The Sweet Escape

Dessert.

I have been needing a whole lot of these lately.

Desserts have always been and will forever be instant mood lifters. A hard to beat combination of flavour rush and visual delight, a dessert by definition is meant to be an indulgent, guilty pleasure that allows us our temporary escape to carefree wonderland. There is an instant appeal of a meeting a friend over dessert, because you know you evening would be  bouncy and beamingly happy. We also know from the movies that eating ice-cream directly from the carton is a legit post-break syndrome. Sin food for the soul. Perfectly shaped, colorful and delicious sweet sugary things, desserts are little luxuries.

Living in France legitimizes starting your day with an unabashed sugar rush. France has by the way the world’s largest per capita consumption of our dear friend Nutella and the mighty sinful Speculoos paste comes a close second when choosing a spread for your breakfast sandwich, to be washed down with a double espresso. However just in case you woke up late enough to manage to skip breakfast, your attempt to have a carb-free morning would be happily rendered futile by the gorgeous smelling freshly baked sweet goodies from the fifty bakeries on your way to work. Pain au chocolat - 20, Me - 0.

Typical sweet sightings at a Parisian bakery, Eric Kayser

As evident from food trends, the world seems to have finally moved beyond typical ingredients for making dessert, read too much chocolate or too much cream and desserts are becoming more and more au naturelle, using fresh seasonal ingredients, artisanally created with a keen emphasis on the combination of textures. Ice-creams today represent  this trend in a very big way and have really come of their own in the cultivated dessert scene. Bite size is another key trend, a staple with your Cafe Gourmand which is perhaps the best example of dessert sampling perfected by the French – macaroons, panna cotta, a petit creme brulee and a little lemon tart served with your choice of coffee or tea. Savoury desserts, another big one in the game, although not a big hit in India yet, are pushing creativity with the use of unique ingredients ranging from chilli to kale.

Cafe Gourmand - Choice of bite size desserts served with coffee

I’m not exactly a dessert person (barring the occasional Nutella spooning while watching a TV show), which is unusual considering the fact that my mom finds it impossible to finish a meal without mithai and craves post-dinner ice-cream like a 4-year old. I have friends who are equally major dessert fans, a friend who is literally my Zomato (Bomato in this case, her name is Bani) for last minute dessert cravings and as we all know, peer-pressure goes a fricking long way in dessert land because no you cannot possibly refuse a bite from the chocolate ganache gooey cake the friend ordered, despite whatever you ordered for yourself.

While choosing a dessert, I normally stick to a few flavor profiles and land up repeatedly ordering or eating the same things over and over again. I think good dessert is all about the one overarching ingredient or flavour and my choice of dessert would normally include one or all of the below :

Dark Chocolate – The darker the better. The benefits of dark chocolate are infinite. It’s loaded with antioxidants, makes your brain sharper, helps you lose weight and even find true love (basically as a result of the first three benefits). There is at any given point of time a bar of dark chocolate with sea salt in my fridge. This Lindt slice of heaven has just the right amount of salty surprise in an otherwise great dark chocolate. I love the simplicity and consistency of a good dark chocolate mousse as well spiked with a hint of fruit, preferably strawberries or clementines. 

Lindt Dark Chocolate with Sea Salt - A square a day, keeps 

Vanilla – Truly the most multi-faceted and amazing of flavors. Vanilla makes everything non-vanilla. I’m known to add vanilla essence to whatever I can, and believe it can fix everything including even a broken faucet. Injecting fresh vanilla pods in your jar of sugar makes it instantly special. Indian summers are incomplete without  meals ending with a large scoop of vanilla icecream paired with the season’s heartiest mango slices. Pour a shot of espresso over a scoop of good vanilla ice-cream for an impressive afternoon dessert called Cafe Alfredo. The versatile vanilla, always to the rescue.

Organic vanilla pods - ready to go into your sugar jar

Salted caramel or Caramel au Beurre Sale – No a better thing wasn’t created. It found its origin in Britanny, France in 1980 in the form of a rich buttery sugary-salty candy and what can be seen from this NYT article, #saltedcaramel is definitely trending worldwide since early 2000s. Pour salted caramel sauce over any dessert or have it by the spoonful, whip it into a cookie, a brownie, a bar or a cake, a real salted caramel dessert is hard to make but a true keeper. What is interesting in its flavour combination is that you taste the saltiness, taste the sweetness, taste them together and yet experience them separately. Make a large jar using this recipe from Nigella and pour away baby.

