Category: Dessert

The Carleton let us bring in our own birthday cake, so I made Kavi a cake we both love: Sri Lankan butter cake, done ribbon style, with a mango-peach glaze, lemon curd, fresh strawberries, and passionfruit buttercream.

(This isn’t exactly the same, but very close, if you want to try making it yourself: https://serendibkitchen.com/…/sri-lankan-butter-cake…/)

The Carleton staff person was very complimentary — she said it was beautiful, and when I demurred, she said, “No, really! And we see a lot of cakes!” They ate some afterwards, and said it was delicious too.

I’m still not the neatest cake decorator, but fresh pansies from the garden cover a multitude of sins. Someday I will learn how to use an offset spatula properly (it probably would have helped if I hadn’t been too lazy to go down to the basement and dig up the cake turntable…)

I didn’t actually remember to take a photo of the finished cake! But here is a slice, at least.

That’s it for party pics for tonight, I think. I’ll get some Conservatory pics up tomorrow, although we also had a professional photographer there, so there’ll be another set of nicer pics in a few weeks.

So many pictures. My family is a little photo-happy.

Dessert tonight — milk rice with bananas, strawberries, mango, and palm jaggery. I was feeling a little fruity.

One last photo of our trifle, in its pristine state. It’s now been thoroughly demolished — I’ll have the last serving for breakfast tomorrow, unless Kevin eats it while I’m sleeping (entirely possible, even likely). Which will be fine, if so — I love him enough that I willingly give him the last serving of trifle…

Kavi and her friend Rose cut out cookies for me a few days ago, and I baked them, cooled, refrigerated for a few days — just got around to icing them now.

For these, I use my super-lazy way of icing — make the icing a little runnier than usual, put it in a wide bowl, and dip the tops of the cookies, lightly scraping off any excess. (They’ll usually drip a bit while drying, but that’s fine — you can put parchment paper underneath the drying rack to minimize clean-up.)

And then have an assortment of silver and gold sprinkles on hand — I do each shape of snowflakes, stars, trees, etc. in a slightly different set of sprinkles, and it makes for a very easy but also nicely classy finished set of cookies. They look a lot more work than they actually are.

Making mango fluff; having lunch today with Kelly Robson, AM Dellamonica, Alec Nevala-Lee, Emmanuel Henderson, and Roshani Anandappa. Science fictional / fantastic lunch.

This is Kavi’s absolute favorite dessert in all the world.

Took ten minutes to make dessert; apples and sultanas sautéed in butter with cinnamon and jaggery, served over ice cream.

Finishing up the summer peach ice cream with some warm chai-spiced apple bread.

Heh. People ask how I get so much done; my family helps, is part of it. Kevin made two double-batches of my chai-spiced apple bread for me yesterday, but amusingly, he did something differently between the two batches, and is not sure what.

One is a little more cake-like, the other a little more bread-like. Maybe he forgot to double the butter? I’m pretty sure that’s it, but luckily, both batches are delicious, so it doesn’t really matter. There’s also more active swirling on the second batch, which results in more of the sugar-spice mix caramelizing on the top.

Recipe is here (if you want it more bread-like, you might try cutting the amount of butter in half — no guarantees, though!): https://serendibkitchen.com/…/09/chai-spiced-apple-bread/

And yes, I have a Nordicware molded pan problem, I know. I know!