People's Pops' Strawberries & Cream Popsicles

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Confession time: I have no less than SIX posts in the pipeline on this here olde time bloggue. Six! There is chili and muesli and cauliflower salad and eggplant parm and a million amazing new cookbooks to tell you about, but somehow the time, the time!, is never enough. So let's start small, shall we, with these delicious little popsicles that I made last week, after having an attack of the mom-guilt-blues and trying to come up with a fun after-school treat to delight my school kid.

(Another confession: A parenting thing I'm really struggling with at the moment is self-doubt. Like, I wake up at 3:30 in the morning to pee, think about something I did/said/didn't do/whatever the day before with Hugo, then proceed to fall down an awful spiral of misery, self-doubt and recriminations that last until it's time to get up and get the day going with my little dudes. It's...not great. Does that happen to you? What's your biggest parenting challenge right now? Why are babies so much easier to parent than kids? Maybe don't answer that question? Are you also an insomniac whose entire night can be ruined by one errant thought? Let's commiserate, maybe we'll all feel better.) 

The recipe comes from People's Pops by way of Catherine Newman, who loves their cookbook, and because everything she writes about turns out to be as delicious as she says it is, I went a little nuts looking up recipes for blackberry-yogurt pops and blueberry buttermilk and roasted plum pops (I mean!). Ultimately, because here strawberries are cheap and plentiful and fragrant as all get-out right now, I made these strawberries & cream popsicles. They were a cinch to make - just puree fresh strawberries with some lemon, vanilla and salt, combine it with simple syrup (which, because I once bought a pretty bottle of cane syrup for the label, I don't even do, I just pour this stuff in) and swirl in some cream - and they were indeed as delightful as they sound, especially because it's been heat-wave hot here lately and we're all constantly irritable and slightly damp with sweat and lightly spangled with playground sand.

The best thing about homemade popsicles has to be the look on your kid's face when they get off the school bus, hangry and tired and wondering what annoyingly wholesome thing you've prepared for their snack and you say there are strawberry popsicles in the freezer. And that he can have two! (Spoiler alert: he couldn't finish two. That's okay. More for you.)

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Note: This post includes affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you purchase through these links, at no cost to you. I use affiliate links only for products I truly love and companies I trust. Thank you.

Strawberries & Cream Popsicles
Makes 8 to 10, depending on your mold
Adapted from People's Pops

2/3 cup granulated sugar
2/3 cup water
4 cups strawberries, hulled and coarsely chopped
¾ teaspoon vanilla
Pinch of salt
1 teaspoon lemon juice
¼ cup heavy cream

1. Combine the water and sugar in a saucepan, and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Stir occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside to cool.

2. Puree the strawberries in a food processor (you should have about 2 cups of puree). Transfer the berries to a measuring pitcher with a spout and add ¾ cups of the cooled sugar mixture, vanilla, salt, and lemon juice. Stir to combine. Pour in the heavy cream; do not mix.

3. Pour the mixture into your popsicle molds, leaving a bit of room at the top for expansion. Insert the sticks and freeze the popsicles until they are solid, 4-5 hours. Unmold the pops and transfer to a plastic bag for storage, or serve at once.


Diana Henry's Roast Apple and Maple Eton Mess

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Reader! How are you? How’s the weather where you are? Here in Berlin, spring has sprung. The breezes are warm, the trees are blooming (the creamy magnolias are already on their way out, in fact, sob, but the frothy cherry blossoms are still in full glory), the markets are stuffed with fragrant strawberries and fat white asparagus. I have put away my heavy wool sweaters and warm coats and am swanning around in t-shirts and sockless feet. It is glorious.

My little white baby Bruno even has his very first sunburn on the tops of his deliciously fat feet. I am fully and miserably responsible. I plead ignorance: my skin color has me regularly mistaken for being South Asian so I have a relatively “relaxed” attitude about sunscreen when not on the beach, yet I seem to have given birth to the whitest baby in Germany, poor thing. The other day, we were at the playground in the what felt like not-even-that-hot-for-crying-out-loud sunshine, yadda yadda yadda, before I knew it, Bruno had red feet. Gah. So I am doing penance now by stocking up on baby sunscreen and already looking forward to the pitying looks that he will be getting from the mahogany-skinned Italians on the beach this summer.

