Family ritual: Critiquing The Dessert
It's Supernatural Eve, finally. I'm not busy enough at the moment for the last four weeks to have passed quickly, not that I think they would have in any case.
We had dinner for my mother's birthday this week and performed what I've recently recognised as one of our few family rituals: the critiquing of the dessert.
We always have a home-made dessert for special occasions, often chocolate (always chocolate, if it's for me - my motto is "If it's not chocolate, it's not a dessert."). Two of them have made it to LJ before:
The ice cream pie from Christmas 2008
The "Tunnel of Fudge" cake my sister made for my birthday in 2010
As soon as we've had a bite or often before, Mom, Sister and I launch into a detailed discussion of the dessert's shortcomings - texture, flavour, presentation, ingredients, comparisons to similar desserts from previous occasions, etc, etc. We really get into it and don't stop until no one has anything further to say at all.
After a few years of listening to us perform this routine, my brother-in-law threw up his hands and said, "It tastes great. It always tastes great. Why can't you just eat it and enjoy it?" The rest of us looked at him like he'd grown extra heads: of course we couldn't do that. Where would be the fun, and besides, we're on a collective quest for the perfect dessert and the only way to get there is to thoroughly analyse what could be better about the current version.
This week it was an ice cream pie similar to the one in the Christmas 2008 picture above. (That one was, in fact, nearly perfect.) This one wasn't quite as good and I thought I could identify the problem: the cookie crumbs had been ground too fine, leading to too hard a crust. I was pretty certain of this diagnosis, but we also discussed the serving temperature and the quantity of butter used. Sister stated that she preferred the current model's flan-like crust compared to the Christmas 2008 model; I disagreed due to the resulting lower ratio of crust (my favourite part) to ice cream. Sister and Mom discussed and agreed to disagree about the most suitable cookies to use for the crust; I'd stated on other occasions that I preferred a different ice cream, but been overruled. About this point I could see my BIL starting to twitch, and turned a semi-friendly glare on him. "I didn't say anything!" he said. "This is what we do!" I reminded him. "Pay attention, and after a few more years you might be able to make your own comments!" At which point we all fell about laughing. I'm not sure there's any hope for him - he's either not enough of a connoisseur or too polite to criticise.
We had dinner for my mother's birthday this week and performed what I've recently recognised as one of our few family rituals: the critiquing of the dessert.
We always have a home-made dessert for special occasions, often chocolate (always chocolate, if it's for me - my motto is "If it's not chocolate, it's not a dessert."). Two of them have made it to LJ before:
The ice cream pie from Christmas 2008
The "Tunnel of Fudge" cake my sister made for my birthday in 2010
As soon as we've had a bite or often before, Mom, Sister and I launch into a detailed discussion of the dessert's shortcomings - texture, flavour, presentation, ingredients, comparisons to similar desserts from previous occasions, etc, etc. We really get into it and don't stop until no one has anything further to say at all.
After a few years of listening to us perform this routine, my brother-in-law threw up his hands and said, "It tastes great. It always tastes great. Why can't you just eat it and enjoy it?" The rest of us looked at him like he'd grown extra heads: of course we couldn't do that. Where would be the fun, and besides, we're on a collective quest for the perfect dessert and the only way to get there is to thoroughly analyse what could be better about the current version.
This week it was an ice cream pie similar to the one in the Christmas 2008 picture above. (That one was, in fact, nearly perfect.) This one wasn't quite as good and I thought I could identify the problem: the cookie crumbs had been ground too fine, leading to too hard a crust. I was pretty certain of this diagnosis, but we also discussed the serving temperature and the quantity of butter used. Sister stated that she preferred the current model's flan-like crust compared to the Christmas 2008 model; I disagreed due to the resulting lower ratio of crust (my favourite part) to ice cream. Sister and Mom discussed and agreed to disagree about the most suitable cookies to use for the crust; I'd stated on other occasions that I preferred a different ice cream, but been overruled. About this point I could see my BIL starting to twitch, and turned a semi-friendly glare on him. "I didn't say anything!" he said. "This is what we do!" I reminded him. "Pay attention, and after a few more years you might be able to make your own comments!" At which point we all fell about laughing. I'm not sure there's any hope for him - he's either not enough of a connoisseur or too polite to criticise.