Candy in Cream

Ok, a foreword before we begin.  This recipe calls for the making of caramel.  If you've never made caramel before there is a tiny (when i say tiny i meant humongous) chance that this dish will be, what my always encouraging little sister calls "an epic fail".

Like all things embraced by the masses strawberry and cream have become this rather cliche, pedestrian dish.  It's just too obvious of a pair, like cut & paste, starsky & hutch or, if i was the jesus-y type, adam & eve.  you get the drift.  Although i enjoy all of those things immensely (cut & paste, my homies), they can get a little, how the french say, banal.  So i've decided to give our little friends the strawberries and cream my favourite thing in the whole world to do.  Makeover! (*clap own hands).

What you need:

• 8 medium-large sized strawberries
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1 cup Mascarpone cream (this is what i use in my recipe but if you're tight on budget, cream cheese will do)
• 1 lemon
• fresh rosemary, finely chopped
• 2 skewers
• 1 foil pie plate

If you're new to making caramel, I suggest you start by preparing all the ingredients first and leaving the caramel last on your list.

1. skew the strawberries, 4 for each skewer, make sure the length of your skewer is quite a bit longer than the diameter of your pie plate.
2. place the skewered strawberries on top of the pie plate, making sure that they're not touching the bottom of the plate. 

- Imagine the people as your strawberries.

- Take a second to recover from that image.

At this point, put the plate aside and get started on your cream.

1. beat the mascarpone with powdered sugar (taste to get the right amount of sugar)
2. grate some lemon zest into the cream
3. squeeze the lemon juice into the cream
4. add rosemary 
5. gently fold the cream to mix.

Now for the caramel, of course you can do all the above while waiting for the caramel to boil, but if you're new at this, trust me, you wanna keep an eye on it.

1. add about 8 tablespoon of water to a saucepan (preferably a nice thick pan)
2. add 1 cup of sugar to the pan
3. put on extremely low heat
4. when the the bubbles get smaller and starts to turn golden brown, quickly remove it from the heat (Warning: don't muck about, sugar melts at a very high temperature, so that pan is HOT) and pour the caramel onto your strawberries.

Let the caramel strawberries cool down for a bit.  Set your plate, cream in the center.  Slide the gorgeous crunchy candy strawberries off the skewers and place them on top of cream and devour.

Yield: 2 serving