Monday, February 26, 2018

Gospel Desserts!

 Our Gospel Dessert for the first Sunday of Lent was an angel food cake with clouds of whipped cream and rainbows as a nod to the first and second readings with the covenant of Noah.


The Gospel was Mark's super short description of Jesus in the desert: he went, he was hungry, he was tempted, the angels ministered to him.


 The second Sunday Gospel was the Transfiguration.  This is one that comes up every year, and I've never been completely satisfied with our dessert interpretation.

I think that, deep in my heart, I've always thought the perfect dessert for this would be a croquembouche.  I know this because I saw one 25 years ago, the one time the Emperor and I watched The Martha Stewart Show.

It was the most glorious, difficult, and time consuming dessert I'd ever seen.

Seriously, people, friends don't let friends watch Martha Stewart!

It's a mountain of cream puffs surrounded by a golden glory cloud of caramelized spun sugar.

I've made cream puffs before, but I was a bit intimidated by the spun sugar!  It turned out to be so fun that we all were spinning it, and we didn't want to stop...

Kinda made a horrible mess of rock hard yet sticky bits of sugar over much of the kitchen, but that's not the point!!

So we ended up with an enormous "glory cloud."

Also, my mountain isn't as tall as is traditional, because I decided not to glue it together with more caramel.  Maybe after another 25 years.

Still, I do feel like we did THE definitive Transfiguration dessert.  This is a transformation of sugar, flour, eggs, butter, cream, and water (with a bit of cocoa in the cream puff filling).


It wasn't as funny (to me) as the definitive Temptation in the Desert dessert, but it was a lot of fun to make!

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