What do you do when you find out that France has this crazy tradition of making 13 desserts for a single Christmas meal, you desperately want to add it to your “International Christmas traditions menu” but you really don’t feel like making a buche de Noel in addition to 12 other, albeit delightful, sweets?
You look for a loophole—a quick fix that lets you get away with doing less.
Turns out that dried fruit and nuts count as items in this over-the-top spread. So I just counted those individually. And then you can add some homemade truffles, so why not some cute little Ferrero Rocher-type sweets made by a much more talented chocolatier than myself? A Frenchman rarely makes his own baguette when a skilled artisan has a shop down the road…
Heresy! you say. Surely a cook such as myself wouldn’t just go buy other people’s creations?
Yup, I sure did. I’d made at least three other gluten-free, dairy-free desserts already (trifle, Jamaican black cake, and Dutch letter cookies) and felt completely justified in copping out…In fact, I even used those desserts as 3 of the 13 I needed for the tray. They could do double duty, I figured. So here’s what my 13 French Desserts were made up of:
1. Medjool Dates
2. White Chocholate Bark (it was a gift, and all luxury with drizzled milk chocolate over a thin sheet of white chocolate that I broke into rectangles and shards)
3. Dried cranberries
4. Strawberry trifle
5. Dutch letter cookies
6. Jamaican Black Rum Cake
7. Green grapes
8. Dried figs
9. Candied ginger
10. Blackberries
11. Hazelnuts
12. Golden raisins
13. Ferrero Rocher-style chocolates
Looks pretty, though, doesn’t, despite the fact that I barely did a thing. And that, dear readers, is how you become a kitchen fairy, by having a couple of delicious tricks up your sleeve. People eat with their eyes, after all, and that white chocolate bark didn’t last long whether or not people thought I made it myself.
Underhanded? Perhaps. Lazy? Not when there’s trifle involved. Successful? Yes.
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