I spent Easter weekend—which was also my father's birthday weekend—at my sister's place in Philly with a bunch of family.  We ate an enormous amount of great food and I'll write a couple of posts about it this week.  But the last shall be first . . . and the last dish we ate Sunday was the dish in the photo above.  I'm not quite sure what to call it.  I began with Joy the Baker's recommendation that I try a Raspberry Blanc-Manger recipe from NPR.org that you can find here if you scroll down a bit.  Taking the recipe's advice on how to fancy it up a bit, I decided to serve it on top of a sponge cake, for which I used a recipe from the New Best Recipe cookbook.  I went shopping on Saturday and didn't find any raspberries, but strawberries are coming into season and they looked delicious (despite the fact that they'd been shipped to the east coast from California)—so I decided to replace the raspberries with strawberries.  The final alteration of the recipe came at the assembly stage.  The blanc-manger recipe on NPR.org calls for the use of an 8 inch round cake pan . . . and further calls for mixing the berries with the cream-based filling and then pouring it into the cake pan mixed together.  But this dish on La Tartine Gourmande had stuck in my head earlier this year and it occurred to me that my take on blanc-manger would provide the perfect opportunity to play with the look of La Tartine Gourmande's dish.  So instead of mixing the strawberries with the cream and pouring it into a cake pan, I layered sponge cake and then strawberries in a spring form mold, then poured the cream mixture on top and threw it into the refrigerator to set for about 3 hours.

I thought it tasted as good as it looked . . . fresh and surprisingly light, considering how much heavy cream is involved.  But it wasn't as good as my mother's classic pineapple upside down cake, which is my father's perpetual birthday cake request.  When it came time to head back to DC Monday morning, I grabbed a couple of pieces of my mother's cake and forgot all about my own.

I'll close with an unrelated request.  If you didn't see my post yesterday regarding the 2008 Food Porn Contest on The Petite Pig blog, please check it out and vote for my photo of roasted bone marrow clicking here.  Thanks!