Faux Summer Pudding

People love summer for a multitude of reasons. The students love them for the summer breaks, some men love them for the bikini babes walking down the beaches. And I love summer because of the abundant berries that come with it.

There are so many juicy sweet fruits waiting to be devoured in summer. While many fruits are delicious to be eaten as they are. I much prefer to take the opportunities to make some pretty desserts out of them. This is my third entry featuring strawberries. This time as a dessert. And also a berry best one too. After this, I will be making something from other berries, like raspberries! I can hardly wait to see them in a dessert for the Saturday gathering.


Coming back to the faux summer pudding. It is a recipe from Pierre Herme's Desserts Book. The first time I saw this recipe, I know I wanted to have a piece of the pudding. But the multitude of instructions deterred my initial enthusiasm. Until a loaf of stale white bread that OCT left in the fridge nudged me to finally "just make it". It's funny that sometime I got around making things that I put off for many reasons (mostly because of the complicated steps) just because of the impending expiring dates. Maybe it's the sense of urgency that an expiring product imposes. I definitely won't be making half as many recipes you see here if all the products/produces can last forever.


The bottom line is, I made the faux summer pudding and it tasted good! PH has very specific instructions for the pudding, such as "Eat the pudding once it's assembled"! It doesn't tell why. It is simply a command from the master. Because the stake of failing the pudding project was high, I didn't alert my friend earlier. In fact, I called them after I had assembled and tasted the pudding! Well, you can't blame me. The many steps of the recipes made me a bit neurotic. What if I told them on the first day and the cream didn't harden on the second day? Or what if I couldn't get the lemon cream right? It was also quite possible that the pudding would fall apart once the springform ring was removed. If any of the above happened, then there would be no desserts! And I would have broken all my friends' hearts who so look forward for a scumptious dessert after a hard day at work, just to find that it was a flop?

Luckily, it turned out well. At least I like the pudding a lot. It was indeed a refreshing and light dessert fitting for a summer night. OCT however, thought it wasn't sweet enough. And hence it wasn't his kind of dessert. Oh well, I am more than happy to eat up his share of the pudding!

Because the recipe stated that the pudding has to served chilled, I took it a step further by putting it in the freezer before my friends came to collect it. I was worried that the pudding would break down and started to sweat on their ways home under the merciless weather. Then this morning, my friend gave me her feedback on the pudding and commented that she especially liked the frozen strawberries!

I laughed so hard that my stomach hurted when I read that. Isn't the frozen strawberries my stroke of brilliant? While this dessert may be a perfect ending for a meal, cutting them into separate servings to be distributed( like what I did) may not be a good idea. Because of the lack of defining structure, the pudding looks like a puddle of cream with fruits. It surely doesn't look like the most appetising dessert monsieur Pierre would serve.