8 courses. Dessert. Cool Earth. Cool.

To say that I like dessert would be an understatement.

I am consumed by it.

But equally frenzy-driven is my love of baking. There’s nothing more therapeutic than baking a batch of rich, chocolatey brownies or a moist, mealy almond cake. Nor rewarding. What other endeavour to hours of hard work ends so sweetly? (Well yes there are others, but we’re talking food here ok!)

For some time now, I had been planning a dessert night for my friends – an opportunity to test a bunch of post-it noted, eagerly anticipated recipes and at the same time, share some baking good will.

Little did I know where an innocent idea could take you.

And I have only myself to blame.

When living in LA, I once wrote a story for the publication I was then editing. Entitled the Dessert Search, it was 25 restaurants, 10 days, 56 desserts – a quest, with my body on the line, to find the city’s finest desserts. If I didn’t get my picks right, I can only claim an intense sugar high blinding my judgment. But with chocolate as witness and cream as my co-signer (plus a few bodily rolls to boot), I swear I tried my very hardest.

But I digress. Dessert, it seems, was not yet lost in the City of Angels, despite diets, mini skirts, and acting deals abounding, and one restaurant in particular, blew me away with a then unfamiliar concept – the Dessert Degustation. 5 courses, all desserts and an adventure into the extraordinary.

And there it all began, almost 2 years prior, the dream of a dessert degustation. And with the launch of Almond and the Hazelnut, it seemed the perfect time to pull the idea off the backburner and into the fiery-hot oven.

I decided to invite 20 close friends, thinking only 10 would come. But when all rsvped, the realisation hit:

This was something big.

Could I handle it? I’d never hosted such an affair. Well, who has really? But there were going to be 8-courses regardless (I couldn’t help but up the ante on 5), I rationalised, better to have more mouths to fill… right?

As it turned out, and true to cliché, the more was definitely the merrier, and the night went, surprisingly, as planned – without hiccup and to great success.

In fact the most surprising part of the night was the complete and utter lack of leftovers. But who are we kidding? These are my friends after all.

I’d like to thank all my guests for putting on such a great show and getting into the spirit, and also, for donating generously to Cool Earth. We raised a nice chunk of money which will go to buying an acre of land in the Amazon. Unfortunately, we will not be able to camp on it as a friend Rich so dearly hoped, but we will be able to see it on Google Maps, which I will be posting shortly. And along with future posts will be some of the recipes I prepared for the evening.

But until then, here’s the menu.

Just beware.

Little ideas, as we’ve seen, can go a long way and you too may find yourself baking till 3am in the morning, coated in flour and bopping to old school mix tapes, high from none other than a baking fever…