Happy Thanksgiving! - A “Blast from Dinner Club Past” to Inspire Your Holiday Meal!

Dinner Club is on hiatus until January now. The holidays are already packed with parties, family gatherings, cookie exchanges and enough other “occasions” to keep us all more than busy! However, just because Dinner Club is on break, doesn’t mean this blog is!

For example: Today’s posting includes a recipe from one of our previous Dinner Club’s that was a huge hit! It was delicious, unusual and just happens to be the perfect type of thing to add to your Thanksgiving table this year. Give it a try for something new!

Skipping December actually works perfectly for our group, but if you have a group up and running and you prefer to go ahead and get together, by all means, go for it. A holiday Dinner Club gathering would be a blast, we all just have way too much going on (including an annual soiree at my place that all of us will be present for anyway) to squeeze it in. We find it refreshing to skip December and pick up with renewed vigor again in the very cold, very dead and boring month of January in Nebraska! Something to look forward to, you know?

Keep watching this blog throughout the month of December. I have plans for postings on great holiday entertaining topics including seasonal baking, great hors d’oeuvres and tips for buffet-style serving!

Back to the recipe! This was made for our “French Foray” back in January of 2008 and it made all of our mouths water for more! The delicate sweetness of butternut squash – fantastic as part of a “turkey centric” meal – was balanced beautifully by the savory tang of sautéed leeks and goat cheese. Hazelnuts may sound strange here, but don’t be tempted to skip them or change them for something else. They emit the flair of the holidays in this dish and provide a satisfying texture to balance the softness of a gratin that is rich with the flavors of cream and sage!

You could also try this paired alongside seared beef tenderloin, as we did for our Dinner Club night. This side dish goes well with nearly any meat entrée and (as it mentions in the recipe) can be made ahead and/or transports well if you’re traveling to another house for Thanksgiving!

Have an amazing holiday! Enjoy your friends and family, be thankful and EAT WELL!

Butternut Squash Gratin with Goat Cheese and Hazelnuts

Found at: http://www.epicurious.com/
Bon Appétit | November 2007
*Squash is often sold already peeled and seeded, making this recipe even easier.

Yield: Makes 8 to 10 servings

Ingredients:

3 1/2 pounds butternut squash (about 2 medium), peeled, seeded, cut into 3/4- to 1-inch cubes (8 cups)

2 tablespoons olive oil
Coarse kosher salt
4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) butter, divided
3 cups sliced leeks (white and pale green parts only)
1 1/2 teaspoons chopped fresh sage
1 5.5-ounce log soft fresh goat cheese
1 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup hazelnuts, toasted, husked, coarsely chopped

Preparation:

Preheat oven to 400°F. Place butternut squash cubes and olive oil in large bowl; sprinkle with coarse kosher salt and ground pepper and toss to coat. Spread out squash cubes on large rimmed baking sheet. Roast until just tender and beginning to brown, stirring occasionally, about 35 minutes.

Meanwhile, melt 3 tablespoons butter in heavy medium skillet over medium-low heat. Add sliced leeks and chopped sage; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sauté until tender but not brown, about 15 minutes. Coat 11x7-inch baking dish with remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Spread half of leek mixture over bottom of prepared baking dish. Sprinkle with half of squash and half of cheese. Repeat layering with leeks, squash, and cheese. DO AHEAD: Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover and chill.
Preheat oven to 375°F. Pour cream evenly over gratin. Sprinkle with toasted chopped hazelnuts. Bake uncovered until gratin is heated through and cream is bubbling, about 30 minutes (40 minutes if previously chilled).

TO GO:
This gratin is a good choice for transporting because it travels well. Either complete the dish at home (wrap it tightly to keep warm) or wait until you get to your destination to add the cream and nuts and then bake.

Hazelnut

Butternut Squash


Goat Cheese

Getting Creative for Themed Dinners: Tips on using what you already have around the house to achieve great ambiance for any dinner party!

As mentioned in my last posting, nearly all of our Dinner Club meals are centered around one type of theme or another. Not all of them require an overwhelming need for “Décor”, but some most certainly do in order to achieve the best mood or setting for the ultimate enjoyment of our meal. What do I mean? Read on!

