make any family get-together a five-star affair:
Q: What's one simple dessert that anyone can master and take to family gatherings?
A:There's a cookie in this book that's a lot of fun to make, called Golly Polly's Doodles. It has a peanut butter center, and, amazingly, it takes only six minutes to bake. It's the kind of item I like to do around Christmastime so you don't have to spend a lot of time in the kitchen.
Q: Any favorite treats that families, including little kids, could assemble together?
A:Brownies or cookies. Any baking book will have some recipes that require very little equipment. You may need only a single bowl, sometimes not even a mixer. Put the ingredients in the bowl, stir them up, bake them, and you're on the way to some pretty sweet eating.
Q: This book is about chocolate, but do you have a favorite non-chocolate crowd pleaser?
A: Peanut brittle. You can make it weeks in advance, have it ready for the holidays and not have that pressure of baking a few days beforehand.