As I type, I have a plastic bag filled with strawberries sitting on the chair next to me. These aren’t the best strawberries, yet, but they smell delicious and between Hugo and me, I anticipate them lasting until, oh, tomorrow morning at best. (Bruno, so far, refuses to eat any berry at all. Weirdo. Takes after his father.)

Anyway, I’m telling you this because I feel a little funny about what I’m going to do next. Which is: blog about a wintertime dessert made with roasted apples. But is so wonderful and delicious that you simply must know about it. And since I was in the depths of new-baby-hood when I first discovered it (and made it obsessively for every special meal we were invited to for a couple of months), I didn’t write about it when it was topical and in-season. Instead I’m doing so now when you could probably care less about roasted apples and will immediately close the browser window and tell me to go jump in a lake. That’s fine! I’d do the same! Forgive me!

But for the three of you who don’t feel that way (or for those of you on the other side of the world, or in Boston, where it was still SNOWING yesterday for the love of Pete), this is for you.

Now, imagine:

Whipped cream.

Greek yogurt.

Crushed meringues.

Roasted apples.

Toasted hazelnuts.



All layered together in a beautiful serving dish and spooned out in such a way that each bite contains a bit of creamy, crunchy, roasty, toasty, juicy wonderfulness. The recipe comes from Diana Henry’s reboot of Simple and is, indeed, simple. All you have to actually cook are the roasted apples (does toasting hazelnuts even count as cooking?). The rest is whipping cream and bashing up store-bought meringues and drizzling maple syrup (and, uh, toasting hazelnuts - don’t you even dare to try and skip this step as untoasted hazelnuts are the devil’s work, as everyone knows).

It is, of course, a wintry riff on Eton mess, traditionally made with fresh strawberries in spring and a glorious dessert in its own right. (Though I never really get beyond just stuffing fresh strawberries unadorned into my craw when they're local and sweet and cheap and sold on every street corner.) Somehow, with the meringues and yogurt and apples, it manages to be a pretty light dessert, the kind you're happy to spoon up after a big meal. (I was going to write, "like Christmas" after that, but it turns out that even I, blogger of apple desserts in springtime, can't bring myself to write about the holiday that shall not be named, so you'll just have to infer it.)

And with that, dear reader, I'm off to buy some fresh rhubarb. At the rate I'm going, I'll blog about what I do with it just around Thanksgiving. Ha!

Note: This post includes affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you purchase through these links, at no cost to you. I use affiliate links only for products I truly love and companies I trust. Thank you.

Roast Apple and Maple Eton Mess
Adapted from Simple
Serves 6

1.5 lbs cooking apples, peeled, cored and halved
1/4 cup light brown sugar
1/3 cup maple syrup, divided, plus more to serve, optional
3 1/2 tablespoons hazelnuts
1 cup whipping cream
1/3 cup Greek yogurt
4 1/4 ounces meringues, coarsely broken up

1. Preheat the oven to 400F. Place the apples in a roasting pan and toss with the brown sugar. Drizzle 3 tablespoons water over the apples. Roast for 15 to 20 minutes, until the fruit is tender. Drizzle 2-3 tablespoons maple syrup over the apples and let cool.

2. Toast the hazelnuts in a dry pan over medium heat, stirring frequently, until they smell toasty and delicious. Let cool and coarsely chop.

3. If necessary, lightly crush the apples with a fork - but take care not to make applesauce out of them.

4. Whip the cream until it holds its shape, then fold in the Greek yogurt and remaining maple syrup.

5. Layer the apples, cream, hazelnuts and meringue in individual glass dishes or one larger serving dish. If you like, you can drizzle additional maple syrup as you go (I never do). Finish with a layer of cream and a sprinkling of hazelnuts. Serve immediately (otherwise the meringues soften).


Kevin West's Damson Butter with Bay and Ginger

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After lunch on Saturday afternoon, we spontaneously decided to go apple-picking with friends. But when we got to the U-pick orchard just outside of Berlin, we discovered that the apple variety we'd set out to pick, Pinova, wasn't ready yet. Other varieties of apples, pears, and plums were ready, so we contented ourselves with those. Now I have several kilos of each in my kitchen; the pears still need a few weeks of ripening, the apples are delicious and crunchy out of hand, but the plums, well, those have already been turned into jam. Quick work!

