Before I traveled back to Dubai I went to a Danish Christmas party at Tina’s place in Brooklyn. It was a spontaneous thing that came to life within a couple of days, but somehow spontaneous parties always end up being the most fun, and it was also the case for this one. If you’re unfamiliar with the Julefrokost concept, read my blog post about it here. I was in charge of the risalamande (Danish rice pudding dessert), and it turned out to be quite a challenge.
After spending more than an hour in Whole Foods, trying to find the right ingredients (thank you friendly young Whole Foods guy for your patience and help) I went back to start cooking.
The pudding part went quite ok, even though I managed to cook enough to serve entire Brooklyn, but regarding the cherry sauce…Hmm, let’s not talk about that one! The cherries I had found were in a glass with this very sweet syrup, which I used as a base for the sauce. To make it less sweet I poured in lots of red wine and port wine, which made it boozy instead. Boozy, but still too sweet. Then I remembered that my grandma used to add sugar if the sauce was too salty and figured, it would also work the other way around. So I added salt. A little too much, and the sauce became too salty instead. I decided to start over and removed the salty sauce from the cherries, but at that time, the cherries had absorbed so much salt that the final result became rather dodgy anyway. Yikes!
Except for my risalamande with dodgy sauce, the food was very good. We had pickled herring, warm liver pâté, frikadeller (Danish meatballs) and everything else you would expect to find at a Danish julefrokost, including Tina’s entire bar inventory. Luckily, I got away before it got really ugly, but poor Julia from Sweetescapes and her fiancé. I hope they’ll manage to recover before Christmas Eve.