Our Outdoor Vodka tasting
bar on Russian Night

I mentioned in that last post about special touches for particular themes that help enhance and make Dinner Club more of an event, but what about when those themes require you to get creative on a larger scale? Does that mean spending a ton of money to rent props, haul in extra tables, pay for an expensive caterer to supply the needed items to up your “wow factor”? Absolutely not! All it does require is a little ingenuity and a tiny bit of extra time spent to make the occasion memorable. Not a lot of time. Just some, so that thirty years from now, your Dinner Club is still one of the highlights of your year with good friends! “Examples?” you say? Here ‘goes!

Last season, our dinner club decided we would have a “Russian Night” dinner with, obviously, foods of that culture, and a vodka tasting bar. The concept of the tasting bar was simple enough; each couple would bring a different flavored vodka and a cocktail recipe and ingredients that could be prepared from their particular flavor. The planning part is easy enough, but what about the mechanics of the vodka bar?

Certainly, we could all show up and stick the bottles in the host’s refrigerator or stuff them in a tub filled with ice, but what would make it memorable? What would really spark the ambiance of a Russian meal on a cold, Nebraska-in-February night? A carved ice sculpture came to mind. One that would act as a decorative element as well as a vessel for holding and chilling our bottles; great idea - no budget for such a thing! Thankfully, here is where the “can do” attitude comes in.

To make our “carved ice” bottle block we (my almost-on-board husband and I) lined a rectangular, plastic recycle bin with plastic sheeting and filled empty two-liter soda pop bottles with rocks. We set six of the bottles in the plastic-lined bin and filled ¾ of the way up around the bottles with water and silver glitter. We lowered the recycle bin into our basement deep freezer and gave it about a week. On the day of Dinner Club, we unmolded the ice block by running water over and around it to loosen the recycle bin and the plastic bottles from the center. We were left with perfect “bottle sized” openings.

Our Ice Centerpiece on Russian Night
with embedded snowflakes and
silver branches

We set a table just outside the back patio doors – close enough to reach when you just open the door, so no one would have to actually step outside – dressed it with a sparkling indigo table cloth and placed our block on it. Additionally, we employed the same technique with empty plastic tubs and cups to achieve “ice luminaries” for the front walkway and the table centerpiece (with a bowl for the ice to drip into once we lit the candle inside). These frozen, sparkling accents added to the ambiance of that night and cost us next to nothing beyond the water and some glitter!

For another culturally-centered meal, our “North African Night” it felt appropriate to move away from the traditional dining room table and feast in a more rustic fashion at tables with pillows on the floor for our seating. “Rustic” doesn’t mean that I didn’t use gorgeous linens in colors that, for me, evoked the hues of an African safari, but I already owned the linens and simply sought to purchase flowers that backed up my intended “look” for the evening. Don’t go out and buy the whole store. Use what you have and make it all tie together. Maybe a plain white table cloth, some remnant fabric and a few well-selected branches from your yard would work to? Experiment.



No plastic buckets showing here!



For the African meal, we used our round coffee table for one dining table and removed the glass top off of another table to set for dinner, but how to make the glass dining table a similar height to the coffee table-level seating we were wanting? Out to the garage my husband went, at my all-too-gentle command to rustle up those five gallon buckets he’s been swearing to me for years we actually needed! With three well-placed buckets underneath the glass top and beautiful table linens to hide the shame underneath, we were set!

Close up of the table linens and flowers
at our North African Dinner

Keep the food the focus for Dinner Club, but rummage if you must and put a few minutes of your time into interesting and memorable details now and then. You’ll love the result and it will keep the whole group entertained, I promise!

Where do the Ideas Come From?

My blog today touches on the topic of brainstorming: I’ve been asked by so many people, “How ever do you come up with the ideas for your Dinner Club meals?” The truth is that at first, it did seem more difficult to come up with things. We were a fledgling group who had never done anything like this before and so it was, and still is, a group effort to brainstorm ideas for each of our six meals together a year.

The main reason it’s easier now is that we’ve been up and running for several years and have a running list of ideas we’ve mentioned or discussed previously, and for whatever reason, didn’t use at the time. It doesn’t mean that they are bad ideas, just things we may be saving for later or weren’t quite ready to tackle at the time they were first suggested. Organization for a group like this is key! Keeping a list of ideas is part of that for us. We try not to do more than one big “themed costume” type party a year.

Small touches to a theme can
make a big difference! At our
1920's Speakeasy, there were
framed pictures of famous gangster's
along with information about their
lives of crime!

