This is what happens after you watch a film about a French chocolatier and off-handedly mention that you really like the look of a prop. This was made by friend Tammy as a birthday present, complete with drawers for transporting and showing off chocolates! It really does look as it has stepped out of the film, though I may need to fill one drawer with an ice pack as the summer heads our way.

To celebrate my birthday, I decided, in a fit of hubris, that I’d do a dinner. A five-course dinner where four of the courses were desserts, because that seemed to sum up how I approach things. Next time I come close to suggesting that, I need to be slapped. Two and a half days of prep work and cooking, experimenting with a gluten-free flour mix for the first time and having a stack of about ten different food chemicals on the counter. It was bound to having some major problems without practicing any of the recipes first. Oh, and buying the wrong type of potatoes and watching them turn to mush as I was attempting to roast them.

(we won’t even talk about what happened to the tofu I made. Well, made is the wrong word. Cremated is a better one)

Of all the dishes, only one came out as I planned - the first, a spin on Wylie Dufresne’s Fake Egg. Instead of making a fake fried egg, I used his locust bean & guar gum ‘egg white’ to fill up egg cups, and then made a mango fluid gel to act as the yolk. Perhaps not quite as “oh wow!” as popping the carrot yolks in the original, but it did work pretty well. Which is more than you can say for what eventually passed as the roast potatoes.