Friday 12 August 2011

Banana & Blueberry Parfait: Easy Summer Dessert


This is the most amazingly simple, yet pretty, dessert to make. Refreshingly chilled and summary, it depends entirely on the combination of sweet, tart & crunchy! And feel free to substitute the banana-blueberry combination with mangoes, fresh strawberries, peaches or any other fresh fruit that rocks your boat! But it HAS to be fresh fruit. It's not the same otherwise. 

Here’s what it looked like:



The original recipe is from my friend Reva’s  blog...

For 6 portions, I used:
1 pack of Nestle Dahi (400 ml pack of yoghurt/ curd)
1 x 200 gm pack of digestive biscuits
4 tbsp melted butter
100 ml cream
3 tbsp powdered sugar
Grated rind of 1 orange
3 bananas, peeled & sliced
½ cup dried blueberries
½ cup orange juice (optional)
¼ cup peach schnapps (optional)

I hung the Dahi in a clean kitchen cloth before I left for work and “un-hung” it 8 hours later. It lost all the water and became thick and creamy... Ignore my ugly pink plastic bowl if you can!


I also powdered the biscuits before work...



And since I didn’t have access to fresh blueberries, I resorted to dried ones which my Mom just brought back from Canada.


I didn’t like the way they looked (kind of like the difference between fresh grapes and raisins) so I soaked them in orange juice and peach schnapps to plump them up a bit.


Well I also added Bacardi, but I wouldn’t recommend it because I didn’t like what happened!


When I was ready to make the dessert in the evening, I grated the rind off one orange...


I beat the hung curd and rind together for a minute, just to combine them well...


I added the cream and the sugar and mixed it just until combined.


Now, to assemble!! Sorry I don’t have more photos of this part, but it’s simple. I got out my new-ish but favourite set of 6 wine glasses and layered everything...

For each glass, I put 1 heaped tbsp of the biscuit mix, then 1 tbsp of the yoghurt mix, then 4-5 slices of bananas and 1 tbsp of the blueberries. Then I repeated it!!  

I chilled the concoction in the fridge until after dinner, but you can chill for as long as you like. Minimum one hour.  And this is what I got.



 Epilogue: I lost one of those glasses even before it had the time to chill. Unfortunately, the glasses were too tall from my fridge rack and we tried stacking them in the door cavity, with tragic results. Broke my heart.

3 comments:

  1. Looks yum! Where'd you pick up the blueberries? Le marche or INA?

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  2. oh yumm :D i tried this with mangoes too, just in time before the season finally died. must try it soon with some fresh fruit of the season :P

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  3. Z: My mom brought me a packet of dried blueberries when she returned from Canada last week. But I'm very sure that INA has fresh ones and you should use those. I wasn't happy with the dried ones at all. I think I'll use the rest of the packet in cookies or muffins.

    Reva: Mangoes are definitely my favourite fruit for the parfait. That's what I had made the first time, way before the blog :) The general logic I think is that berries are the best type of fruit for this dessert.

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