Gimme All the Dessert

I’m not sure if it’s clear or not. I’m a savory foods person. I don’t really care for sweet foods for breakfast and I look at dessert with a more Asian palate. Meaning, I don’t like desserts to be too sweet. During quarantine, I’ve made a point to make a weekly dessert. That doesn’t necessarily translate into me actually eating the dessert. The Mister has the formidable task of making sure the sweets are consumed. So instead of me saying Gimme All the Dessert, it’s Gimme All of the Dessert to Make.

A few weeks ago, I made a spicy hot chocolate cake with espresso frosting. I did a post about it here. Afterward, I made an apple crumble galette/pie (I just made that up). Since the Mister is the one who enjoys chocolate, I made a chocolate cream pie the following week. This past weekend for Mother’s Day, I baked mini strawberry bundt cakes to give to my mom and my aunts in a contactless delivery and a strawberry loaf cake to keep for my house.

The Mister bought apples that he no longer wanted to eat and since I’m a believer in minimal food waste, I thought let’s make something with them. One thing I do know about myself is that I’m lazy when it comes to making dough. I asked the Mister to get me dough and since I wasn’t specific, he got me frozen pie crust as well as roll out pastry dough. As a result, I had choices!

Since I also didn’t have enough apples, there wasn’t enough volume to fill a frozen pie crust. So, I used roll out pastry dough to make a free form pie, aka galette, and I thought I would try out a crumble topping. Instead of walnuts, I used sliced almonds. A warm slice of pie and vanilla ice cream with whipped cream was a perfect way to use up the apples. This dessert is based around this recipe from Sally’s Baking Addiction.

As I mentioned, the Mister enjoys chocolate. So, it was time to return to a chocolate-based dessert, and since I had a frozen pastry shell, I thought about making a cream pie. The recipe I used by Ina Garten has a different style crust, so I substituted one of the frozen pie crusts that the Mister bought. Since the crust was a little smaller than the original recipe, I knew that I would have leftover chocolate cream leftover from making the filling. I also substituted Bailey’s Irish Cream because I didn’t have any Kahlua. This pie is supposed to also include bananas. When I worked at Kinkead’s, I ate so many banana cream tarts that I can no longer eat desserts that have bananas in it (the exception being bananas foster). I also didn’t want to cover the pie in whipped cream because I knew we wouldn’t be able to finish this pie quickly, so I added whipped cream per slice.

I bought a new tea kettle from Le Creuset, and to avoid the shipping cost, I decided to purchase a new baking pan so that I could reach the minimum for free shipping. I’ve made a different strawberry cake before where the key element for the strawberry flavor is a jello strawberry packet. Instead, I wanted to try a recipe where the ingredients focused around the strawberries. The original recipe called for fresh strawberries, and I had a small bag of frozen ones in my freezer. I defrosted them on the stove and then pureed them. The frosting also included freeze-dried strawberries so that it would give it the taste and color of strawberries. My preference is to have desserts that aren’t very sweet, which is good because I didn’t really have any more confectionery sugar. The freeze-dried strawberries are very tart, so most people will think that my frosting wasn’t sweet enough when I combined it with the cream cheese and butter.

For some reason, I can’t locate my piping tools. I found an unopened package of couplers and one tip. The funny part is that none of these items fit together because the piping tip is too big. Nonetheless, I got the frosting on! I was also a complete mess with the frosting. I already mentioned that I didn’t have enough confectionery sugar. I also forgot to add the whole milk, so the icing came out like cement. My 1st decorating attempt was to use a mini off-set spatula. It was horrible. I didn’t want to document it because it looked so bad 🙂 That’s when I realized that the coloring and the creaminess were off. The liquid made all the difference! See, that’s why I don’t bake!

If I have a favorite kind of dessert, it’s anything with a citrus flavor. As you can see, I have yet to make something that I would say is my first choice. So, stay tuned for something in the future that involves lemons. Hope one of these recipes inspires you to make a dessert.

MXM