Caramel au Beurre Sale, Ummmmhhhh

Ghirardelli, an SF based chocolatier does a fine combination of dark chocolate, sea salt and caramel chocolates. It’s difficult to not bite into your fingers while eating this damn thing.

Holy Trinity - Dark chocolate, sea salt and caramel

Coconut – My fondness for coconut is stuff of legends. I find inventive ways of incorporating coconut in my daily life, be it summer or winter, drink or dessert. When it comes to dessert, my love for coconut ranges from greasy coconut barfis that come home with wedding cards to the chocolate supreme, Bounty (no debate here). It cannot get more amazing that most people dislike or are by and large opinionless about coconut and hence I always land up getting a giant’s share of any coconut based dessert. My summer of 2015 is full of the Bombay staple and newly launched in Delhi, Natural's Tender Coconut ice-cream, with real coconut chunks and the right amount of sugar! #truelove

Natural's Tender Coconut Ice-cream - Perfect summer dessert

Cheese – The single most important ingredient of the best desserts – from Tiramisu to cheesecakes. Though Italians have originally mastered inventive uses of their cheeses in texture-heavy, melt-in-your-mouth desserts, the Americans gave cheese its legitimacy in dessert land with the eponymous cheesecake.  Bake or no bake, a classic cream cheese based cheesecake is the American way of life, where cheesecakes come with anthropological names depending on their origin (New York,  Pennsylvania  Dutch..) and are home to organized crime at The Cheesecake Factory, which boasts of 34 unique types of cheesecake. (Here’s a nice ranking of all the 34 - yes people have actually done that). Back in la Italia, mascerpone and ricotta are the 2 most widely used Italian dessert cheeses. A favorite ricotta based dessert is found in Naples - Sfogiatella or a signature warm and flaky pastry with a sweetened ricotta cheese filling. Typical example of cheese dessert divine.

A typical New York no-bake blueberry cheese cake

Naples signature dessert - Sfogiatella 

Another handy cheese dessert, Dolce Sergio, named famously after an Italian friend with a famous sweet tooth who invented it, is your Italian debauchery created by amazing things easily available at home - simply layer Speculoos biscuit crumbs, mascarpone and good quality fruit jam (raspberry works for me) on top of each other and top it up with a seasonal fruit. Kept in the fridge for 30 mins and it becomes the best thing to serve for a weekday dinner.

My attempt at Dolce Sergio, topped with oranges

I have always believed in the merit of dessert being a separate meal and the creation a dessert hour to celebrate the wonders of dessert as a cuisine in itself and not just an after-thought. I guess we all should add more of these moments of hedonistic rush, endorphin release and heightened mood to our daily lives and revel in the pure luxury of allowing ourselves a much-needed sweet escape.

A few of my favourite sweet things and where to get them in Delhi :

Creme Brulée – Le Cirque at The Leela Chanakyapuri or Le Bistro du Parc, Def Col

Tiramisu - Artusi, GK 2 M Block (by far, faaar, faaaaaaar)

Blueberry Cheesecake - The Big Chill Cafe, Khan Market 

Salted Caramel Eclair - L'Opera bakery, Khan market

Kahlua Mousse Cake - Whipped, GK 2 

Brownies - Theobroma, Mumbai (simply get them couriered to Delhi)

Expert Tip 1 : Knowing how to bake is therapeutic and sexy in equal parts.

Expert Tip 2 : Get on to dear friend Shaheen's eclectic food blog PurpleFoodie for your daily dose of sweet advice and simple tips on becoming a dessert diva at home. I once baked brownies with her in my apartment in Paris and it was really fun! 

Baking brownies with Purple Foodie on a rainy day (ah well always) in Paris
May'13

Sweet dreams, literally.

Seeing Art

I love spending time in galleries and going far and wide to see art in cities that I am travelling to. When travelling solo I can be quite heavily planned and pretty much know what exhibition I need to catch in what city, given the sublime experience seeing art can be and given the scarcity of such experiences in India. I'm also of the opinion that it is an activity best done alone as art can have this profound effect on you which gets somewhat diminished (if not ruined) if you over-discuss it, unless it is in highly knowledgeable company or unless ofcourse you both have shown up drunk.