Now, nearly every meal we do has a theme, but they aren’t all “dress up” events. Nobody wants to come up with a costume every month! But, we do choose themes around all different types of focus. This last dinner, our “Cheese Inspired Menu” was focused on a particular ingredient theme carried throughout the meal. Other themes are more obvious, such as a particular cuisine or nationality, say Brazilian or Italian. These were the first type of theme dinners we clung to. It’s easy to center a meal on the cuisine of a particular country (not to mention delicious and fun!). We still do a few of these dinners each year, however we are trying to become more tightly focused as the years go on.



For example, Italian is great, but now that we’re all comfortable in our group and more comfortable in our cooking skills we’ve taken a closer look at particular regions of Italy and look forward to focusing a future meal on specifically Sicilian foods or what about the Piedmont, Tuscany or Calabria regions? Wouldn’t it be interesting to research and prepare foods of those areas? Mexico and so many other countries are similarly broken up into regions that feature their local produce, herbs or spices.

This year, our Dinner Club is also branching out to other theme types you may like to consider, such as television show themes (we’re doing Mad Men in April) or other quirkier food fetishes like our “Aphrodisiac Foods Night in March. There are some really interesting concepts on our list and I would never give them all up at once, but I would love to get you started and your creative juices flowing!



If you’re starting a group of your own, or simply looking for new ideas, try branching into some of those I’ve mentioned above and begin your own list. We have over fifty ideas currently on our “unused yet” list! That’s years more fun just waiting to be had! I’ve provided a quick list below of all of the meals we have done in previous years. We may even revisit some of these in the future and change our focus or simply make different dishes. Who knows? Only time will tell! Google your heart out, talk about it, brainstorm and TAKE NOTES!



If you do choose a theme, don't be afraid to "over do" it! At our 80's Prom Night, we had a table for displaying our own high school yearbooks and a Prom King and Queen were crowned for the night by drawing names! We also had an "after prom party" following dinner where we played cards and drew prizes to take home!



Here’s some of the themes we’ve taken on in previous years:

• Oktoberfest
• Cuban
• Fondue
• St. Patrick’s Day
• Tailgate Foods
• North African
• French
• Tapas
• Italian
• Greek
• 1920’s Speakeasy
• New Orleans
• Thai
• Deep South Dinner
• Last Meal on the Titanic
• Napa Wine Tour
• Russian
• Mexican
• Back to Your 1980’s Prom
• Pub Foods
• Japanese
• Big Texas Barbecue

More on This Month’s “Best of the Night” Dish – Baked Brie with Caramelized Onions…

The results are in! Everyone agreed that the buttery, creamy richness of the baked brie appetizer was the hit of the night! The meal consisted of independently delicious elements that complemented one another, but as with every Dinner Club gathering, there is always a standout dish that you loved enough to make it again for guests, a holiday, or to devour on your own some night in the future!



Baked Brie with Caramelized Onions



Keep in mind that anything you make can be “tweaked” as you like to prepare it more the way you love it! Don’t ever be afraid to experiment in your cooking. That’s how you discover, and eventually create, the things you love most. If you’re a “more garlic” person (like myself) and a recipe calls for one clove; throw in three! You’re really not going to hurt anything as long as the other ingredients are delicate flavors that would be ruined by your excessive garlic habit! (Besides – garlic is good for you!) A great example of this is my dish for this month’s Dinner Club; the Mixed Berry Napoleons with Chocolate and Mascarpone Cream (see my earlier blog post for the recipe). I prepared all of the pastry cream and after a quick taste of each, decided that the chocolate one wasn’t quite sweet enough for my liking. I took it upon myself to blend in a bit of confectioner’s sugar. No harm done; and the group loved the result!

If it’s at all possible, don’t prepare a recipe without ever tasting it as you go. A tad more salt, a pinch more sugar, a hint of extra garlic sometimes is the missing key to the proverbial castle! But I digress – back to cheese appetizers! Below I’ve shown the recipe for Baked Brie with Caramelized Onions that was the belle of the ball at this month’s Dinner Club, as well as an additional cheese appetizer recipe that’s been a favorite starter in my family for years – Camembert with Blue Cheese, Fig and Port Sauce. Try one of these over the holiday season, and “Hail to the Cheese”!

Baked Brie with Caramelized Onions
From www.epicurious.com
Bon Appétit | December 1995
Reminiscent of fondue, this rich appetizer is lovely served alongside an assortment of crudités and your favorite mulled wine. Be sure to order the uncut wheel of cheese from a cheese shop or specialty foods store.

