Frozen Dessert

Mascarpone cheese gives this dessert a smooth, creamy texture, making it more like a sherbet than an ordinary granita. Best of all, you don’t need to scrape it as it freezes to create icy granules, so it’s truly a snap to make. Serve it with tiny glasses of limoncello for a perfect summer dessert.

A special combination, decidedly Asian. Use fresh ginger if at all possible.

Unlike almost every other frozen dessert, granitas take no special equipment. They do take some time, however, and do not keep well, so timing is important. Figure two to three hours for this, start to finish.

Like most sorbet recipes, this one is infinitely easier to make if you have an ice cream machine. The key is to serve it as soon as you can after making it—it does not keep well and in fact is best the day it is made—and, if necessary, “warming” it slightly in the refrigerator before serving.

This is quite possibly the simplest dessert “recipe” imaginable: vanilla ice cream doused with coffee. The dessert probably originated in Turin, an important city for both coffee and ice cream, and is served in bars there all over town.

I picked up this simple, delicious, and very Italian cake on a visit to Angelo Brocato’s ice cream and confectionery in New Orleans. I am sure you will want to make this dessert over and over again. If you are going to freeze it, keep the taste fresh by wrapping it tightly in plastic.

Incassare in Italian means “to put in a box,” and in this case the boxing consists of flavored ricotta in a light sponge cake, often decorated with candied fruits and chocolate. It is a dessert that, once filled and sealed, keeps well for a few days. That is why Italian American restaurants had it on the menu: low maintenance with good flavors. This versatile dessert can be filled with various flavors of ice cream, so try substituting that in place of the ricotta filling (in which case you will have to keep the cake in the freezer). Sicilian in origin, cassata is most easily found in areas of America that experienced a large influx of Sicilian immigrants, such as New Orleans.

Spumoni is a delicious dessert made from three flavors of ice cream stuffed into a cup, and cut in four when frozen. The ice-cream colors reflect the colors of the Italian flag—red, white, and green—and spumoni has long been a big item on the menus of Italian American restaurants. Spumoni has its origins in a Neapolitan dessert, and supposedly came to America in 1905 with Salvatore Lezza. Lezza’s spumoni can still be had on Chicago’s Upper West Side. I filled many a cup with my own homemade ice cream in my early restaurant days, in the seventies, but spumoni is still delicious when made with good store-bought ice cream as well. Here rum gives the spumoni an extra layer of flavor, but the juice of the sour cherries is a great alternative.

The light granular texture of this tasty ice cream is what makes me love it so much. Swirl in some cajeta toward the end of the churning or top it with some berries if you want to add a complementary flavor, though I think it is perfect just as it is.

I did a lot of experimenting when I worked at Rosa Mexicano as the pastry chef, and trying out new ice cream flavors was one of my favorite things during my time there. I have always loved rum-raisin ice cream and thought raisins and tequila might also go well together. The reposado and añejo styles of tequila have been aged and come through very nicely, but I felt the ice cream needed another layer of flavor, so I added canela, which turned out to be just what was missing.