First comes the smoked caramel panna cotta with its butter apples and hazelnut crumbs. Then there’s the posset, a pastel passionfruit filling a glass modern glass, followed by a ruby dark briquette of chocolate, artfully positioned alongside a scoop of toasted ice cream. If the desserts streaming from the Heartwood Provisions kitchen seem a bit…

Figs. They’re savory, saucy or sweet and it seems they offer something for everyone. The leaves covered Eve; the fruit became the center of a beloved sandwich cookie. They’re in the bible, on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and soon they’ll even be appearing on the menu at Heartwood Provisions. What makes figs so…

With its easygoing nature, panna cotta—Italian for “cooked cream”—makes for a spectacular holiday dessert. The essence of simplicity, it can be altered to suit any occasion—built savory with cauliflower and morels in spring, created to uplift with spices and citrus in winter, or made sweetly with vanilla and strawberries in summer. Panna cotta provides a…

The stretch between roasted pumpkin seeds and pumpkin pie—the weeks between now and Thanksgiving—is ripe with opportunities to work with pumpkin. So, we tapped Chef Varin for a gourd-ish twist on desserts for the holiday season. He gave us an alternative to the standard pumpkin pie recipe: an effortless pumpkin cake. “As summer winds down and…