Tuesdays With Dorie…Lemon Cup Custard
This week Bridget of The Way the Cookie Crumbles chose Lemon Cup Custard for us to make.
Oooooh, I thought. Lemon. Tangy. Yummy.
But then I consulted our Headquarters to see what others were saying.
Oh no.
Eggy. Not lemony. Eggy. Oh no.
So I made mine, but adjusted the eggs down. Upped the lemon. Still eggy, still not lemony. Whaaaa?
So in a flash, I quickly posted my results on the Comments. I never do this. Ever. And what happened?
Oh no. The Dorie saw them.
Oh shiiiiiiiiiz.
Dorie cried. I know she did. I can make geniuses cry. I do it often, without even knowing. It’s a gift I have.
So anyway, I could just see her, sitting on a stool in that sleek Parisian kitchen, weeping silently into a flour coated dish towel, the ends of her apron strings occasionally catching the wayward tear. She wants to bake but can’t, the silent KitchenAids on the counter cruelly mocking her. Later she would have to tredge down 4 flights of stairs to roam the cobblestone streets in search of Pierre Herme or Laduree to feed her face full of sweets, all because I said her recipe was “blaaaaccchhhh.” Poor, brilliant Dorie…please put down that 17th macaron. I truly meant no harm. Really.
What I should have said was this:
In January of 2001, to celebrate my Birthday and also my 1 year Anniversary (yes, I got married on my birthday) all of my housemates and friends went out to El Guadalupe for dinner. Dinner was good, but my friend Nicole decided to get flan for dessert. I had never tasted flan. I tasted her flan. Ick.
Later that evening, we pull the traditional thawed frozen wedding cake tier from the fridge and dig in. All of us. It was chocolate, with that crappy white shortening icing, especially good because it has been in a deepfreeze for 365 days. Mmmm. Makes you salivate, doesn’t it?
Well, maybe it was the cake, or maybe it was the flan, or maybe it was the series of shots I had recently gotten for our month-long anniversary trip to Thailand & Indonesia, but whatever the reason, I lost all of that flan, cake and El Guadalupe. You all know what I mean by lost…not lost, as in, “oh hey, where did I put that bite of flan? lost” – but lost as in “I know exactly where it is and oh no, my husband is having to hold my hair ohgodohgodohgod lost.”
All night.
All the next day.
And the next.
And then I boarded a plane to Bangkok.
And then Jon got lost in Indonesia. Luckily, he doesn’t have hair.
So see, Dorie, that was 8 years ago. And I still relate flan to getting, umm, lost. And this Lemon Cup Custard reminded me of flan. It wasn’t you. It wasn’t your recipe. It was questionable Mexican fare, a year old cake, and a shot of Japanese Encephalitis Vaccine.
Clearly not you.
So please forgive me. I wouldn’t want you to feel sad. Now put down that eclair and get back in that kitchen and make me a Potpie!
I mean, go on with your bad self. You rock.
Whew. That’s out of the way.
As you can see I piped a little of the custard into some tiny little chocolate cups and topped it with a LemonHead. I also made some in a little souffle cup and threw some sugar on top for an added crunch. I just felt like it needed something to actually chew on, didn’t you?
Well, if you are still reading you should keep on going and head over to the Blogroll to see how the rest of us fared. And pick up Dorie’s book, people. She’s so tiny and cute. And her recipes are the bomb. We just can’t have her wandering the streets of Paris in search of chocolate. We need her in the kitchen, using her creative genius. I promise not to make her cry again. I hope.
