Ok, SBMD peeps! I need your help- I have been charged with making dessert for 20 in 5 days. I have time and can spend some money (not a fortune, though) on this. It’s an event at my in-laws’ and I want to impress.
In fact, I think I have impressed before with my cheesecake w/berry sauce, chocolate-coconut pudding pie, and banana bread. I THINK this is why I am being charged with this duty.
Any ideas that are easy, not terribly costly and impressive to make?
Open to all suggestions,
Thanks!
-BB
How about poached pears with chocolate sauce? It looks terribly fancy, but it isn’t hard and all, and pears are in season right now (use Bosc pears for best results). Plus it is delicious!!
Something along these lines:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Pears-in-Chocolate-Sauce/Detail.aspx
(except I would core the pears from the underside, leaving the stem and a bit of the core in place. And skip the gag maraschino cherries!!)
Make a trifle. Just layer one inch cubes of cake with something liquidy (if it’s chocolate cake I use coffee liqueur and if it’s yellow/white cake I use frozen berries that have been thawed and lightly sugared) and whipped cream or pudding. Add whatever else seems yummy into the layering and do a few layers in a pretty glass dish. You’ll end up with something tasty, gorgeous, and impressive. Trifles are my goto dessert.
When I want to impress I always make chocolate pudding cake. One 9x13 pan only serves 16 or so, however, so you’d need to make two. Be sure and serve warm with sweetened whipped cream.
Take a jar of fancy jelly. Not grape jelly, but some fruit preserve. Blackberry or blueberry is especially good.
Set out 20 nice plates or bowls. Fill each with a scoop of good plain vanilla icecream. Meanwhile heat up the fruit preserve in the microwave, untill it is hot and syrupy. Drape or pour about three tablespoons of hot fruit sauce over each portion of ice cream. If you want it even more fancy, garnish it with whipped cream and sprinkle a couple of frozen berries over the whole thing.
For variety, try this with (home made) hot applesauce with a bit of added cinnamon over plain ice cream.
Another idea: take any dessert, and flambee it. Also called brandy flame, or maybe somthing else, I don’t know the proper US word for it.
Take a deep metal spoon and fill it with strong brandy. Heat over a flame until you can see the alcohol evaporating. Then tip the ladle a bit so the brandy catches fire. Let the flame come to the brandy, not the other way around. Don’t panic. Pour the burning brandy over anything you want spiced up. My favourite is home baked pancakes, topped with a bit of apricot jelly, and flambeed with some orange brandy like Grand Marnier or Cointreau.
Here’s a vid of someone flaming banana’s in a pan.
Disclaimer: try this out very carefully. It is very easy to set fire to your kitchen while doing this.
For a dinner party this weekend my wife made a pumpkin bread pudding. It was amazing. It’s made with bread (like French bread, not pumpkin bread!), canned pumpkin, cream, sugar… oh my, it was delicious. Served warm with whipped cream and/or vanilla ice cream.
Another vote for trifle. They always impress and get gobbled down.
Here’s a traditional trifle bowl - they’re clear, so you can see the pretty layers. Use whatever nice glass bowl you have. Here’s what they look like finished.
Our method:
Cube up a cake. Pound cake is terrific, as it’s pretty sturdy, but whatever kind you like. Sprinkle liberally with your liqueur of choice.
Mix up a box of instant pudding. Fold in a tub of Cool-Whip knockoff.
Get some fruit - canned fruit, frozen fruit, fresh fruit. If needed, chop it up into bite-size pieces. (We like the canned tropical mixed fruit.)
Layer it up: pudding, then cake, then fruit; repeat. Top with pudding and garnish with fruit.
Mix flavors to suit your taste. Plain cake and chocolate pudding. Lemon cake and vanilla pudding. Chocolate on chocolate. And so on. Select the liqueur and fruit to complement the main flavors.
It takes about 30 minutes (figure 45 since it’s your first) and will be gone in a flash.
The Pears sound (and look wonderful) but I need to have dessert for 20! I will surely try it another time, though.
The trifle is also problematic since I needs 20 servings.
