phyllo rolls w/ ricotta & strawberries

So I don't want this blog to try to do too many things at once, which is why I never post about stuff that I make (I bake). However, I took some relatively decent photos of my food today, and I had nowhere to post them... so I'm just going to classify this as an "I'd Hit That" post. This is the thing about how important visually eating is: good pictures/good-looking food just makes you want to eat it (I mean, tastespotting seems to accept anything as long as it's a good picture). The rolls didn't taste bad (Karen described them as "danish-like"), but these pictures are definitely deceiving....

I had two firsts today: using phyllo, and entering the world of molecular gastronomy. For the prior, I thought "Oh, ricotta+strawberries+phyllo? That just makes so much sense! " Well, I must've been on crack at the time I made up this recipe. I added an egg yolk to the ricotta mixture (cinnamon, orange zest, vanilla, honey) thinking that it would stabilize when baked, but maybe one wasn't enough. Or maybe it was the fact that strawberries have a lot of water in them and boil when baked. Or maybe I just put too much filling in (although I don't think this is the case because I tried making them as thin as possible). Or maybe I should've baked them in smaller rolls instead of one long one. Whatever the reason, they all burst in the oven. The picture above shows some of the salvaged pieces with drizzled honey and...

... watermelon "caviar." Yes, I realize that watermelon doesn't go at all, but that was the only juice I was able to make without going to the store, and it didn't really matter what I used in the long run. With my handy dandy UCSF-stolen lab syringes, this was pretty successful and I came out fairly unscathed (I stabbed myself once, accidentally of course). Some of the pieces look oblong, and that's because it look me awhile to figure out how to position the syringe and how far to distance it from the bowl so there wouldn't be a tail. The first batch looked a lot like pink sperm (appetizing, I know), but when they're grouped together like above you can't really tell - phew. They aren't as delicate as I had imagined, and they don't really taste like watermelon at all. I'll try something with stronger flavor next time.

*** Edit: after writing this post, I realized that the problem was very much the fact that I used strawberries. They're like sponges! I should've known better. Oh well!