| Musings |

Just Desserts

By Esther Kurtz | October 13, 2024

I blame my mother. She hated making dessert, too — and so she didn’t

or as long as I can remember, I’ve loathed making dessert.

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.

For Yom Tov, I’d make something more elaborate. In hindsight, that was a mistake — because now my family has favorites. Favorites I don’t want to make. Like blueberry crisps and tricolored sorbet and mocha mini trifles something. My boys even imitated their girl cousins, squealing, “HEA-VEN!!” as they ate mini trifles.

My husband and kids begged me to make those good and proper desserts more often, but there’s a “can’t” in me. And then my newly married sister-in-law came for Shabbos with her newly minted husband and made these cute Lotus mousse cups for dessert. Was she trying to impress me? Her husband? Both?

Guess who loved them.

Everyone.

“Ma, make these,” my second son and pickiest eater said, raising his literally licked-clean cup.

“They’re soooo easy,” my sister-in-law said. And I believed her.

But life got busy, and I never got around to making the Lotus cups or getting the recipe; I pulled out store-bought sorbet.

Then at my nephew’s bar mitzvah there were mini Lotus trifles at the sweet table.

“These aren’t as good as yours,” I said to my sister-in-law, who was sitting next to me. “The crumbs on this one are too compact, they’re not textured enough.”

She nodded. “I’m telling you, mine are so easy.”

I hadn’t asked her for the recipe before, and I didn’t now. Store-bought mediocrity would suffice for us.

But later in the week I was putting together my Yom Tov menu and got up to desserts. As I ran through my mental Rolodex of my family’s favorites, I nixed each one as a patchkeh. My sister-in-law’s “so easy” comment floated to mind, so I typed Lotus cups into my spreadsheet, then messaged her to ask for the recipe.

She chatted back two recipes and three sets of instructions.

Disbelieving, I texted back:

Oh so easy… I just mashed together 3 recipes, and 20 steps

She was persistent.

no it really is easy

Then she voice-noted.

“I’m telling you, it’s my favorite recipe to make cuz it takes me less than an hour.”

I replayed the voice-note twice. The audio was spotty and I couldn’t accept what I was hearing.

Less than an hour? You think I usually spend more than an hour on dessert????

Pause. Three dots. Finally, she responded.

I usually do

At least now I understand why I hate making desserts. When I can make a four-course meal in the time it takes to make one dessert, of course it feels like a waste of time.

Should dessert be its own category so my brain resets its expectations? Like I wouldn’t expect to finish all my carpools in an hour. (I also hate carpool, so maybe that was a bad example.)

But is dessert as necessary as carpool?

Do I like dessert that much?

Do I like my family that much?

Yes? No? Sometimes?

I don’t know. I don’t have time for these existential questions. I’m too busy making Lotus cups.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 915)

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