I had picked out 15-4: Fruit Salad with Chocolate Sauce specifically because I didn’t think I’d have a ton of time to cook last week, since we took Memorial Day week off to work on some home improvement projects.
I even took EVERY shortcut I could think of to shrink that time commitment down even further (plus, my kitchen was out of commission most of the week), so this will be…we’ll call it truncated. You’ll see what I mean after the jump.
This one has intrigued me for years…when you’re a kid, it looks absolutely magical. Almost like Ice Cream Mountain, if you know that reference.
As an adult, 15-6: Royal Court Dessert just looks like a sugary headache. Turns out, it’s a little bit of both.
They’re right that this is a pretty quick and easy dessert to make. The hardest part (for me) was actually finding the meringues themselves. I guess I could have made them myself, but that is neither quick nor easy.
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On the heels of 19-8: Coffee, Tea, & Chocolate I, I happened to recently make a somewhat-related recipe, 15-22: Cappuccino Ice Cream. I love coffee ice cream, and so does my mom. However, this recipe is NOT what you (or I, or she) would have expected by that title.
I bring my mom up also since it’s just about Mother’s Day (or might already be by the time you read this)–maybe don’t make this one for your mom though, unless she likes coffee slushies. Again, even that sounds better than this actually is.
We’re closing in on the 11th anniversary of this project, and if I ever have hopes of finishing it (which I still do), I need to figure out a strategy. I’ve spent enough time in my real life learning how to “professionally” manage projects, so I’ll apply some of that here and aim to knock out at least one recipe a week until I finish everything non-meat-related. Then I might just dump the rest online and call it a day.
You don’t care about any of this–you’re here to read about 15-46: Mousse Casablanca, right? Everyone wants to “jump to the recipe” already.
Blah blah something about how this is fancy and 80s.
Here’s the thing with this recipe–it seems too “kiddy” to be an adult dessert recipe, but is also something you most likely wouldn’t serve to kids (unless you grew up as a quasi-adult like I did). I’m not sure who this is supposed to be for?
In an attempt to finish off last year’s Christmas dishes (XMAS 23) before this year’s Christmas gets here, here’s 16-22: Apricot Swirl Cheesecake. Probably more of a summer recipe, but whatever, cheesecake is good any time of year. I made this together with 16-20: Chocolate Mousse Cake, because you need both a chocolate dessert AND a fruit dessert.
Fun fact: this may look okay-ish in the picture, but trust me, this does not go well. Jump behind the cut for the details (and mistakes).
In today’s edition of “The Way Things Used To Be”, we’re going to see yet another example of how globalization over the last 30ish years has changed everything, including the availability of produce. 19-3: Exotic Fruits I (and its sequel, 19-4: Exotic Fruits II) highlights three fruits that seemed “exotic” back in the late 1980s-early 1990s: kiwi, carambola (“star fruit”), and mango.
Out of the three, I’d maybe consider carambola as the most “exotic”–kiwi and mango were already pretty popular by the 1990s (the heyday of brands like Nantucket Nectars and Snapple). Plus, which of the three do you think you’d have the hardest time locating in a grocery store these days? I mean, you’d find all of them, but you might have to go to like, two stores? When this was written, it’d have been much harder (especially based on where you lived).
I grew up in Southern California, and lived there up until about 10 years ago. At one of my last jobs before I left, I was often gifted with a Porto’s Bakery fruit tart, which was (and I’m sure still is) delectable. 16-32: Glazed Fresh Fruit Cake reminds me of those fruit tarts, and makes me excited for warmer weather days ahead (check with me again about that when we’re in the middle of summer).
Glazed fruit tarts aren’t unique to just Porto’s or Simply Delicious, and there’s even different options for glazing your fruit tarts, depending on what you’re going for.
I got into making my own plant-based meats a few years ago, mostly because the options available in the markets at the time were A) expensive; B) hard to find; and C) not very good. B and C have mostly been rectified in the last few years, so I find myself buying more of that and making less of my own (proving that time is money).
However, I had at one point stocked up my freezer with a lot of the homemade stuff, so 8-38: Brandy Two-Pepper Beef Steak is another one of those recipes where I was using up what was left of that stash.
It’s been challenging to figure out how to tackle these meat-focused recipes when I don’t really eat it anymore, so a lot of these have ended up being more “adaptations” rather than full replications of the given recipe. There’s so many cooking travesties on social media and the internet these days–this feels like a drop in the bucket at this point.
We’re barely into spring, so what better way to celebrate that than to jump ahead to summer with 16-19: Midsummer Cake? We’ll call it being super proactive–you’re already thinking ahead for summer. Like when you go shopping for spring clothes and the summer stuff is already on the shelves. Look at you being so productive. Such a trendsetter!
There’s no rule saying you HAVE to make this in summer–it could be a great spring dessert as well. In fact, strawberries are generally considered more of a “spring fruit” more so than a summer one (depending on where you live), so maybe we should update this to be a “Spring Cake”? I can’t go with “Mid-Spring Cake” because that sounds like something you make in the middle of a jump.
I’m a day late, but had intended to post 14-28: “Hot Love” for Valentine’s Day, because how could you not? Apologies for procrastinating on it, but at least it’s there for Valentine’s Day 2024 (and beyond).
This one used to make me giggle every time I looked at the card as a kid–it felt cheesy to me even back then (but also sort of intriguing in that “is this what grown-ups do?” kind of way). I pretty much still feel the same way about it (grown-up question and all).
What is the plate in the picture above resting on (besides a book)? A cabinet on its side? A locked trunk? What’s in the box!?
Can you tell I’m not much of a romantic?