I was edging toward the haupia (coconut)-chocolate pudding pie along with a banana-chocolate pudding pie. Plusses are that it would be cheap and easily solved, but I guess was hoping to make something a little more ambitious and ‘wow’ worthy. A LITTLE.
The ice cream/hot preserves thing sounds pretty interesting, no recipe really so no measuring things and all that, and I can try it at home. You’re Dutch, right? Is that a Dutch thing to do?
Oh, and the fire idea? Intriguing but I can just see myself incinerating all sorts of things accidentally. A strong impression to be sure, but not the one I wish to create!.. 
Thanks for all the cool ideas
BB
MAN, that pumpkin bread pudding thing sounds great. I should have added this- unfortunately I live in Denmark where almost anything remotely luxurious or exotic is unavailable or prohibitively expensive. No cool whip, no (edible) pudding mix, no canned pumpkin.
I second this idea; serve on a swirled raspberry sauce.
I had a dessert at a restaurant that was chocolate ice cream topped with cherry lambic. For the non-alcohol-drinkers we’ve used cherry soda. As long as it’s tart rather than sweet, a cherry beer/soda/sauce/jam on chocolate ice cream is phenomenal.
I don’t know if it is Dutch, I kinda invented it by accident when I made blackberry preserve and had a bit left and poured it over some icecream I had in the freezer.
But it has become my favourite impress dessert, it is so easy and it has gotten me loads of compliments. Try a bit yourself: you can heat up a one-person serving of preserve to try the recipy first.
You know, you can seek refugee status for this kind of thing.
Well, if YOU’RE Dutch, and you invented it, then I guess it IS Dutch, huh?
-BB
What about heavy cream and actual pumpkins? You can make your own (tastier) cool whip and pumpkin puree.
Or you can make caramel roasted pears, plums, or apples if they’re cheaply and readily available. You split them in half and core them, melt some butter and brown sugar in a baking dish, and put the fruit split side down and roast. The sugar in the fruit caramelizes, and the butter/brown sugar cooks down into a caramel sauce. Serve hot with a little whipped cream (or creme fraiche, or ice cream, or whatever you have) and some toasted nuts. Is nommy, easy, and cheap if you use in season fruit.
Oh, do you have a stand mixer? If you do, marshmallows are trivially easy to make–bloom some unflavored gelatin, cook a sugar syrup to the soft ball stage, pour it over the gelatin, and let the mixer whip it all up. I’ve had spectacular response to making little chocolate drizzled fruit and mallow skewers, or a sort of Mississippi mud cake–triple chocolate espresso brownies topped with amaretto flavored marshmallow and dusted with chocolate shavings.
Chocolate stout cake is dreadfully tasty, and I’ve got a recipe somewhere for chocolate stout cupcakes filled with whisky-infused ganache and topped with Irish cream icing. They. are. SPECTACULAR.
Or you could always make a truffle sampler. Truffles are even higher than cheesecake on the reaction:effort scale. Warm a little cream and butter, and dump over chocolate. Let set to melt, and stir until smooth. Add flavoring. Chill. Scoop out and roll into balls. Dip in more chocolate or roll in cocoa powder/nuts/whatever.
If you like the idea of trifle, why not a tiramisu? It can be made in advance in a big lasagne-type tray, which would be easy to make 20 servings of.
Everybody loves a cupcake.
You can fill them and decorate them beautifully. Very easy to accomodate 20 people.
I recently made vanilla cream-filled devil’s food cupcakes with caramel frosting - huge hit.
**MissMossie **speaks truth - make a trifle. You can make big ones - my friend makes one that would serve 20. They’re easy and impressive. They can also be light, which can be nice after a big meal.
Make a trifle.
If ice cream is easy then I recommend offering vanilla ice cream with a choice of bases. i.e. brownies, pound cake or apple pie. Then offer three toppings i.e. caramel, raspberry or chocolate fudge.
All easy to do in advance then pack up and assemble. And that’s the key thing, when catering (at 20 servings, that’s what you’re doing!) always think in terms of assembling (or at most warming) rather than cooking on-site.