I had the best birthday dinner. From top: lemon-pepper pappardelle with homemade Alfredo sauce (courtesy of Chef Terri) and broccoli, plus roasted-garlic asiago bread (spread with garlic cheese spread and broiled). And dessert.
So, it was almost perfect. Dinner was perfect. Exactly what I wanted. Part of the plan was to make a fabulous dessert. So after much debate, I decided on a double-crust apple pie, baked in a springform pan. Sounds good, right? Looks good, too:
However, for some reason, it was not good at all. Bad recipe, I think. The crust was inedible. It had perfect texture: crunchy, flaky, tender. The apple filling was pretty good. But the crust called for self-rising flour, which I thought was strange. And it was. It was so salty and baking-powder-y, it was truly inedible. Pretty pie, but disappointing.
So tonight, I made a 'make-up' cake. A classic yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Sounds good, right?
And it was good. However, it had sort of the opposite problem of the apple pie. I did a sloppy job, because I had a crappy day and I just didn't care. The frosting was store-bought, which is unusual in itself for me -- I thought it wouldn't matter. But I remembered after the first bite that I don't like store-bought frosting - it's yucky. I also didn't wait around for the butter to soften properly (and I don't have a microwave to speed up the job), so I overmixed the batter and the cake, while very tasty, was sort of tough-textured.
So the first dessert looked pretty and had great texture, but bad flavor. The second dessert looks sloppy and has imperfect texture, but tastes yummy (the cake part, anyway).
Third time's the charm??
This is the apple crisp from the Barefoot Contessa. (here's a version online) It's quite possibly the best crisp I've ever had. My grandma used to make apple crisp every year around this time, and so it always reminds me of her. So I thought it might be appropriate. I think the major difference is the use of lemon and orange zest and juice, plus a much bigger, crunchier topping.
