Word: caked
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Desserts these days are rarely what they seem. What looks like a slice of - chocolate layer cake is really a reward for jogging those extra two miles in the morning. A towering wedge of vanilla-scented cheesecake, laden with calories, is no more than fair compensation for eating only salad or fish for lunch. And warm apple pie a la mode is not the obvious self-indulgence it once was, but a vital, midday energy booster for a deserving workaholic. Whatever the reasons (or sweet excuses), desserts are back in style with a vengeance, in restaurants and bakeries, even...
...prepared in advance, there is a higher profit percentage in desserts than in most appetizers or entrees. "Waiters also like to offer pastries because that raises the check and, therefore, the tip that is a percentage of the total," observes Dieter Schorner, the gifted pastry chef whose velvety chocolate cake and supple, sugar-glazed creme brulee have caused many a dieter's downfall at such restaurants as Le Cirque in Manhattan and Potomac in Washington...
Schorner has just opened his own rose-pink confection of a bakery-cafe, Patisserie Cafe Didier, in Washington's Georgetown, where chocolate cake ($2.50 a slice) and cream-puff swans ($2 each) are among the offerings. "Desserts sell better when they are beautiful," he notes, "so decorating is important...
...table strategically placed near the entrance. "Some customers reserve their choices before ordering dinner because they know we run out of certain things," says Sam Rubin, owner of the seafood restaurant John Clancy's in Manhattan, where individual lemon meringue tarts ($6) and dense, moist chocolate velvet cake ($6) are among the first to go. Another trend: dessert samplers, with an assortment of up to seven different confections. Joyce Goldstein, chef-owner of San Francisco's Square One, describes her $6.50 version as "a ritual platter, a little orgy...
...restaurants prepare their own desserts, which is a boon to suppliers like Just Desserts, the San Francisco bakery. In addition to running four retail shops, it services 550 restaurants. Its best sellers: chocolate sour- cream fudge cake, apple pie and carrot cake. In five years the business's butter consumption has jumped from 3,000 lbs. a week to 7,000, while its weekly flour order has doubled from...