It’s my first bake of the year! So to ease myself and get those baking muscles pumping again, I went for a tried and true recipe. It’s from one of my favourite cooks in recent times — Helen Goh! If you haven’t heard of the name (shame on you), she’s a Malaysian who’s done great things in the world of food. She heads up the Ottolenghi team in more ways than one (yes, that Ottolenghi), has a cookbook to her name, keeps up multiple recipe columns in Australia (she lives in London), and is an absolute qween when it comes to desserts. And she does all this on top of being a kick-assmother to two kids. Yup, she’s the very definition of #goals.

So, I flipped through Sweet (the cookbook she co-authored with Yotam Ottolenghi) and picked one of her favourite recipes from it — ‘Frozen Espresso Parfait For A Crowd’. Also, sub-reason I picked that recipe was because I had a party that weekend, so the second half of the recipe title might’ve influenced my decision…

To no one’s surprise, the recipe is an absolute stunner! I mean, it is an Ottolenghi recipe after all. It’s got the sweet, the savoury, the crunch, the cream, the kick of caffeine and the pleasantly bitter buzz of alcohol. It’s a surefire crowd-pleaser if there ever was one.  Plus, it’s the closest thing you can get to ice cream without an ice cream machine, only better. Most of all though, I’m smitten by it because I took so many liberties with it and it still came out pretty much perfect.

Case in point — here’s a laundry list of changes I made to recipe (some intentional, some not so much), and it still turned out tastier than nearly all the things I made last year. (Well, except those lotus paste salted egg doughnuts I made in October; those were special. 😉)

• So, let’s get the most embarrassing one out of the way first — I accidentally burnt the praline. To be fair, I was trying to change my Spotify baking playlist from lo-fi study music to upbeat, funky video-game music, took my eyes off the caramel for a split second, and it went from the colour of overwashed chinos to a deep, dark amber bordering on cinder. However, it reminded me of a burnt caramel ice cream I had at Toscanini’s in Boston which I absolutely devoured, so I used it in the praline anyway, which gave it a welcome hint of smokiness, kinda reminiscent of super dark roast coffee beans. 😉 (Warning: there’s a fine line between burnt-but-edible caramel and burnt-but-cancerous caramel, so if your caramel turns out darker than death, you might want to toss it out and start a new batch.)
• I under-folded the parfait mix before freezing it, so there are white streaks of whipped cream spread unevenly through the parfait. Still tasted bomb though.
• I reduced the amount of sugar used, mainly to account for me and my family’s low tolerance for sugar. (I cut it down by about a third, and dad still thinks it’s way too sweet.)
• I didn’t make the whisky caramel sauce because I was too lazy, and instead added the alcohol into the parfait. (Because why not.)
• I made it in a loaf tin (and a round cake tin for the party) and both came out just as nice.
• I didn’t put cream of tartar in my meringue, because I forgot to get some during my grocery run, and realised too late.
• My thermometer chose to run out of battery the exact moment I needed it, so I had to rely on culinary school pâtisserie lesson #2 to gauge the temperature of the sugar, and even then I wasn’t sure I got it right. But it came out fine so I guess it did! (See Step 9 in the recipe.)

So even after taking a battering in my kitchen, the parfait still came out killer! I can only hope that the rest of my bakes for the year can turn out half as good as this one did. So thank you Yotam and Helen for sharing this gem of a recipe with the world! (Yes, I like to pretend like we’re on first-name terms with them, heh.)

Happy baking, y’all!