I love making jam - apple butter in falll, Seville orange in winter, blueberry-lime (make sure to reduce the sugar a bit) in summer - but this year, the cookbook work kept me from any jam-making. I figured I wouldn't much miss my little pots and jars in the pantry that much and contented myself with store-bought jams instead, but they were always too sweet and insipid compared to the things I made myself. (The jam I most regret skipping was the Seville orange marmalade, which when homemade is so incredibly superior to anything you can buy - even fancy, high-quality brands - that I have sworn to myself that even though our baby is due right before Seville orange season, I'm not going to skip it again this year. Wish me luck! I'm pretty sure I will be cursing this resolution in early February when I'm knee-deep in nipple cream and sleep deprivation.) So I'm back at the jam-making station now, easing myself in with Damson plums, a supremely satisfying and easy fruit to preserve.

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Damson plums are high in pectin, which means that when cooked with sugar they thicken and gel beautifully without any added help. They're also easy to pit, which makes them very appealing to work with, especially when you're confronted with 4 kilos of them after not even half an hour spent in the plum orchard. I turned half of my Damsons into Pflaumenmus, a thick plum butter spiced with cinnamon and cloves that is also known as Powidl in Austria and is an essential element in the German and Austrian kitchen. An easy and reliable recipe for Pflaumenmus is in both My Berlin Kitchen and Classic German Baking. Traditional Pflaumenmus is actually made without any sugar at all, but your plums must be very ripe and sweet for it to turn out nicely. Since the ones I had were still quite firm and sweet-tart, I used my recipe, which contains sugar.

For the remaining of my Damsons, I turned to a recipe from Kevin West, the author of Saving the Season. West cooks his Damsons with bay leaves and ginger first, then forces them through a sieve (I used an immersion blender instead), adding the sugar and lemon juice only at this point before finishing the cooking. West is a genius with flavorings; he seems to have an uncanny sense of which herbs and spices pair best with fruit to bring out their best flavors. To my taste, his jams are often too sweet, so I reduced the sugar in the Damson butter, but you might find you prefer a sweeter jam, as he does. The ginger and bay give the plum butter a gentle fillip of spice and savoriness, but not too much of one. This is still a fruit butter that will do gloriously on a piece of morning buttered toast.

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As soon as the pears are ready to go, I'm going to be turning to this fantastic and inspiring little book for my next batch of fruit butter, a silky concoction of pears, apples and maple syrup. I'm trolling the markets for the season's very last plum tomatoes so I can make Kevin's savory tomato jam with smoked paprika (!). And like I said, I'm counting the weeks until Seville orange season. I can't wait to have a pantry full of homemade treats again.

Note: This post includes affiliate links and I may earn a commission if you purchase through these links, at no cost to you. I use affiliate links only for products I love and companies I trust. Thank you.

Kevin West's Damson Butter
Adapted from Saving the Season
Note: If you would prefer to preserve your Damson butter the American way, once the jars are filled and tightly closed, process them in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Marisa McLellan is an excellent resource on this subject. I do not process any of my jams in this way. The cooking time, the relatively high sugar levels, the high acidity of the fruit, the spotlessly clean jars, and the upside-down cooling method, which gives the jars an airtight seal, are enough for me and all European jam-makers I know.

4 pounds Damson plums, pitted
1/2 cup water
2 bay leaves
1-inch piece of ginger, peeled
2 cups sugar (the original recipe calls for 3 1/4 cups)
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice

1. Put the fruit, water, bay and ginger in a large, heavy pot. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

2. Take the pot off the heat and remove the bay and ginger (discard). Using an immersion blender, purée the plums until smooth. Add the sugar and lemon juice and stir well.

3. Bring the mixture to a simmer over medium heat, then reduce to low and simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes, stirring. Take the pot off the heat and ladle the hot butter into spotlessly clean or sterilized jars. Immediately cap the jars and turn them over upside-down to cool completely. The jars will keep, unopened, for a year. Once open, the Damson butter should be consumed within a few weeks.

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Marisa McClellan's Cherry Butter

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I came into a glut of cherries this week, picked by a friend from the tree in his mother's garden. He and his wife ate themselves silly while standing on ladders leaned against the tree for picking, then pitted and preserved a whole bunch more, and still had a bucket or two left over after that. Did I want some, they asked. DID I EVER, I replied.

We drove to their place to pick up our loot. Hugo's just learning how to eat around a cherry pit, so we gave him a handful to celebrate with in the backseat while we drove home. "Chays!" he calls them.

