The Easter Dessert Disaster and Other April Happenings

Before I tell you my tale of woe, let’s talk about the positives!

First and foremost, have you seen the weather! Sure, we had some rainy ones (and an event I was working got rained out twice before we finally got out! I did get some great photo and video for my client though) but it’s certainly on its way to being “working outside every day” weather, and I can’t wait. My lunchtime walks are starting to end with me sopping wet, so we’ll see how that continues. Once it’s summer they might have to become morning walks!

The nice weather also means we got out for this year’s first disc golf run. I still suck, but I had a lot of fun. And one of my putts was spectacular. If only I’d been filming… nah, I was too busy enjoying!

My reading this month was dominated by The Devils by Joe Abercrombie which was an absolute hoot and somehow I lucked out in the next novel I started, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, being equally enthralling. I talk more about this in the upcoming reading recap but suffice to say if dark fantasy suicide squad with quirky dialogue sounds interesting to you, definitely add The Devils to your list.

Ben and I went to Black Squirrel because the books he ordered were in, so I said, “Why not bring our laptops!” (A pattern is emerging.) We rallied early to get there for open so we could get seats, and not only did we get seats but we got the seats.

Look at this beauty! Latte in hand, I got my hour of writing done, and then left him to his own devices while I went and found a few books of my own.

And another score for the day! I found two books from my TBR plus filled the nonfiction slot for Quarter 3. (Spoilers, the quarter with July in it is focused on Canadian authors.)

And I think that brings us back to the beginning of the month: Easter. Overall a great time but…

So, my mother-in-law hosted Easter this year and when she hosts, I bring dessert, and when I host, she brings dessert. (This is relatively new, she never used to let me bring things!) I love to make food that is super seasonal in spirit, whether by visuals, ingredients, or ideally both! A snack board laid out to look like a Christmas tree, a pumpkin shaped cheese ball, floral cookies, you get the idea.

This Easter I was inspired to create eggs in a nest. I had so many ideas for how this could work. The nest could be pretzel bites, haystacks, cookies, brownies, or puffed-rice squares… and the eggs could be as something premade like mini eggs, chocolate eggs, or small round fruit or I could get a little fancier and cover something in chocolate like strawberries or almonds…

What I landed on was macaroons with egg shaped truffles. What a frickin’ cute idea right! Mango sounded like a great flavour to pair with the sweet coconut base, and of course white chocolate to possibly be decorated if I had enough time. Just like Easter eggs. They would have looked like this!

Well friends, I’m sure you guessed it from the title. It did not go well. Here is my tale of the Easter dessert disaster.

I found a recipe for mango truffles with a cream cheese base. I don’t often use recipes because I don’t often bake; I’m more of a “kinda sorta looks at a recipe and then runs away with her own ideas” kind of person while cooking.

Now whether or not unbaked truffles count as baking… I don’t know! But the reason I mention this is to say I’m not really in the habit of verifying it’s a good recipe because I so often just fix it myself! In hindsight… well, we’ll get to that…

I soften my cream cheese, I puree my mango, and I start mixing all the filling ingredients together. I get to the point in the recipe where it tells me to “roll it into balls” and I look down in dismay at the soup sitting in front of me. How do I roll soup into balls!?

I think: maybe I just need to chill it and it will come together. So I pop the bowl in the fridge and walk away for a half-hour. When I return, it is still soup. This is NOT good. I need to take a break from being in the kitchen. (The cats had been driving me kinda nuts through this whole ordeal making the soup frustration a bit more frustrating.)

I’m lamenting my woes to a few friends and my buddy says, “Send me the recipe, I wanna see why this went so wrong.” So we both sit there looking at it and he says, “That feels like a lot of mango.” It was indeed quite a lot of mango, and mango is pretty juicy. Perhaps I should have caught this. But I am no mango truffle expert! I’m no truffle expert at all!

He uses recipes far more often and is adamant about checking reviews before steaming on ahead. He mentions how it’s weird that there are so many views and likes but no actual written reviews. How the heck could it be rated so highly when I’ve had such a hard time of it? (Bots… I know it’s bots…)

After thinking it over a bit, taking a break, and eating some brain fuel, I head back to the kitchen to see what I can do to salvage these truffles! I separate out a small bit of the mixture and add in some of the leftover cream cheese. (Luckily we had more than needed for the original recipe, but that was actually by accident! It’s not a staple in our house due to the lack of bagels; gluten free bagels… they are not good.)

It’s still a little on the soupy side, so why not throw in a little ground almond. A little nuttiness, a little texture. Great. Still kinda soupy, but together enough that I can make little dollops that keep their relative shape. I freeze these overnight. There’s no way I will be decorating them in the morning, but I should have time to cover them in chocolate.

Unfortunately, I made what I knew was a terrible decision and got chips instead of melts. (For those of you that don’t know, chips are formulated to keep their shape and don’t really melt that well as opposed to melts which, well, melt.) I can’t do anything about that now! They get covered, I make every attempt to make sure the mango can’t leak because I will have to leave them out of the freezer for at least a little bit before serving so nobody cracks a tooth on the chocolate!

In the end they still taste amazing and everyone loves the story of my dessert making plight. It was probably the best crowd to have such a baking blunder in front of: my very kind parents-in-law and some other experimental food/foodie in-laws. They all thought they were delicious and that my idea of expected presentation would have been cute and my flavour combination choice “made a lot of sense.”

I suppose I should mention that my first time making macaroons went well and those were simply a hit. It turns out while I was worried about someone having an aversion to coconut, it was actually a favourite of everyone’s and the missing cousin doesn’t like coconut, so their family doesn’t often have it around! A very lucky choice on my part. Maybe saved the day a little.

Not everything you make has to meet expectations. When it comes to food as long as it tastes good it’s great. And if it comes with a story? All the better!

And of course, I wouldn’t leave you without…

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