Just Desserts

I blame my mother. She hated making dessert, too — and so she didn’t. Our family ate Milky Pleasures and Minis and Confettis and whatever pareve confections ice cream companies came out with. We ate the fruit tarts and cherry pies and Boston cream pies that Kaff’s bakery sold. All delicious.

And then I got married. Turns out buying dessert is expensive on a kollel budget.

So I started making desserts. And that’s when I shockingly discovered that I was just like my mother. I couldn’t pinpoint it: It was a patchkeh, it had too many steps, it had layers, I had to wait for things to freeze, I had to take out my mixer. Also, my mazel, my husband’s definition of dessert is “something frozen,” so I couldn’t just whip out cake or cookies. (Not that I like baking, either).

I found all the easy recipes — crushed cookies with whip in a piecrust, snickerdoodles in a piecrust, something in a piecrust. They were okay, but they were halfhearted dump efforts, and you could taste that.