Still Feeling Peckish

Yesterday was a series of kitchen disasters. I set out to experiment to make a low carb Pandan chiffon cake and ended up completely annoyed. Firstly I used an open bottle of meringue powder, not suspecting that it had gone bad…and the whole cake looked beautiful but tasted sour! It was awful and I threw that away. Then I trotted out to buy more eggs and tried the recipe again with some tweaks (I was trying to use Maria Emmerich’s low carb angelfood cake as a base recipe) and it turned out bad again! This time I think it lacked the luscious silkiness of a chiffon cake and the taste wasn’t quite right. However, I didn’t throw out this second cake, but after moodily grumping around half the day, decided to turn the failed cake into a trifle.

I was actually patting my own back smugly because I thought it was extremely expedient to use up some sour blueberries and strawberries in the fridge. And it also occurred to me that I had some leftover coconut cream and coconut milk in the fridge and I thought it would be lovely to whip that into a creamy icing-like layer. Of course since Murphy’s Law was reigning over the kitchen, the coconut cream and milk didn’t quite thicken up the way I wanted and I had to put that coconut cream aside. In the end, I had to use regular whipping cream to create the cream layer of the trifle.

So after all my struggles I had a failed Pandan cake but a truly amazing trifle! At least I didn’t have to discard the cake this time and the family enjoyed the failed dessert.

Being a frugal Asian, I would never throw away the coconut cream mixture I had actually set aside, so I decided to throw in and mash up some avocados and make a kind of an avocado shake. Helper D just came back from her 1 month vacation back home in the Philippines and she came back with lots of avocados from a tree growing in her granny’s backyard. So we were a little desperate to use up the slightly overripe avocados too. The avocado cream was rather thick after it was done and I was doubtful if I could manage that much of it as an avocado shake. I threw it into the fridge because I didn’t want to think about it (I was preoccupied with the trifle), and after refrigeration the cream became a rather nice thick mousse-like dessert! Instant dessert win!

So here is the recipe for my accidental yummy dessert. It is a pure illustration of how when you are given lemons, you can still make lemonade!