shadow19's Diaryland Diary

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The Debacle

Yesterday I had an epic dessert failure, and I don’t handle those well. Back when I was 10 or so, I accidentally added a ½ cup of salt to my brownies. My family thought that this was hysterical, but I didn’t see it that way. The more they laughed, the more I cried (what with my perfectionist tendencies and all).

So, anyway, yesterday…
I decided to bake the Raspberry-Lemon Shortbread Tart in Rachael Ray’s new magazine. It looked easy enough and would be the perfect thing to contribute to a Dinner Mystery party thingie we were attending in the evening. The crust went well. No problem there. Then I added the thawed raspberries to the crust and topped that with a lemon custard (which was also easy to put together). Cool, I thought. No sweat. But in a bit, smoke started pouring from the stove…my first clue that something was not as it should be. Apparently, the raspberries were oozing great quantities of water (though I had attempted to drain them) which made the baked crust a soggy mess, with the “overflow” water leaking out of the springform pan onto the hot oven floor. Thus the smoke. There was also a custard/water swamp settling in the middle of the pan. Ick. Fred insisted that it would be fine (sometimes he’s MADDENINGLY optimistic) but I knew otherwise. I finally pulled the plug on the project and headed out for cannolis instead, but I was in a foul mood. Mostly because I’d followed the recipe to a tee (tea? T?), and it done me wrong. To be honest, though the magazine explicitly says to use frozen berries, the ones in the picture look suspiciously like fresh. I think it’d be fine with fresh, but it’ll be awhile before I revisit this one. Brownies never betray (now that I know that a ½ cup of salt just doesn’t make sense)!

8:43 p.m. - 2006-01-29

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