Chopped Inspired Dessert

It has been a while since I have done a cooking blog (there were complaints that that was all I did, apparently they were appreciated) and I decided it was time to do another one. Daniel and I love to cook, so naturally we love cooking shows. Chopped is one of our favorites. We were watching an episode that we have seen a couple times ( the one with Trig super annoying arrogant chef) anyway, their mystery ingredients were bananas, phyllo dough, pomegranate and miso. Well he made a banana rolled in phyllo dough and topped with a miso/pomegranate sauce. We decided to take his idea but top instead with banana foster. Phyllo dough, for those of you that don't know, is super temperamental(Trig whined about his being all broken and poor quality, what a whiner.) But you have to work quickly with it before it dries out. Each sheet has to be brushed with butter before you work with it so that it doesn't tear. You also have to have a damp cloth ( I used a paper towel) so that the sheets can absorb the moisture

 So I buttered 4 of the sheets and stacked them. Then I took the sauteed bananas that Daniel took care of for me...

And added them and some cinnamon to the dough and rolled them up like an egg roll

I placed them on a jelly roll pan with parchment paper and threw them in the oven for about 10 minutes. You are just waiting for them to get crispy. The layers will separate some, but this just adds to the flakiness of the pastry.

Daniel and I both really enjoy banana foster ( I think I just like it because it is a fancy caramel sauce) but we decided to try our hand at making some. For our recipe you do need rum the drink, but you can always just use rum flavoring. All the alcohol cooks out and you can barely taste the rum where with an artificial flavoring you might not be so lucky and it will probably remind you of the horrible taffys you used to get for Halloween. 

Daniel made this sauce: you take 1/2 cup of butter to 1 cup of brown sugar. You want to completely melt the sugar into the brown sugar. ( Daniel used the butter left in the pan that he had used to sautee his bananas) Allow them to come to a slight bubble. Then add 1/3 cup of rum and turn off and remove from heat. The liquid will continue to boil. If you want to be extra fancy like the people on tv you can light the fumes on fire    ( we did not try this but I am tempted to next time). You just have to remember to light the fumes and not the actual sauce. 

It should come out to the consistency of caramel. 

We added a side of whipped cream just to add some creaminess and a cooling to the bite. It was delicious. We are grateful that we can see an idea and make the product even if we don't necessarily use the right techniques.