Food and Fandom: A Darker Shade of Parfait

You’d think that a rainy Saturday would have helped me get on with my reading, but nope. For the past few days I’ve kind of been in a slump and have been reading at a turtle’s pace lately. Probably slower, because I read like a turtle on a regular basis.

Or maybe it’s because I still have A Darker Shade of Magic on my mind, and I just needed a way to convey that into food. Who knows.

One of the things I did love about ADSoM (a book I’ve gushed about already) was its world’s structure. As far as the reader is concerned, there is a portal between four different Londons, and while much of London can still be recognized in each world, the rest of the area outside of the city differ in more than just name. The Thames alone is enough of an indication that while landmarks are similar, they do not necessarily play the same part.

So I sought to portray the four Londons (Grey, Red, White, and Black) in a type of food. Layered in the order Kell had to travel to get to the Black London portal, that is.

I honestly had a couple options to go about this. The parfait was the first that came to mind, the second being a layer of jello. I also thought about cookies and piping chocolate, but I’d need a more precise hand at mimicking the book covers’ depictions of the Londons. The jello would have given more shape to the “layers” of London, but it would also have taken some time. So I went for a rougher–and quicker–rendition.

The parfait could have honestly been a combination of anything, really. I used pieces of chocolate I’d gotten from Moscow (which was delicious!), frozen raspberries (which were kind of too tarty, unfortunately), and vanilla pudding, which I’d split up so I could color one half a bit darker. I topped the entire thing off with a few pieces of white chocolate, raspberries, and a piece of spiced chocolate from Prague (yes, I seriously went chocolate crazy in all the places I’d visited last summer). Honestly, it took all of 10-15 minutes to make, and very delectable when put together! It was harder to color the white pudding since I ran out of black food coloring, so I mixed a bit of blue and red in for a light shade of purple. Oh, and I might have added cinnamon into the vanilla pudding, because why not.

Verdict: Other than the tarty raspberry, the combo was pretty good! The chocolate pieces certainly lent texture to the whole thing. The layers came out messy, but hey, I can totally just chalk this up to “the four Londons aren’t evenly separated anyway!” It’s so true, and from the looks of what A Gathering of Shadows is about, I’d say the Londons are slowly going to end up bumping and sliding and encroaching upon each other at some point.