The rest I pitted with my thumb and forefinger. These were small cherries and already past their prime. They were easy to pit like this, though my nail beds now look like I've been dabbling in the dark art of butchery. If you have fresher, bigger cherries, you would probably do better by using a cherry pitter, as canning and preserving expert Marisa McClellan says.

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It's from Marisa's first book, Food in Jars, that I got the recipe for what I made with those cherries: dark and velvety cherry butter. Don't think of actual butter, though. Think of cherries and sugar cooked down into a thickish, wine-colored mixture, then puréed until as creamy and smooth as, well, butter.

Did you know that I have strong feelings for fruit butters? (Exhibit A: this apple butter, one of the best things on this here website. Exhibit B: the roasted plum butter recipe in My Berlin Kitchen.) I do. I love them: their smooth yet faintly nubby texture, how they manage to be simultaneously tangy and almost toasted in flavor, and the way the fruit used always ends up tasting so concentrated, so deeply of itself, if you know what I mean. I like fruit butters on buttered toast, I like they way they swoop through yogurt (especially if the yogurt is swoopy itself), and I like them spread in a crostata or layered with cream and rolled up in a jelly roll (recipe forthcoming in the German baking book!).

General wisdom around here is that sour cherries are the cherries you want for jam-making, while sweet cherries are the ones you want for eating out of hand. And, you know, if the sweet cherries you can find are so plump and fresh that they crunch when you bite into them, then you should definitely just buy them by the pound and eat them all out of hand, spitting the pits out if possible. That's one of life's great pleasures, full stop.

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But. If your sweet cherries are a little old and dented, or if you share my intensity of feeling for silky fruit butters that drop luxuriously from a spoon, then you should try this recipe.

Marisa McClellan's Cherry Butter
Adapted from Food in Jars: Preserving in Small Batches Year-Round
Makes 3-4 8-ounce jars
Note: As the subtitle of Marisa's book says, this is small batch canning - the recipe yields just a few small jars of precious cherry butter, which seems like very little indeed until you consider how long it took you to pit three pounds of cherries. If you can rope someone into helping you, I suggest doubling the recipe below.

3 pounds (1.4 kilos) sweet cherries
2 cups (400 grams) sugar
Juice of 1 lemon

1. Pit the cherries. Wash four small jam jars and their lids in hot soapy water and rinse well. Set aside to air dry.

2. Place the cherries and 1 1/2 cups (300 grams) in a large pot. Set over medium-high heat and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce the heat so that the mixture simmers and let the mixture cook for 60 minutes, stirring every 15 minutes or so.

3. After an hour, the mixture will be reduced and a deep wine color. Take off the heat and purée thoroughly (taking care not to burn yourself with any splatters) with an immersion blender. When the mixture is velvety smooth, taste it - if it needs more sugar, add some of the reserved sugar and stir well. Then stir in the lemon juice.

4. Return the pot to the stove and place over medium heat. The butter will start sputtering pretty quickly. Let it cook for another minute or so, until the butter is thick and spreadable (remember that it will thicken and set more as it cools).

5. Pour the boiling hot butter into the prepared jars, filling them up as far as you can. Wipe the rims, if necessary, then screw on the lids and turn the jars upside down to cool completely. The jam will keep, unopened, for at least 6 months.


Saltie's Currant Pickle

Saltie's currant pickle

Sometimes you just want a chicken salad sandwich.

So you buy a plump little chicken and you boil it up with the usual trio of carrots and celery and onion. You add some peppercorns (which you end up skimming off with the muddy scum a few minutes later) and an old bay leaf from your grandfather's garden for flavor. (It is so old, in fact, it was picked before he died. Seven years ago, may he rest in peace. The bay leaves still work, though, even though they're brown and brittle.) When the chicken is good and cooked and the broth is flocked with golden gobs of molten chicken fat, you pull out the chicken and let it cool a little; how long depending on just how little feeling you have left in your fingertips.

You shred the chicken, mix it with mayonnaise (I use Maille's because I think it tastes the most like homemade and because it keeps in the fridge for ages, but no one is stopping you from making your own), and then pile it on bread. Ideally, you have good bread. Something holey and crusty, with a crumb that's cool to the touch. Homemade foccacia would be good too, if you have that kind of time. But toast isn't bad either. In fact, some think toast is precisely what you need with chicken salad. That nice crunch against the rich filling. Whatever, the point is, sometimes what's ideal isn't what's in the fridge and I hate how food has become so fetishized now that you can't even crave a stupid chicken salad sandwich without someone somewhere telling you that you're doing it wrong. So forget about the "ideally". Just put it on some bread, whatever you've got is fine.

