Snap-tastic, Pt.1

After graduating from college, I moved into a Brooklyn brownstone 2-bedroom apartment with one pot, one pan, a cheese grater, and no job.   My best friend and new roommate, Cree, matched my meager supplies, with the addition of a cookie sheet browned by at least a decade of grease, a French Press, and two relatively large and sharp knives with chipped plastic handles.  This was our kitchen, and it essentially didn’t matter much, being that Top Ramen was our primary sustenance for a good 6 months.

This was not, however, the way I envisioned I would be eating, living in the Big City, with so many exotic ingredients at our disposal.  Shrimp-flavored noodles heavy on the broth, light on noodles and flavor.  It was as if we were on hunger strike from the bad hand we were being dealt.  Bright, idealistic, and entirely employable, we stretched every temp-job dollar to keep the rent paid and our work clothes clean, waiting for our big break – then we would feast.  And we were getting sick of it, Cree and I began to fight often over ridiculous household trivialities such as who last washed the dishes, if boric acid or motels were more effective in combating roaches, or whose turn it was to go to the fourth floor and tell the neighbors with the 4 pit bulls that their washer was backing up our sink and flooding the kitchen,  AGAIN.  We had the typical obstacles as young big-city dreamers, and we really didn’t care about much in the dump we called our apartment.  It was a place to crash every night, for the most part.  And then came our first test of adulthood.

 

 

We were invited to a dinner party being held by our friend Eric, 2 years out of school and already doing  outrageously well for himself: web designer, commercial producer, Liza Minnelli’s personal assistant.  Although we knew we didn’t need to impress him, we wanted to make a good impression as capable adults, with no small amount of taste or skill.  I suggested that we make a dessert to bring, thinking of my mother’s cookbook I had been given for Christmas.  Its typewritten, plastic-sleeved pages were thick with French, Eastern European, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, and plenty of decadent desserts to choose from.

As I pored over the options, mousse aux framboises,  gateau au chocolat, continental pear cake, getting increasingly hungrier, I came across the one that I was sure would knock everyone’s socks off: Brandy snaps a la crème.

This was a dessert I would recall my mother making for one of the many parties she catered during my childhood.  She would set the sweet, unfilled brandy snap shells on the buffet in the dining room to cool as she made fresh whipped cream  to fill them with, and whisk them away to the party.  She must have learned to make more than enough, as I always swiped three or four of them off the buffet, and though I was sneaky about pilfering her stash, I could not contain myself when I ate them.  The gingery sugared “cookie” melting on my tongue, I was ecstatic, and, rather foolishly would walk into the kitchen with  a brown ring of sugar on my mouth.   I never worried about being punished, as who needs dinner when you can eat these delicate morsels?  I know my mother loved it, she was training me to have a refined palate, to be a junior gourmand who one day would carry the torch of her culinary skills.  Or that’s what I thought, salivating over this recipe I would undertake: the ingredients were simple, seemed rather cheap, and Cree, already privy to my mother’s culinary wizardry, had no doubt that this would be the best damn thing ever created my mortals.