Yield: Serves 8 to 10

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
8 cups sliced onions (about 4 large)
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme

4 garlic cloves, chopped
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 teaspoon sugar

1 8-inch-diameter 32- to 36-ounce French Brie, packed in wooden box (reserve box)
2 French bread baguettes, sliced

Preparation:

Melt butter in heavy very large skillet over medium-high heat. Add onions; sauté until just tender, about 6 minutes. Add minced thyme, reduce heat to medium and cook until onions are golden, stirring often, about 25 minutes. Add garlic and sauté 2 minutes. Add 1/4 cup wine; stir until almost all liquid evaporates, about 2 minutes. Sprinkle sugar over onions and sauté until soft and brown, about 10 minutes. Add remaining 1/4 cup wine; stir just until liquid evaporates, about 2 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Cool. (Can be prepare 2 days ahead. Cover and refrigerate.)

Preheat oven to 350°F. Unwrap Brie, reserving bottom of wooden box. Cut away only top rind of cheese, leaving rind on sides and bottom intact. Return Brie to box, rind side down. Place box on baking sheet. Top Brie evenly with onion mixture. Bake until cheese just melts, about 30 minutes. Transfer Brie in box to platter. Surround with baguette slices.

Camembert with Blue Cheese, Figs and Port Sauce
From: www.epicurious.com
Bon Appétit | December 1998, by Maria Watson, Orinda CA

Yield: Serves 4

Ingredients:

1 8-ounce (4 1/2-inch-diameter) firm Camembert cheese with rind
1 large egg, beaten to blend
1 cup fresh breadcrumbs made from crustless French bread
1 cup ruby Port
1 cup dried black Mission figs, halved lengthwise
1 tablespoon sugar

2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
1/3 cup crumbled blue cheese
Chopped fresh chives
1 French bread baguette, sliced into rounds, lightly toasted

Preparation:

Brush Camembert on all sides with egg, then coat with breadcrumbs. Place on foil-lined plate and cover.

Bring Port to simmer in heavy small saucepan over medium heat. Add figs; simmer until slightly softened, about 5 minutes. Using slotted spoon, transfer figs to small bowl. Add sugar to Port in pan; boil until reduced to thick syrup, stirring occasionally, about 5 minutes. Pour syrup over figs. (Cheese and figs can be prepared 3 hours ahead. Refrigerate cheese. Let figs stand at room temperature.)
Melt butter in heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add Camembert and cook until breadcrumbs are brown and cheese is warm, about 2 minutes per side. Transfer to platter. Top with blue cheese, figs and syrup. Sprinkle with chives and surround with toasts.

Dinner Club’s “Cheese Inspired Menu” Was a Rich and Savory Success Story!

We don’t goof up very often in this group, and I’m told Saturday night’s cheese menu was no exception to that! Again, I couldn’t be there myself, but I’m relying on friends we’ve been doing this with for years to fill me (and you) in on what worked and what didn’t. I’m told there wasn’t much in the “didn’t” category!

This month’s host and hostess were kind enough to lay out some appetizers for the crowd to snack on as they arrived, including an asiago cheese sausage that was a terrific bite with a cocktail before everyone was present. Our group typically sets Dinner Club start time at six-thirty, with the understanding that we’ll all trickle in between then and about seven. That leaves time for mingling and cocktailing before we usually sit down to our first course around eight o’clock.



Tomato & Smoked Gouda Soup



The most-raved-about item seems to have been the starter of baked brie with caramelized onions. A fantastic combination of flavors if you’ve never had the opportunity to try it before! I’m told it was buttery, rich and addictive. (More on our "best dish of the night" in my next blog entry!) In speaking to one of the attendees today, she mentioned that there was quite a lot left over of it. Here’s a great tip from one cook to another: Any kind of cheese dip or spread as an appetizer typically makes a fantastic filling for chicken breast as a “recycled” meal.

Simply take the leftover brie with caramelized onions, pound out and season some chicken breast (don’t forget the garlic!) and place a scoop of the cheese and onion mixture in the center of each breast; roll up and place in a baking dish and bake them for about thirty minutes at 350 degrees, et voila! A savory caramelized onion and brie stuffed chicken breast! Pair it with some salad or a vegetable for a fantastic and well-rounded meal. Plus, your terrific appetizer leftover didn’t go to waste. You could even fill and roll them, then freeze just like that to pull them out and bake some evening when you don’t feel like making dinner!