But I also need a little something sharp in the sandwich, something to help all that rich and soothing meat and cream stand at attention a little. For me, that something is Saltie's red currant pickle, which I have mentioned a half dozen times and yet never blogged about and which I will remedy today. It is my favorite condiment in the fridge besides Heinz's ketchup and my Seville orange marmalade. It is, as the authors of Saltie: A Cookbook describe, "more of a chutney" than a traditional pickle. It's piercingly sour and sharp. It's delicious with cold meats, makes them taste richer and fuller, if you know what I mean. The book says it keeps for 2 months, but I am here to say that I made it 8 months ago and am still eating it with gusto. It is still delicious. The sugar and vinegar are pretty good preservatives.

I'm sorry that you can't make this pickle right now since red currants aren't in season at the moment. I hope you bookmark it for when you can get them. In my feeble defense, I wasn't really planning on writing about red currants today, I just wanted to write about craving a chicken salad sandwich and then somehow that pickle snuck in. You know how it is, right? Sort of like when you wake up thinking "today is going to be great!" and by 10:30 am, it's the worst day ever. Or the other way around, you drag yourself through the motions in the morning, dreading everything and hating everyone, and then you go outside and have some kind of human experience that makes you feel so grateful to be alive that your feet practically tingle.

(At the last minute, I added two slices of avocado to the sandwich, squishing them into the bread before layering on the shredded chicken. Not really sure what possessed me. The color, maybe? I'm pretty sure the sandwich would have been just as good without it.)

Anyway, I was craving a chicken salad sandwich today and so I made myself one and it was just as good as I hoped. Sometimes that's all there is and it is enough.

UPDATE: Caroline Fidanza, the author of Saltie: A Cookbook, has written in to say that the recipe was meant to be made with dried currants, not red currants, so hooray! Currant pickle for everyone!

Saltie's Currant Pickle
From Saltie: A Cookbook
Makes 2 cups

2 cups dried currants (or fresh red currants)
2 teaspoons mustard seeds
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
1 cup sherry vinegar
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar

In a large saucepan, combine all the ingredients and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Lower the heat and simmer gently, stirring, for 30 minutes, until the pickle is thickened and reduced. Let cool completely before storing in an airtight container in the fridge for up to a year.


How to Roast Strawberries

Roasted strawberries

Fact #1: Strawberries are at the top of my list of favorite summer fruits.

Fact #2: Strawberry jam is at the bottom of my list of least favorite jams.

Fact #3: My favorite strawberry-monger was selling half-pound baskets of Saturday's strawberries yesterday, at the rock-bottom price of 1 euro per basket.

Fact #4: I am powerless in the face of cheap, delicious, local fruit.

Fact #5: I bought a pound of strawberries and though they were cheap, they were also at peak ripeness and needed to eaten or processed that same day.

Fact #6: While I probably could have eaten all the strawberries in the course of the day, I exercised exemplary restraint and ate only about a third. Standing up. With my fingers.

It didn't seem worth it to make jam out of the remaining strawberries. Especially since I don't particularly love strawberry jam. (Does anybody else think it tastes a little like Band-Aids? Just me?) Instead I took to the internet, which informed me that everyone and their mother has moved on to roasting their surplus strawberries, duh, and so I decided to follow suit.

I hulled the strawberries and cut them in half lengthwise, then dropped them in a large baking pan. I added about 1/4 cup of sugar (I'm guessing that I had about a 3/4 pound of strawberries) and one teaspoon of vanilla paste, something I acquired at a TJ Maxx in Newton Highlands on a recent trip to Boston and am still not entirely convinced by. Mixed up and then spread out evenly, the strawberries went into a 375 F oven (190 C) for an hour. I rotated the pan halfway through, but only sort of shook the strawberries a little instead of stirring them.

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At the end, the scent of roasting strawberries had filled the house. The fruits had given off a gorgeous claret syrup, but had stayed intact - shrunken, but intact. I let them cool, much to my son's chagrin, and this morning we ate them spooned over bowls of cool, creamy yogurt. The flavor of the strawberries had concentrated and deepened, of course, but gone darker too, into a richer, almost savory place. And the texture of the strawberries was wonderful - with just the barest heft, the seeds still crunching pleasantly in my teeth, the flesh silky and tender. They made our bowls of breakfast yogurt taste like dessert.

