All Abby Dodge, All The Time

Abby Dodge – she of Desserts 4 Today and all those easy, delicious, sophisticated treats, also has a pretty awesome blog. Come for the recipes, stay for the fun stories! She’s just too cute. And I want to make pretty much everything she posts. In fact, when she posted her Key Lime Heaven recipe on a Thursday, I had it made by Saturday. Sort of.

As it turned out, I could not find any Key limes in my local megamart, but Abby said you could substitute lemons if you couldn’t find them. I had no idea how many lemons I would need to get enough juice so I just bought a few big ones and I juiced. And I juiced. And then I juiced some more. Then I dug out a sad old regular lime from my produce drawer and juiced that. Then I found another older lemon sitting around in there and juiced that. (Interesting tidbit – the old lemon had more juiced than the fresh one. Hmm.) I still didn’t have enough juice. I made up the difference with orange juice. Mixed Citrus Tart it is, then!

Looks kind of like a cheesecake before baking, doesn’t it? So, here’s the thing. My finished tart? Does NOT look like Abby’s. Like… at all. I followed Abby’s instruction to wrap the bottom of my springform pan with foil when baking the crust but then like a goober, I didn’t take it off to bake the tart. I ended up with the same issue as with my cheesecake where it took WAY longer to bake and set up than it was supposed to. I mean, it was jiggly like jelly and Santa’s belly after 40 minutes. So I baked it some more. And some more. And then some more after that. And then maybe… just maybe… I mighta sorta forgot about it for a bit while I sat downstairs by the fire with my husband and played cribbage.

Golden brown and delicious, right?? Actually – yes, right! It was indeed delicious, despite it’s suntan. Hey, at least somehow I got it a little more reminiscent of the Keys – a nice tan. I neglected to take a picture of it on the plate, topped with creme fraiche as Abby recommends but that might again have been one of those cases where we inhaled it too quickly to think of photos. Ooops. And if you like the sound of this tart, make sure and check out Vino Luci Style’s variation with Key limes and coconut!

In the next case, I don’t even have any process pictures. I finally used up the very last of last summer’s strawberries from our garden in Abby’s Strawberry Trifle. I don’t have a real trifle dish and I didn’t have quite enough strawberries, and certainly not any super pretty fresh strawberries to slice and garnish it up. But I did the best I could and came up with this:

Not too shabby, right? My husband is not a big fan of the color pink (he does like the artist Pink though. He’s complicated.) but he was not offended by this dessert. In fact, this was just another in a string of Abby Dodge hits around here. Thanks, Abby!

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