Moosewood Mondays: Peach Parfait with Amaretto Cream

Is there anything more wonderful than a fresh peach? We are lucky enough to live close to Niagara - a great peach producing land - and are enjoying these blissful weeks of ripeness before having to go back to the grocery store rocks that pass as peaches for the rest of the season.

You don't really have to do much with a good peach - they are perfect right out of hand. But sometimes you want to dress those babies up, like bake a pie. (If you bake a peach pie, please invite me over. My birthday is coming up. Just sayin') Or make a parfait. Peaches love cream. And I love cream. See? Win-win.

This is a simple and delicious dessert with excellent wow-factor for the few minutes work you have to put into it. The success depends entirely on the freshness of the peach - so pick some good ones!

Peach Parfait with Amaretto Cream
adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home

Ingredients
1 cup heavy cream, chilled
2 Tbsp amaretto
2 Tbsp icing sugar

4 ripe peaches
8 amaretti (Italian almond cookies)

Directions
Whip the cream with the amaretto and sugar until you have stiff peaks. You can do this several hours ahead of time and chill until needed.
Cut up your peaches as desired.
Crumble your cookies.
Layer cream, peaches, and cookie crumbs in a parfait or glass dessert dish, doing at least 2 layers of each and topping with cream and more crumbs.
Serve immediately.

Variations
Use strawberries or sweet cherries instead of peaches, sub a tsp of vanilla extract for the amaretto in this case. Sugar cookies or ginger snaps would also be nice.
Use your imagination!

TIFF Winner!
We had a surprising amount of local entries for TIFF tickets and the winner, chosen by random.org, is Erika K! Congratulations Erika!