Showy Desserts, Part Two

Okay, I realize that from the photo this looks like vanilla ice-cream with strawberry sauce, but it is actually coeur à la crème, a dessert that is not much harder to make than whipping cream but is a showstopper if you have the heart-shaped mould. Maybe I'll buy it for next time? It's made much like a cheesecake, cream together cream cheese and confectioner's sugar (called icing sugar in Canada), then switch to the whisk attachment on your mixer and add vanilla, lemon zest, and more heavy cream (called whipping cream in Canada) than is decent and whip it all together. Then into the fridge overnight wrapped in a cheese cloth and sitting in a sieve until it sets. So yummy--and my first experience using a cheese cloth, which was super fun. I also made the strawberry sauce--Bon Maman Strawberry Preserves, strawberries cooked in water and sugar and a little bit of Grand Marnier in the food processor. I would make it a little less sweet next time since the preserves were already pretty sweet, but this was for Peter's birthday and he has the sweetest tooth of anyone I know.

One thing that came out of this dessert was a conversation about differences in dairy and sugar products in the US and Britain / British colonies. Peter is from the Bahamas and claims that there are dairy products with even more fat than heavy cream and things like castor sugar that you can't really get in the US, which means that there are desserts you can't really make. I believe it--during my brief year in the UK I did consume more different kinds of dairy than ever in my life, and when I moved to the US I was uncertain as to whether heavy cream would whip since I had only known it as whipping cream in Canada.... This is a question that merits further investigation I think--and maybe an experiment in making clotted cream?