Farmers Market Salad

According to another attendee the salad was, “beautiful, with perfect cherry tomatoes, fingerling potatoes and a subtle dressing that tied it all together. It was topped with goat cheese crumbles that were mixed with cumin.” He also commented to me that the broccoli gratin side dish, “went well with the pork” and that it “had plenty of cheese, but it did not overpower the taste of the vegetables.”

Berry Napoleon Dessert

As far as the entrée and the dessert, he said that, “the combination of butternut squash and blue cheese made for a unique taste of its own (a good one). The blue cheese did not overpower the dish.” Also, “everyone raved about the dessert. It was just what we needed after such a great meal. Something heavy, like cheesecake, would’ve been too much, but the stacked puff pastry desserts were light and delicious, not to mention beautifully presented with fruit poured over the top. All in all it was a great night, with each dish complementing the other.”

After dinner, I’m told, the group joined in some rousing card and board games together for an evening that sounds intimate, fun and delicious! Sorry I missed it everyone, but thank you for all of your terrific comments and photos! Next stop is the disco in January!

This Is No Potluck!

No potluck about it….Dinner Club just couldn’t survive that way; at least not for our group! When I think of potluck, first I think “Yum!” I love them. Don’t think I’m bashing the good ol’ Sunday afternoon church potluck, or the good natured neighborhood get-together. I’m certainly not! I love potlucks because you’re exposed to so many new things – or new ways of making things- that you never considered before. You show up with the surprise of finding new casseroles to try and re-visits of old favorite salads that you forgot you loved!

The problem with potluck – at least in terms of Dinner Club – is the “luck” part of the word; as in “lucky if everything goes together”. When you’re at a church gathering, picnic in the park or some other such social activity you don’t care about how well the meal jives, you just want to sample a little of everything there is to offer. But with Dinner Club, the food not only matching your chosen theme, but the dishes matching one another simply must figure in. When we show up there’s no “luck” about it. Each dish has been chosen to complement one another.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we adore every element of every meal we put together…. A particular Japanese gelatin-like dessert comes to mind; but we don’t leave it up to chance that the meal will have flow either. The other part about selecting dishes together ahead of time is that everyone has input on what is essentially a group-driven decision process. We leave ultimate control up to the couple that must prepare and bring the particular dish, but we all offer suggestions during meal planning of what we think would work well.

This month’s menu is an excellent example of how choosing the dishes for the meal in advance, as well as TOGETHER, helps avoid meal-time disaster. This month is an ingredient-based theme as opposed to a locale-theme, a costume function or a historical time period. Our “Cheese Inspired Menu” will be delicious without being overly heavy (as long as we practice some modicum of portion control!) and each dish will lead well into the next. Cheese doesn’t have to be smothering; sometimes it’s present, but only suggesting itself, as in the “tomato and smoked gouda soup” we’re having or the mascarpone cream in the napoleons for dessert. Mascarpone is in there, but the crisp buttery stacking of puff pastry sheets and berries is the main scoop!

Would this menu pan out as well if we had said “Cheese featured in every course” and then left it up to chance what everyone showed up with? I don’t know about you, but I love blue cheese; just not in the appetizer, salad, soup, AND the entrée! Can you say overload?! There are many ways of accomplishing the result of a well-balanced and cohesive meal, but our planning is now time-tested and has pretty much always worked for us. We’re no experts; we just know what we love to eat and we’d love to spread the wealth of our knowledge so others can eat like kings and queens too!

I Still Intend to Deliver on My Dinner Club Commitment!

As previously mentioned, I will be unable to attend our Dinner Club this coming weekend. However, just because I won’t be there to eat myself, I have no intention of any of the rest of the group going without dessert because of our family football habit!

Certainly, the show would – and has – gone on without a dish or two, but we do plan these meals out in advance to make them easier to prepare and less of a time commitment for everyone involved. The fun of getting together is the priority; not hours of slaving in the kitchen (unless that’s exactly what you love, like myself!). In fact, at this very minute, I am, as always, food-multitasking (with a firm commitment to make it to the gym yet today as well!).

I have a stock pot on the stove preparing a shellfish stock from leftover shrimp and lobster shells and lobster meat (leftover from a couple of meals months ago). Why throw the shells out, when I can toss them in a baggie in the freezer until the day - which happens to be today - when I have the time to let them simmer into a rich and luscious seafood stock that I can again freeze to be used in the preparation of some lobster bisque or other seafood soup in the future?