There is something about the subjectivity of art which speaks directly to the kind of person you might be and the kind of life stage you are at. We interpret artworks not as they are, but as we are. That's probably why seeing good art can subconsciously address our deep-seated fears and anxieties and that could explain how we always walk out of museums feeling somewhat lighter. Swiss modern philosopher and author of Essays in Love, Alain de Botton (I'm a fan) goes on to explain in great detail how art can help us with our most intimate and ordinary dilemmas in his book Art as Therapy - a colossal must read. The currently trendy art blog  Berlin Art Parasites is infact founded on this very philosophy - using art as a means to alter how we live and love. Art not just for art's sake.

Museums and galleries take as much of our time as an otherwise wasted Sunday afternoon but fill it up with sensibilities of a life time. Seeing art is luxury for all and being at a museum paying homage to the arts, the best kind of idol worship.

Given this subjective nature of art, I'm most particularly drawn towards contemporary works even though Impressionist remains by far my favourite artistic period and those works create similar 'impressions' in us. While there is a whole lot of average work in the name of modern art, the reason why we tend to get drawn towards it the most, is the calming feeling that it is the creation of someone like us - with similar joys, sorrows, ecstasies and anxieties of a modern world, the one that we belong to.

The calming effects of Monet's Water Lillies at Musee L'Orangerie in Paris

I have distinct love for art museums that reside in spaces that bring their own unique character to the art viewing experience. The space carrying its own story interacts with the works it houses in very creative ways evoking a range of connections with the audience.

Hence I thought of sending your way a little round up of some of my favourite physical spaces that are home to certain major contemporary works, set in some of the most gorgeous cities of the world. Summer's right here and as you depart on your long vacations, keep some time (and just a few euros) aside to see and marvel at these stunning centres of living, breathing art that double up just as well as datey afternoon cafes, for those who couldn't care less about the art side of things.

1. Andalusian Centre of Contemporary Arts, Seville
   for a lazy sunny garden lunch date

This one is from my recent vacation in the South of Spain and came highly recommended by my Italian painter host. Couldn't possibly have gone wrong. The centre of contemporary art in Seville, set on the other side of the Guadalquivir river is housed in what can be called a wonderland garden. Amidst magical hanging creepers and bougainvillea on steroids, lies a museum inside the Cartuja monastery which once used to be a ceramic factory. The centre presents an overview of the artistic trends that developed in Spain from the mid-20th century through to the present day and includes pieces by Luis Gordillo, Candida Höfer, Rebecca Horn, Pablo Palazuelo, and Joseph Kosuth amongst others. 

The magical gardens of CAAC, Sevilla

The museum is celebrating its 25th year and is curating a stellar exhibit on the role of the artist in a world of economic troubles (See Not, Hear Not, Speak Not is running till Sept'15). With opening works by Curro Golzalez, this exhibit, divided in different galleries analyses the art acquired by the Centre in 25 years within the modern world's economic framework and is a resounding must see.

As a Backdrop (Immaculada Salinas)
Introspective piece on art as backdrop in various scenarios rendered in all pantone shades

Stepping out of the galleries set apart by vast sunny quiet spaces, you will enter a charming garden cafe where you can muse and bemuse the art you just saw over a cafe long and amidst views of lifesize bougenvilla gates and scents that emanate from endless trees of neroli and oranges. A complete feast of the five senses. 

Sipping a coffee at the museum garden cafe

Bougenvillea facades at the CAAC gardens

2. Maxxi, Rome
    for a night of martinis and caviar and hanging with Italian actors

Entrance, MAXXI Rome

Designed as a multidisciplinary space by celebrated architect Zaha Hadid and standing tall in its stark modernity against the classical eternal city of Rome, Maxxi is dedicated to innovation in the arts. I went to Maxxi last April and even though the word is that this centre is running into huge losses, there can be no finer example of a gallery where the medium is the message. Navigating through the steel and glass of this brazen structure, you almost become a part of the art on display, making you a central piece in this interactive experience , the protagonist in a novel. I was quite moved by the work of a Dutch architectural firm unStudio which has developed unique 3D architectural concepts, real enough for you to imagine yourself in your future establishment.

unStudio's Living Spaces installation

Or this jaw dropping piece by Emilia Kabakov called Where is our Place, a lifesize installation that makes you examine the relationship between ancient and contemporary art by the means of humans who are in three different temporal planes viewing art from three different eras.

