CRUNCH ("Can we serve this?")

On Sunday Sherisse and I decided that we wanted to test our culinary prowess. She had a tub of mascarpone cheese that needed to be used pronto, and I was hungry. I did some searching on the internet for uses of large amounts of mascarpone (low maintenance of course...we are poor and don't have really cool kitchen accessories) and found a version of a "breakfast pizza". It would need some tweaking to accomodate ingredients that we could find, but looked promising. We didn't know if we would be able to find ready-made pizza dough in TESCO, and neither of us really wanted to walk in the rain to find out, so we found an alternate recipe for home-made dough and got to work!

I nominated myself to start the dough while she wrote down the rest of the recipe. Sticky is the best word to describe it. Very simple of course...Flour, Baking Soda, Salt and water (plus I added some cinnamon sugar to make it more of a treat pizza) Then I beat the crap out of it and tried to spread it out because we didn't have a rolling pin (we're poor...remember? and we didn't think that using one of the old wine bottles would be effective). Once it submitted to my violence (who ever said it wasn't the answer?), we laid it out on a wax papered cookie sheet, and then went to dinner. In retrospect, we probably should have covered it with a wet towel, or just baked it right then and there. You bake, you learn.

Dinner was fun, we went to Trafená HUS, and I had picante risotto with chicken and sun-dried tomatoes. It was sort of the "final goodbye" for Juste :(. We will miss her terribly. After dinner, we invited everyone back to Chez Sherisee et le Dane for some (what we hoped would be) dessert.

The dough had dried out a little, but we figured it would be ok. We brushed it with butter and stuck it in the oven.

As those of you who have baking experience probably know, the dough came out a bit "crispy"...aka: kind of like biscotti. NEVER FEAR! We still had to spread on the mascarpone...which we hoped would soften it a bit, and the raisins, which would add an extra flavor element, and sprinkled on some more cinnamon sugar. Then I had the idea of adding ice cream, which would further distract people from the crunching noise going on in their mouths as they ate.

To our surprise however, everyone liked it! They obviously made comments, but the whole thing was gone by the time we left! I apologize for not having any pictures, maybe the next round...when we're smarter, and have added more fruit!