Things not to do with a Carrot

I am being oddly productive on my holiday – I guess that’s what you get when you aren’t working 10 hour days. Oh yeah, and when someone else does the dishes, I mentioned how wonderful my Mother in Law was right? How someone so diligent with dish washing managed to spawn someone who is so reluctant to do my dishes I’ll never know.

Anyway. Seeing I was sitting around on my backside not doing very much I thought I could make dessert. Now Central Otago weather (in the summer at least) and the Cold Sweets section are just made for each other. Those of you who remember back to "Special Jelly" and "Lemon Souffle" will be aware that I have not had a great deal of luck with the cold sweets section in the past. God, apparently, loves a trier. But then this recipe was never ever going to turn out well.

Now I scanned through the ingredients of the recipes in the section and seeing there was no Gelatine in the house and only one packet of lemon jelly crystals in the house I had a limited selection of recipes to choose from. One in fact. Orange Jelly Sponge. Which oddly contains neither orange – in any form – or sponge. It does how ever contain carrot so it is at least partially orange in colour. I feel the need to explain…

Orange Sponge pudding – make up a pack of jelly crystals with boiling water, cool, add milk and beaten egg yolk, cool until almost set. Whip the mixture and fold in egg white and grated carrot. Set.

This was foul. The lemony mousy bit was quite nice but the grated carrot did not work in the least. It was really quite scary. I apologised before anyone saw it, then while I served it up and again while we were eating it. Perhaps I should start measuring these recipes by the number of apologies required. We sat around the dinner table, heads in hands, asking "WHY?". Surely no one who had ever actually made this recipe would think it was a good idea to share it with others – and surely they wouldn’t have thought it was worth printing.

I wonder if there is anyone else out there who has ever actually cooked this. I wonder if perhaps all of the housewives in 1966 took one look at this and thought, "carrots in jelly, you’ve got to be joking" and flipped over the page to the recipe for trifle. Perhaps no one else out there has ever made orange sponge pudding. If it hadn’t been so incredibly awful I would almost feel a little sad.