When I visited legendary pastry chef Dominique Ansel’s eponymous bakery in New York a few weeks ago (I wrote about the adventure and the subsequent canelé experiments in my previous post), I managed to get my paws on a raspberry and lychee pavlova. One of the staff members had told me it was her favourite dessert in the pastry display case and, since it was also the most eye-catching one, I had to try it.

Ansel’s website describes the raspberry and lychee pavlova as “light-as-air lychee meringue filled with fresh raspberries, raspberry jam, mascarpone whipped ganache, and lychee whipped ganache.” The pastry was splendid; the meringue was crunchy on the outside but chewy on the inside, with just the lightest hints of lychee flavour. The ganaches complemented the raspberries wonderfully.

As I dug into my raspberry meringue sandwich, eyes wide, I took plenty of pictures so I could recreate the splendid dessert at home. I flicked the top shell off with my fork, snapping a photo of what lay underneath. Then I moved the cream out of the way and took another photograph. And so on. And so forth, working methodically from top to bottom.

The friend I was with laughed as I dissected Ansel’s creation. “You know,” she said, “I hate when people take photos of food. In this case, however, you have a reason.” While waiting for her to clearly specify whether she thought my intention to reverse-engineer Ansel’s dessert allowed for the jettison of social convention, I chewed.

Good photos were critical since Ansel’s dessert is equally a feat of engineering as it is a feat of pastry. As one of the attendants explained during the autopsy, “Correctly layering the ganaches is important in the pavlova to ensure its structural stability.” Since one cream is thin and the other thick, and because so much is going on between the two meringue shells, it is not hard to imagine an improperly-assembled iteration quickly falling apart.

For my homemade version, I worked off of the photographs I had taken and the official description of the dessert. I did, however, make a couple of changes. To start with, I removed the lychee flavouring from the meringue shells. At first, I had decided to do this simply because I was not sure how to make a lychee-flavoured meringue. Then, after further research and the realization that Ansel probably just folds in some crushed freeze-dried lychees, I decided that the hassle of getting those was not worth the minuscule flavour difference in the pavlova.

(If you’re not familiar, freeze-dried fruit has moisture extracted from it in a nifty process that renders the fruit crunchy, not chewy like regular dried fruit. But while some freeze-dried fruit—like raspberries—is relatively easy to find, freeze-dried lychees are not easily available in Toronto and can pretty much only be bought online.)

Second, while Ansel has two ganaches in his version, I cut the white chocolate out of one of the ganaches and labelled it a crème instead. Removing some of the white chocolate lowered the sweetness level in the pavlova, making the dessert lighter and allowing the fresh, slightly-tart berries to shine.

Finally, instead of making my own raspberry jam, I bought a ready-made jar in the store. (Gasp! Please don’t unsubscribe.) While I love homemade jam, there is so little of it in this pastry that taking the time to make a batch just did not make sense. Plus, subbing in store-bought jam for the homemade stuff makes this recipe much faster to prepare. I wanted something relatively simple after my canelé tutorial.

The end result was really nice. This is not a heavy dessert at all; just the opposite in fact. The pavlova is light and a perfect ending to any meal. The recipe is also easier than most of what I post, which is a nice plus. Of course, you can always make it even easier by baking it as one big “pastry” instead of ten smaller ones like I did.