Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Memorial day "feast"

What a weekend!! The Memorial day long weekend was entirely spent just eating - yes, eating and what an awesome feast. On Saturday, my roomie's friends brought along with them loads of Indian dishes and all my favs. They just asked that I make the dessert - which is already my most fav thing in the world - and I gladly did, ofcourse with A to help. I was not sure how many people were planning to come over to my place, so I figured I'd make atleast 2-3 desserts, just in case.

I started off with an ice cream cake, which actually had to endure a lot of strain, I will tell you why in a minute. This is what I did - on Friday, I baked a simple pound cake (dense, not airy because it had to take the weight of the ice cream). I also lined my cake pan with a plastic wrap, scooped in chocolate ice cream to make a thin layer, froze the pan for 10 minutes, removed the frozen ice cream layer, wrapped it in more plastic and dumped it in the freezer; I did the same for the strawberry and vanilla ice creams (it was a good idea to buy one of those 3-in-1 flavors). I also left my vanilla frosting on the counter (as opposed to the fridge). On Saturday, I started to assemble my layers together. I brought out the pound cake, levelled it off, plopped the ice cream layers vanilla, strawberry and chocolate, and started frosting the cake with a simple vanilla frosting. As I was doing so, the plate decided to tumble off the counter and plop(!) it landed on the floor with the chocolate ice cream at the bottom. Lucky for me that I had layers, so I just discarded the entire chocolate layer and had to make do with just 3 layers. Obviously now my cake looked really ugly, so I sliced a few strwberries and stuck them on the cake sides and top and then A suggested that we drizzle chocolate over it (I think that was because he loves chocolate with everything). Anyway, I think it came out pretty decent in the end. Here's what it looked like.
I wanted to make a quick next dessert, so I decided to go with a cheese cake truffle. I bought a plain cheese cake, cut half of it, mashed it up, made tiny balls of it and left it in the refrigerator over night. The next day, I melted some white and some dark chocolate; dipped the tiny balls first in white and then in dark chocolate and sprinkled some grated dry coconut over it. Simple but delicious. For the third dessert, A decided to pitch in and make his fabulous pineapple upside-down cake, I guess because it was the popular demand. Of course you have to ask him for the recipe, but this is what it looked like and boy, was it yummm!!


For the kids that were going to come over, we made some chocolate chip cup cakes and decorated it with the only things available at home - a tube of orange icing, tiny marshmallows (leftover from A's bday party) and chocolate syrup (yes it was A's idea again - i told you he loves it!!) and the kids really loved it.


And I ended up making some banana-walnut loaf cake for tea, which I do not have pictures for. But it was surprisingly warm and delish (to put it in Rachel Ray's words) and the guests really loved it, although I should have made more of it, 'coz I hardly got a bite :( .

On Sunday, Mr and Mrs R invited us over for a barbecue party followed by a southie dinner. We hogged on corn, chicken, fish, veggies and lots of more junk, took a huge break and had some extremely yummy "mor kozhambu and parpa usli". Oh and leaving the best for the last, we had amazing carrot halwa and kesar pista ice cream. I was surprised I could even move after that.

All in all a fabulous weekend, thanks to everyone for cooking, inviting me and for just being there.

1 comment:

Ajay said...

Super kewl desserts... esp the Pineapple Upside Down cake ;)