The United Way Dessert Extraganza

I'm sure you've all been wondering how the bananas foster ice cream turned out and the dessert competition went. The answer for both is: middlingly. (It would be mediocrely, but that's not an actual word.) I swear, if the ice cream had turned out the way it did last year I would have blown away the competition instead of coming in fourth.

After I melted down the ice cream for its makeover I added a quarter cup of brown sugar to each batch which did help quite a bit. In retrospect, what I should have done was roast another couple of bananas, get them to turn out correctly this time and add them to the mix. But I would have needed quite ripe flavorful bananas and I didn't have time to get them to there from the green condition you can buy bananas in.

I'm not going to say that the final result, after I rechurned it, was bad, but it was adult with the flavors of spice and rum equal with the banana. And that's not a crowd-pleasing strategy.

Here's the winner: Nilla Wafer banana pudding using the recipe off the back of the box. It was the only warm dessert there (other than my caramel sauce which turned out OK but a little heavy on the vanilla. My homemade vanilla sugar turned out a bit more potent than I thought. I need to make a sponge cake that I can poke full of holes and pour the caramel over.) and it had a well done meringue so I can't entirely begrudge the win.

However, second place was, while labelled brownies, in fact more like intensely sweet barely solid chocolate sludge. Completely inedible to my palate. I don't seem to have a shot of it.

I do have a shot of third place, though: a strawberry puff pastry cream layer something-or-other. Not bad, although some sliced strawberries in the middle somewhere would have been a nice addition.



And here are some of the also-rans:

The one in the middle on the red tablecloth is a Krispy Kreme bread pudding. Yes, a bread pudding made with Krispy Kreme glazed donuts. I think it frightened everybody at appropriate levels as not many tried it.

Personally, I voted for the pumpkin and carrot spice cakes you can see on either side of the green tablecloth. I like the subtle spice and I'm a sucker for cream cheese frosting.

I don't know how much money we raised for the United Way. At the last minute admission was lowered to five bucks and we didn't have a huge crowd so it couldn't have been much. Better than nothing I suppose.

For my next dessert competition I'm thinking quadruple chocolate ice cream: a premium chocolate ice cream with malt balls, cocoa nibs and white chocolate stracciatella (assuming you can make white chocolate stracciatella. I'll have to try that and see). Or maybe caramel corn; I do a darn good caramel corn. Or maybe an olive oil ice cream with balsamic mascerated strawberries and cracked black pepper. Something like that.