I have dinner in the slow cooker for a family on the go tonight…as well as before, during and after writing this blog, I am hard at work planning our big meal for this weekend in place of Dinner Club: tailgate food!

My Nebraska friends will appreciate our thoughtfulness – mine and my husband’s – in agreeing that the tailgate should absolutely include corn on the cob of some sort as a side dish and TURNOVERS for dessert! I am Googling my little heart out in search of the perfect items, in anticipation that, for us Cyclone fans, the food will be the highlight of our day over the outcome of the game this Saturday!

So back to Dinner Club: I have included below my recipe for this week – Berry Napoleons with Chocolate and Mascarpone Cream. Sounds difficult and like a huge time commitment, right? No way! I will have to rely on my fellow Dinner Clubbers to bake the puff pastry and assemble the dessert that night, but I should be able to easily prepare in advance each of the elements of this decadent dish and deliver to them ahead of time to make it very easy to finish that night. Most recipes are this way when you really take the time to figure out what all you can do in advance. That’s one of the keys to Dinner Club success. DO SOME OF IT AHEAD! Then you have more time for chit-chat and cocktails that evening with your friends!

This posting is getting longer than I’d like, but I do feel it’s important to include some basic information on exactly what a napoleon is for those of you who might not have had it before; so I’ll quote my old friend Wikipedia (shown **’d) once again for the basics.

**The variant name of Napoleon appears to come from napolitain, the French adjective for the Italian city of Naples, but altered by association with the name of Emperor Napoleon I of France. There is no evidence to connect the pastry to the emperor himself. In France, a Napoléon is a mille-feuille filled with almond flavored paste. The Mille-feuille (French pronunciation: [mil fœj], "thousand-leaf”, is a pastry originating in France. The name is also written as "millefeuille" and "mille feuille".

**Traditionally, a Mille-feuille is made up of three layers of puff pastry, alternating with two layers of cream pâtissière, but sometimes whipped cream, or jam. The top is usually glazed with icing or fondant in alternating white (icing) and brown (chocolate) strips, and combed.
Thank you, Wikipedia! I would note, in addition to the above information, that napoleon’s are not required to be molded and combed. Many of the recipes now are simply “stacked” desserts that are prepared individually for each guest; which is exactly what mine will be. For a look at different types of napoleons, you can search “Google images” to see what they can turn out looking like! Here’s the recipe. Enjoy!

Mixed Berry Napoleons with Chocolate and Mascarpone Cream

From: www.lacucinaitalianamagazine.com

4 servings

Ingredients

For the pastry cream:

·                                 4 eggs

·                                 4 tablespoons granulated sugar

·                                 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

·                                 2 cups whole milk, heated

·                                 3⅓ ounces dark chocolate, melted

·                                 8 ounces mascarpone cheese

For the napoleons:

·                                 All-purpose flour for dusting

·                                 8 ounces frozen puff pastry, defrosted

·                                 8 ounces mixed berries or sliced strawberries

·                                 Confectioners' sugar

Instructions

Prepare the pastry cream: In a large bowl, whisk together the eggs and sugar until pale in color. Add the flour, and beat well. Add the hot milk in a slow, steady stream, whisking until smooth. Transfer to a pot and bring to a boil, whisking continuously until the mixture is thick enough to coat the back of a spoon. Remove from the heat, and let cool. Divide the pastry cream evenly into two bowls. Add the melted chocolate to one bowl, mixing well to incorporate. Add the mascarpone to the other bowl, mixing well until smooth. Cover, and refrigerate until ready to use.

Prepare the pastry: Preheat oven to 325°F. On a lightly floured surface, roll out the puff pastry to ¼-inch thickness. Using a 2-inch cookie cutter, cut out 12 circles. Arrange the circles on a baking sheet, and bake for 15 minutes, or until puffy and golden-brown. Remove from the oven, and let cool. Cut each pastry puff in half horizontally. (This makes more than needed, in case some break.)

To serve, place a spoonful of the chocolate cream on each plate, and spread it out decoratively. Assemble the napoleon on top of the chocolate: Place one circle of puff pastry on top of the chocolate, and spread a layer of the mascarpone cream on top of it. Repeat twice, so that each napoleon has three layers of pastry and mascarpone cream. Top with mixed berries or sliced strawberries, and dust with confectioners' sugar. If desired, place remaining chocolate cream in a pastry bag, and pipe over the napoleons.