A Strawberry-Blackberry Dessert Evening

The gourmet club just had a fun progressive dinner last night. Three houses within 5 miles of each other served as the venues for the evening. We started with a beautiful spread of appetizers at house #1, then headed to house #2 for the main dish and sides. So delicious! For dessert, everyone went to my place, house #3.

I'm sharing with you now the dessert spread. I decided to focus on strawberries and blackberries. First is a pavlova with freshly-whipped cream, topped with sweet strawberries and blackberries.

This was light and delicious.

I also served strawberry panna cotta in small verrines. A layer of blackberry gelée topped the panna cotta and for crunch, I added some rice crispies cracker crumbs. It gave the panna cotta the slightest hint of salt that contrasted nicely with the sweet and tart strawberry-blackberry dessert combination.

The pavlova and the panna cotta

Then I had a thought! I had made a very nice sweet-tart and flavorful balsamic syrup last week and wanted to use it. Also, I still had a lot of blackberries left. So I decided to add ice cream to the spread.

I made small quenelles of blackberry ice cream filled with a bit of the balsamic syrup.

Here's a cross-section of the ice cream showing the balsamic syrup filling

And here they are altogether

But wait, there's more. I had an extra pavlova so I dressed it up with lemon curd and almond slivers.

Bon appetit!