Edmonds cake Woulfe makes good on a reckless vow. Evidently delirious on white sugar and raisins, I also made a promise: to come back in summer and do the cold desserts section.
Now I stand in front of you, just a girl with a jelly mould, asking you to follow her into an opaque and quivering world. After the puddings ranking went up, a PR person sent me an Edmonds spatula and a kids’ cookbook and gently let me know certain recipes have been updated since 1998. We use the edition that was pressed tearfully into our suitcases as we left home. In 1998, Edmonds was offering 18 cold desserts. Most are jellies of a kind, but there’s also pavlova and trifle, both of which I urge you not to cook this Christmas.
Throughout, there’s a lot of whipping until stiff, a lot of chilling, a lot of dubious combining of dairy with other dairy. Also jelly crystals and custard and eggs. A bowl of white frothy-looking stuff with canned apricots pocked on top. We can the hands of two children who are clearly interested in getting a nosy at this monstrosity. Like the puddings before them, the cold desserts do have their good points. Further, lots of the names are enjoyable to say.
They also have an air of the bizarre, like fungi or sea anemones. Bring a Melrose Cream to a barbecue and at least you’ll have something to talk about. Content warning for vegans: lots of these desserts function like meatless turduckens. They’re simply layer upon layer of animal products. I thought about this too much, and like the animal products the thoughts compounded, peaking with the penultimate dessert I made, Spanish Cream. Mix the yolks and the milk, add gelatine, fold through clouds of billowy egg whites. We gave a lot of desserts away after a taste test and they didn’t even mind, inured as they were after the winter puddings bonanza.