Home › Ices, Ice Creams, Etc › Mazarine
Mazarine
Bake Brioche in a Charlotte Russe mould or individual tins, cool, cut a slice from top of cake or cakes, and remove centre or centres, leaving a wall or walls one-half inch thick. Fill with rich Vanilla Ice Cream, invert on serving dish, and pour over Apricot Marmalade. Drain one can apricots and force the fruit through a strainer. Cook syrup until sufficiently reduced to add to fruit, and make of consistency of marmalade. Add a few drops lemon juice and sugar if necessary. Decorate top with halves of apricots, glacé cherries, and whipped cream.
A hollowed brioche filled with ice cream and sauced with apricot — an assembly job whose success depends entirely on temperature control. Read the whole thing through before you start, because everything must be ready at once.
- The hinge: chill everythingA room-temperature brioche shell will turn the ice cream to soup within a minute of filling. Bake the brioche a day ahead, then freeze the hollowed shell hard, fill it with ice cream that is firm but spreadable, and return the filled cake to the freezer for at least two hours before saucing and serving.
- Charlotte Russe mouldA round tin, typically slightly flared toward the top, of roughly 1 to 1.5 quarts. A charlotte tin, a deep 6-inch cake pan, or a clean coffee can all work. Individual tins means small brioche moulds or muffin cups, in which case allow one per person.
- Day-old brioche cuts betterFresh brioche tears when you dig out the centre. Bake it the day before and let it stale slightly; use a small knife to score a circle half an inch inside the crust, then lift the crumb out in pieces with a spoon.
- Canned apricots have changedFruit for this sort of dish was generally packed in heavy syrup; much of what is sold now is in juice or light syrup, which may not reduce to marmalade thickness on its own — the recipe itself directs you to cook the syrup down. Expect to add 2 to 4 tablespoons sugar to the syrup and reduce it before stirring the sieved fruit back in. A 15-oz can gives roughly a cup of sauce.
- Force through a strainerA fine sieve and a wooden spoon, or simply a blender followed by a quick pass through a strainer to catch skin. The lemon juice is not optional flavouring — canned apricots are flat, and the few drops the recipe calls for bring the fruit back; add more only to taste.
- Invert on serving dishTurned over, the cake rests on what was its top; the recipe does not say what becomes of the cut slice, so if you replace it as a lid before inverting, cut it flat and thick enough to hold. Sauce the cake at the table or immediately before it goes out.
- Glace cherriesCandied cherries, sold as glace or crystallised fruit for baking. Modern maraschino cherries are wetter and will bleed pink into the whipped cream.
- YieldA 1-quart mould serves 6 to 8. Figure about 1 pint of ice cream for the full-size version.
"Mazarine" is one of a family of French culinary names traditionally attributed to Cardinal Jules Mazarin, chief minister to Louis XIV, in the same way as a la Mazarine garnishes and the Swedish almond mazarin tart — the attribution is conventional rather than documented. The dish belongs to the late-Victorian fashion for iced desserts served inside bread or cake: bombes, biscuits glaces, brioche filled with cream. It assumes something no longer true of most kitchens — that a cook already had a charlotte mould, a brioche dough she could make without a recipe reference, and a freezer of hand-cranked vanilla to draw on.