IT MEANS I LOVE YOU

Rich chocolate versus puckering citrus: August birthday face-off.

Sour cream chocolate cake, german chocolate filling, cinnamon whipped cream. Coconut, bittersweet ganache.
Adapted from various recipes in Sky High.

Jenny requested german chocolate, which I'd never made. So I toasted coconut and pecans, made dulce de leche by slow-baking sweetened condensed milk, substituted my favorite fudgy-moist chocolate cake for the recipe's cola cake (which still interests me but is reviewed as more fluffy and dry), and opted for a whipped topping in hopes of offsetting the germanic filling. The cake was dreamy, the filling still cloying for my taste, and the whipped cream started to look curdled halfway through icing -- this, and my hasty ganache prep caused my chocolate to seize. But it piped okay. For translation, see entry title.

Then Brett came through town on his birthday eve, so I did the following from 12-2 a.m. :

Lime curd tart, blackberry sauce. 

Adapted from Ina Garten and Smitten Kitchen, April 2010.

I really love the simplicity and impact of a tart. Ina's recipe produces a creamy, bright curd, and her technique of grinding the zest with the sugar prior to cooking prevents the gray-green weirdness that sometimes afflicts lime desserts. Revisions: added an egg to the crust -- which, wow, tasted like a sugar cookie thanks probably to the addition of vanilla, and I did have to frankenstein it together in the pan but it baked perfectly. Might cut sugar in the curd (I like it very tangy) and slow-cook the sauce to reduce/thicken a bit but otherwise, the flavors were there. As was Frank.

Thank you for your visit(s).