A Fabulous Dessert

Years ago, when it became my turn to furnish dessert for the next meeting of my garden club, I opted to prepare a prize-winning recipe from a magazine. If memory serves me accurately, it was a $10,000 prize winner, perhaps a Pillsbury one. It had a fancier name than “pie” but was in that category. Of many ingredients, the recipe was the kind one should try out first before serving it to others. But I took the risk.

The filling was a complicated blend of raspberries, chocolate, and other goodies, topped by extremely thin lattice strips of a rich dough. Cheese of some sort was somewhere in the masterpiece, I think in the crust. That must have been grated cheddar. It was designed for a 10-inch pie pan (or was it 12?) and one pie would serve the entire garden club, for it was cut into thin slices such as cheesecake is. The triangle of delight was then placed on a spoonful of raspberry sauce on the dessert plate, with a floating berg of real whipped cream in the sauce, not on the pie. Since I knew this would be a hit, I took along printed copies of the page from the magazine, featuring the creator of the recipe, and, of course, a photo of the finished production. (Later I learned one member had actually made it to serve for a special occasion and it was a hit.)

But the point I want to make here is that when the dessert was served at the meeting, the first thing the woman sitting beside me did was to use her fork to place the whipped cream on top of the pie, as if it had slid off! This was one good time to copy the hostess to see how things are done. (I wasn’t the hostess, but that lady knew where the whipped cream belonged. She had helped serve it up in the kitchen, before taking it to the living room.) I refused to look around to see how many others, if any, had done this same thing.

One might wonder why the whipped cream was served this way. Well, think of a very narrow wedge of the rich pie that takes a lot of time to prepare. It’s the star. Anything topping it would likely fall to the side anyway and that might look messy and would diminish its attraction. I suppose the guest next to me thought the sauce should have been over the top too. But no. I’m quite sure this recipe won partly because of its presentation. (There was also a higher-prize winner but I never came across that recipe.) It pays to look through some nice magazines once in a while.

♥