2 years ago tomorrow I wrote my first blog post. It was based on the story of making my own birthday cake – a dairy-free chocolate-hazelnut mousse cake, because you can’t buy one of those around here, and I could make it better than a store anyway. Hubris, I know. Layers of carefully spread blanched toasted and chopped, sweetened hazelnuts with chocolate-rich deflated meringue layers of mousse (not the photo above, which is a gluten-free almond-chocolate torte – nice, but nowhere near the pleasure level of my hazelnut chocolate mousse cake). The meringue was a mini-disaster that would have flunked me were I in pastry school, but my stomach gave me an A+. I love my stomach sometimes. I hate it when I feed it dairy and it revolts, but I do love its encouragement.
In two years I haven’t made that dessert again, but I think I have gotten a little better, or at least a little more comfortable, with chocolate mousse. The dairy-free kind, anyway. The regular kind is relatively easy and I scoff at all those bakers who think they’re the bees knees with their heavy cream. Alice Medrich, you still rock my low-fat dessert world, and low-fat in this case does not mean low flavour. Christophe Morel, your chocolate…thank you. Terra Nostra dairy-free chocolate truffle rice milk bars…The sweet life. Two years of generally messing up recipes, eating mousse-y pudding cakes that didn’t stiffen, freezing rich ice creams and custards, and most recently, preserving wild blueberries, mangoes, peaches, and cherries have all made my life a little more delicious and educational.
And that’s why I’m still here two years later, writing daily. Because there are so many wonderful and disastrous recipes to share, so many pictures or beautiful and ugly food to take, and so many more stories to tell about Montreal, Canada, and wherever else I’m fortunate enough to experience.
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