Sweet chariot
Barbara Revsin reports.
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| Fill it up |
| Fair trade fish |
| Digesting timely topics |
| Please eat the pansies |
Nobody doesn't like Twinkies and Oreos, at least nobody who dines at Viand Restaurant in Chicago, where chef Steve Chiappetti's dessert "junk food cart" is a runaway best seller. Designed to serve two or more, the desserts include oversized brownies made with dark or milk chocolate, a large banana-infused marshmallow, a decadently rich cookie loaded with chocolate chips or M&M's, and upscale versions of the aforementioned classics, all made in-house and served in a miniature grocery cart that never fails to elicit a smile.
Chiappetti's Twinkies are made with genoise batter. The filling—a stiff Swiss meringue—is piped into the cakes after they're baked in appropriately shaped molds. For the Oreos he uses chocolate meringue-style cookies layered with Italian buttercream.
The dessert cart was originally developed for Mango, a restaurant Chiappetti closed several years ago to make room for new construction. He revived it when he moved to Viand last winter after opening the Banana Bakery in west suburban Westchester with his wife, Leslie.
Chiappetti says he opened the bakery in part because he wanted his daughter Grace and son Leo to experience an authentic American-style neighborhood bakery, a genre he likens to an endangered species. Brownies, éclairs, cookies, and cupcakes are mainstays, but it's the doughnuts—made with a vintage machine—that steal the show.
As for the junk food cart, aficionados intent on replicating the restaurant experience can order the cart, complete with a mouth-watering array of baked goods, online at www.junkfoodcart.com.