Where is Our Place? (Emilie Kabakov)

Maxxi is a must visit for perhaps just for the sheer dichotomy it offers from say the Colosseum in Rome. And for some of the best installation art you are likely to see in Italy. And for a hip dinner date at the swish, black and white Maxxi 21 bistro. There is something for everyone here.

Towards MAXXI's hip bistro

3. Peggy Guggenheim museum, Venice
    for a rained-down romantic afternoon 

As unreal a city Venice is, taking a boat in the rain to visit someone's private drawing room is enough of an ethereal experience in itself. Located on the Grand Canal, Peggy Guggenheim museum is devoted to modern art, with works ranging from Cubism to Abstract Experessionism. Peggy Guggenheim was an American art collector and socialite with a body of collections on display from New York to Bilbao, who came to live and display her works in Venice in 1949. She was later buried within the gardens of this museum.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection at Grand Canal, Venice

Spending an afternoon at her Venice museum is akin to being invited for a private viewing of works inside her home, such is the intimacy and solitude this space recreates. Walk down rooms and rooms filled with works of celebrated abstract painters like Piet Mondrian (his Composition 11 in Red, Blue and Yellow is on my bedroom wall), Kadinsky and Picasso, lounge on a sofa to ponder a little or play hide and seek with a friend amongst the room walls. You will be at home at Peggy's Venezia museum and a stroll away from a magical gondola ride back into the rest of the city.

Piet Mondrian at Peggy Guggenheim, Venice

View of Grand Canal from the museum

The museum also houses a relaxing garden cafe set entirely in glass and displaying additional works from her collection. You will be in fine company.



4. Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
    for an elitist evening champagne and carpaccio

   
Luxury brands have been historically known to patronise the arts because luxury like art, is handmade and invaluable. So fter the Cartier Centre for Contemporary Art and the PPR museum, it was time for LVMH scion Bernand Arnault to offer his monumental tribute to contemporary arts. Enter Franck Gehry's architectural masterpiece (is it a bird? is it a plane?) and the creation of Foundation Louis Vuitton. This is scale unprecedented.

External View - Fondation Louis Vuitton, a stellar structure by architect Frank Gehry

So what is so cool about this space? Well, its better than better. A 5 level glass and concrete space set over a giant blue grotto. I walked 2 kms in 5 inches to make it to this masterful strcuture in Jardin d'Acclamation in the 16th arr of Paris, only to realise that I would be walking 12 kms more discovering its endless collection of best artworks from popular modern artists. A decade in the making and a budget undisclosed, this is a broken down Sydney Opera House that locks you inside its infinite vastness of space and art, intimate and grand, children's playground and futuristic spaceship.

Paris's skyline from Fondation LV's terrace

Glass and concrete over the blue grotto, Fondation LV

Arnault is a man of boundless influence, and with the Fondation he has managed to bring in what are by far the best works of the most famous influencers of contemporary art in one single opening exhibition (Les Clefs d'Une Passion, running till Sept'15). There's Edward Munch's The Scream brushing shoulders with Henri Matisse's The Dance, Kadinsky's Composition VI next to Fernand Léger's Trois Femmes. If you haven't seen any art expos in your life, there cannot be a better place to start and you would have pretty much seen it all by the end of it. For those who have seen it all, the Fondation brings highly original commissioned works by the likes of Ellsworth Kelly (Spectrum VIII in the auditorium) and Olafur Eliasson (Inside the Horizon) whose interactive work with 43 yellow prisms is this ginat structure's selfie-central.

Henri Matisse's The Dance (Les Clefs d'Une Passion - Fondation LV)

Inside the Horizon ( Olafur Eliasson) - Fondation LV

On your way out, stop for a champagne (or five) at Le Franck, the gallery restaurant run by a protege of Alain Ducasse and celebrate this glorious coming together of the best of luxury and art in the heart of Paris.

I wish you an arty summer vacation!

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