Pitayas aka dragon fruit
Remember that I bought a whole box of pitayas not too long ago? And that we all absolutely adored them to the point where I eventually ended up buying the very last box from that farmer? Well, it's been a pitaya journey since. Damn, these things are tasty if you put them in a smoothie or dessert. I'm still not sure if the purple or white ones are my favourite.
Of course I planned on using them in other ways than only in smoothies when I bought them because this fruit doesn't only look amazing, it simply IS amazing in many ways. They're so healthy and I've noticed a significant change since we consumed them almost daily. Of course this will end eventually because once the frozen ones are consumed, it's a long wait until next pitaya season. I'm very happy that I ended up buying the last box because I wouldn't have want to miss this badge honestly.
Ice cream
The original request was to make ice cream with it but I somehow wasn't sure anymore about the process so while prepping, I changed my plans to making a creamy pitaya dessert because I had mascarpone left that should be consumed within days. As I don't fancy throwing out food, this was perfect and I just started the usual prepping of a dessert based on mascarpone. Usually, I do this with chocolate but now I wanted to replace this with pitaya.
I almost forgot there needs to be sugar in that mix because otherwise it's not it, mind you, I didn't measure the sugar as everything went in on the go, sorry. Just add bits and taste if it's sweet enough to your liking is my advise.
Pitaya cream
So thankfully I read that you should first mash these pitayas and then cook them with some gelatine water to have a good consistency because otherwise it's possible I would have thrown them mashed inside the cream instead. Maybe that works as well but I don't have much experience making creams based on mascarpone so I was not willing to risk ruining a perfectly good pitaya that day.
I prepped the gelatine in cold water as per instructions of the package. I had no clue how much gelatine was needed so I just took a bunch of it, hoping it would be sufficient. After all, this was a new thing to try for me. I added the parts of Pitaya on top before starting to mash and cook it as you can see below:
I put some aside in a bowl so it could cool off a bit faster to later mix it into the mascarpone cream.
Pitayamisu!
Meanwhile, when I saw the ladyfingers in the cupboard, I had an idea and decided I'd go for a Tiramisu-like dessert. I prepped a coffee and let it cool for a while before I'd soak the fingers in the coffee. But now at least I had a plan for the end result of the dessert because until that moment, I had no clue how it was going to look or taste!
I took half of the mascarpone from the fridge and added cacao to it until it had a chocolate taste:
While the other half was going to get delicious pitaya mixed in once cooled off:
The perfect glasses
Now I don't have a huge variety of glasses or dessert type of things to make stuff look fancy but I figured these glasses were good enough to make it look pretty while being able to layer this stuff up for different taste sensations.
Here you can see the layers I used for the "Pitayamisu", coffee soaked ladyfingers topped with chocolate cream and pitaya cream and repeat.
Chill in the fridge for a few hours for the best results!
Pitayamisu with a view
The different tastes of chocolate combined with coffee soaked ladyfingers and sweet pitaya was much better than I expected. I guess this will be a recipe to fine tune and save in a recipe book for later for the offspring.. I love the name, PitayaMisu :)
Enjoy!