Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was selected by Andrea of Andrea In The Kitchen Andrea In The Kitchen. She picked the Coconut-Roasted Pineapple Dacquoise. For the complete recipe, visit her blog. Perhaps you are unfamiliar with a dacquoise. I’m typing this up in Word and it doesn’t recognize the word either. A dacquoise is a cake made with layers of nut meringue; you can fill the layers with buttercream or whipped cream. I’ve never made a dacquoise before, so I was quite excited to make this recipe.

This dacquoise has coconut and ground almonds in the meringue, and then is filled with a white chocolate ganache. To top it all off, you roast some fresh pineapple and throw that into the mix. Hard to go wrong with all of these great ingredients! Some people don’t like white chocolate, but I do. Some of the other Tuesdays with Dorie bakers substituted buttercream or whipped cream for the ganache.

This is not something that you can make quickly! Luckily, I don’t have to work this week so I had an entire day to make this. It doesn’t take a whole day, but fairly close to it. You make the meringue first. You have to trace the desired shape on parchment and then spread the meringue to the right size. I halved the recipe, so I made 6” squares. You then have to bake the meringues for three hours. Yes, three hours. This is the perfect thing to make if you are at home and have all sorts of other things to do. So I put it in the oven to bake and was able to get a lot of other things done around the house. Luckily it wasn’t very warm today; otherwise I wouldn’t have been too thrilled to have the oven on for three hours.

As soon as I got the meringues into the oven, I made the white chocolate ganache, which is just white chocolate and heavy cream. Since this had to chill for about three hours, I got it in the refrigerator right away and it was basically chilled when the meringues came out of the oven. The pineapple roasted very quickly, so that didn’t add any extra time. Assembly was fairly easy. You have to whip the ganache before assembling the dacquoise, and I think I overbeat it somewhat, but it worked ok. I did have a little problem getting the meringues off of the parchment. I’ve never had anything stick to parchment before, very strange!

This was really good! It was light and refreshing. It was very sweet, so if I made it again I think I would use less of the white chocolate ganache. The meringue layers have a bit of a crunch, and the pineapple and coconut flavors come through nicely. I wasn’t really sure if I would like the meringue, and I think it has a good flavor and texture. This is such an interesting dessert and so different from anything that I had ever made. Thanks Andrea for picking such a great recipe!

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, pages 293-295