SusieJ's Advent Calendar December 5, 2008

The recipe: Zitronenherzen

In 2003, an exchange student from Sachsen-Anhalt joined us for ten months. One of the recipes he brought were these lemony hearts.

The surprise: Child's Play

Child's Play is a charity started by two geeks to provide games to children's hospitals. It was started to show that gamers are not the anti-social slackers so often portrayed in the media.

Over-prepared

For Thanksgiving, I'm one of those horrible, mix-it-up, let's-do-something new, not-that-old-thing people. My husband holds the line on serving the exact same turkey, mashed and stuffing, which he makes. Each year, I peruse a stack of food magazines (going back fifteen years) for new side dishes, soups and desserts. Like me, magazine editors seem to get pretty desperate for new recipes for the by T-day, and come up with some wild combinations. We have a variety of people to serve, including a vegetarian friend and a toddler who has eaten nothing but applesauce for four years.

Last year, Bon Appetit had a recipe for a tart with a chocolate crust, mascarpone filling and cranberry gelatin topping. It was one of those combinations that, with the right ingredients, could work wonderfully well. With my blah supermarket mascarpone, not so well. And I needed to remember not to serve it to vegetarian Marianne, as it had Knox gelatin in the cranberry topping. She would make do with pumpkin pie.

At Thanksgiving, my ideal is also to have pre-made everything the weekend or day before, with only re-heating left to do. Yes, if I could pre-cook the turkey, I would; even more reason for my husband to cook the turkey. That year, I made the cranberry sauce, the mascarpone filling and the cranberry topping for the cake the weekend before. I carefully labelled them and put them in the downstairs fridge.

Thanksgiving day, I've baked the chocolate crumb crust, filled it with the mascarpone, and am spreading cranberries on top. As I'd gotten the cranberries out of the fridge, I did briefly wonder what the other bowl of cranberries were for, but was so busy, it soon slipped my mind. Only as I started getting out the bowls and platters, did I realize that those other cranberries were part of dinner.

In fact, what was now on the cake was the cranberry sauce, and the certainly not vegetarian (gelatin, remember?) was still in the fridge. Rather than enjoying appetizers with the family, I spent 20 minutes very carefully spooning cranberry sauce back into bowls (the mascarpone filling was vegetarian), and spreading the correct topping on.

The cranberry sauce might have been better.

Tell me about your own disaster!