USA Today – COVER STORY August 21, 2008

…Pastry guru: Ben Roche
Nougat of wisdom: “The thing I like most about pastry is that there are fewer boundaries. With pastry, all these excellent fruits and flavors really work well in any sort of texture, whether it’s a gel or a liquid, or something foamy.”

Recent creations: “Intergalactic Dreamsicle” (a cone made of liquid-nitrogen-frozen ice-cream-cone purée; filled with vanilla whipped cream and orange liqueur; topped with vanilla ice cream shells filled with frozen orange segments and flavorless Pop Rocks; with the cone set into a carbonated orange); and “Alien Crash Landing” (a tableau of a space-craft crash, featuring an oyster-shell “spacecraft,” alien beings made from green melon juice gel, a smoke trail of frothy mint tea, and “gravel” made from black sesame and lavender butter.)…