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Recipe

Cherry, Macadamia and Dark Chocolate Sundae

the bowl at the end of the night

Four things in a bowl, and the only one you cook takes twelve minutes.

A cherry compote rather than a sauce out of a jar, and the difference is one ingredient: lemon. Cherries alone cooked with sugar taste like cough syrup; a squeeze of lemon at the end and they taste like cherries. That is the entire recipe.

Macadamias whole and toasted, chocolate broken, not grated. Both of those are about keeping something hard and loud in a bowl where everything else is soft and cold.

Feeds
4
Hands-on
15 minutes
Compote
12 minutes
Chocolate
Broken, not grated

The compote has to cool before it goes on ice cream, which is the only waiting involved.

Ice cream with cherries, macadamias and dark chocolateIce cream with peanuts, cherries and chocolate chips
Shot the night it was made. Open any picture for the full photograph.

What you need

The cherry compote

  • 3 cups dark cherries, stoned
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • 2 tbsp water
  • 1 strip lemon peel
  • Juice of half a lemon — at the end
  • A pinch of salt

The bowl

  • Good vanilla ice cream
  • 3/4 cup macadamia nuts, whole, toasted
  • 4 oz dark chocolate, 70%, broken into shards
  • Flaky salt

How it goes

  1. 1 — Compote: cherries, sugar, water, twelve minutes

    In a small pan at a simmer with the lemon peel until about half the cherries have broken down and the syrup coats a spoon. The other half stay whole.

  2. 2 — Lemon juice at the end, off the heat

    This is the step. Without acid, cooked cherries taste medicinal; with it they taste bright. Salt too — a pinch, and it sharpens everything.

  3. 3 — Cool the compote completely

    Warm sauce on ice cream is a puddle in forty seconds. Cooled to room temperature at least, or chilled.

    pro tip — It thickens noticeably as it cools, so stop cooking while it still looks slightly loose.

  4. 4 — Toast the macadamias whole

    Dry pan over medium heat, shaken, four or five minutes until they are golden in patches. Cooled. Whole, never chopped — the size is the texture.

  5. 5 — Break the chocolate, do not grate it

    Smacked on the counter in its wrapper and broken into irregular shards. Grated chocolate melts on contact and disappears; shards stay cold and snap.

  6. 6 — Build it cold, in order

    Ice cream into a chilled bowl, compote spooned over, macadamias, then the chocolate shards pushed in at angles so they stand up.

  7. 7 — Flaky salt over the top

    A pinch across everything. It is what makes dark chocolate and cherries taste like more than sugar, and it takes two seconds.

Chilled bowls. It buys you four extra minutes and it is free. LFG.

More of what comes out of this kitchen on the food wall.

Every picture on this page is one of mine. I paint for a living the rest of the time — that is the gallery, and the originals are for sale.