When you make this (not "if"), you will probably want to adjust the amount of sugar you use. The strawberries I had were incredibly sweet and delicious on their own and more than 1/4 cup of sugar would have been too much. But you don't want to use too little sugar, either, because that strawberry syrup that collects at the bottom of the pan is pretty great stuff.

Fact #7: We need more strawberries.


David Tanis's Ambrosia

David Tanis's Ambrosia

Happy New Year! I hope you all had restorative, calming breaks. Max was home for 16 blissful days and we enjoyed every single one. Even Hugo played along and stopped waking up at 5:00 am, for which we are both endlessly grateful. We may even buy him a pony in gratitude? A tiny motorcyle? His very own African elephant baby?

I know it is hopelessly unhip to admit to eating healthfully in January, but I can't help it. In the grand German tradition, we started eating piles of Christmas cookies all the way back on the first Advent and by the time New Year's rolled around, after the roasts and the jelly doughnuts and the Stollen and panettone and everything else, it would have been a freaking miracle if our pants weren't tight. Ahem. My pants. Also, I now have that sort of unpleasant sensation of being completely sugared out. Of being sated down to the tips of my toes. Best remedied by eating lightly and cleanly and by getting out and moving.

But I was invited to a lunch party yesterday and was tasked with bringing dessert. What was I going to do? I couldn't bring myself to even make a pan of brownies. (The last pan I made, David's dulce de leche brownies, was just after New Year's and while they were perfect, I couldn't bring myself to eat more than a few bites. Like I said, sugared out! To the tips of my toes!)

Instead, inspired by something I read online from Amanda Hesser about a reinvention of that old Southern dessert ambrosia, a mix of sliced oranges and shredded coconut, I turned to David Tanis's lovely book, A Platter of Figs. David Tanis updates the dish with just a few simple touches, turning it from simple and retro into something far more elegant, complex and delicious.

Segmented citrus

Instead of just using oranges, David has you use grapefruits, blood oranges, kumquats and navels (I didn't have navels, so used clementines). The grapefruits are segmented, the oranges are peeled and sliced and the kumquats are sliced, so you not only have a whole dance of different citrus flavor going on, but layers of texture too, especially once the soft pineapple and spiky coconut are tossed in. Some versions of the old ambrosia add canned crushed pineapple to the mix, but here, David has you dice up fresh pineapple, which adds an element of pure sweetness to the dish. And instead of sweetened shredded coconut, use unsweetened shredded coconut (I used a mix of flaked and shredded, just for fun). David's original recipe makes an enormous amount of ambrosia, so I scaled down the citrus a bit to the quantities below and it served 6 of us at the end of a 3-course lunch quite well.

David's ambrosia is the perfect winter dessert - seasonal and juicy, deeply satisfying and delicious, and beautiful to boot. I'm in love.

But next week is my mother's birthday and I am, of course, in charge of dessert. And while I adored the ambrosia, I'm not sure it's birthday party material. I want to find something that's celebratory and special, but still relatively light. So what can I make? A wintery pavlova? An angel food cake? A towering croquembouche filled with nothing but sweet, delicious air? Help a girl out, folks!

David Tanis's Ambrosia
Adapted from A Platter of Figs
Serves 6

2 pink grapefruits
2 blood oranges
2 clementines
8 kumquats
1/2 ripe pineapple
Sugar, if necessary
1 cup unsweetened shredded coconut

1. With a sharp knife, cut off the tops and bottoms of the grapefruits, blood oranges and clementines, then peel, making sure to remove all the white pith. Working over a bowl, section the grapefruit into wedges, cutting between the membranes. Before discarding, squeeze out the grapefruit carcasses into the bowl, they should yield quite a bit of juice. Slice the blood oranges and clementines into 1/4-inch rounds and add them to the bowl. Slice the kumquats into the thinnest rounds possible and add to the bowl. Peel and core the pineapple, then cut into small pieces and add to the bowl. With your (clean) hands, mix the fruits very gently. Taste the juice and if absolutely necessary, add a bit of sugar. Cover and set aside for up to several hours.

2. Just before serving, sprinkle the coconut over the salad. Toss gently and serve immediately.