ounces chocolate chips
1 cup frozen, sweetened strawberries, thawed
½ cup caramel sauce
½ cup butterscotch sauce
1 rectangular block of vanilla ice cream (half-gallon)
4 plastic squeeze bottles
METHOD:
1 In a saucepan, heat the cream to a simmer. Add the chocolate chips and remove the pan from the heat. Let sit for 10 minutes, and then stir the melted chocolate into the cream to combine. Pour this chocolate sauce into a plastic squeeze bottle and keep in a warm place.
2 Purée the strawberries with their liquid in a blender and then strain it. Pour this strawberry sauce into a plastic squeeze bottle and set aside.
3 Heat the jars of caramel and butterscotch in a saucepan of warm water. Pour the sauces into two separate plastic squeeze bottles and keep in a warm place.
4 Peel the sides of the ice cream container down to expose the sides of the rectangular block of ice cream.
5 Cut the ice cream block, with a knife warmed in hot water, into 1- to 2-inch slices and place them on each guest's plate.
6 Set the squeeze bottles of sauces out for your guests to paint their own ice cream canvases à la Jackson Pollock.
Painter's Palette Cookies
SERVES 12
INGREDIENTS:
4 ounces soft butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1 tablespoon cream
½ teaspoon vanilla
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1¾ cups flour
1 egg yolk
food coloring (red, blue, yellow)
METHOD:
1 Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.
2 In a mixing bowl with an electric mixer cream together butter and sugar until fluffy. Add egg, cream, and vanilla and mix well. Scrape down the sides of the bowl.
3 In a separate bowl mix together the salt, baking powder, and flour and then add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture. Mix to form a smooth dough.
4 Roll out the dough on a lightly floured surface to prevent sticking. With a 3-inch x 4-inch oval or egg-shaped cookie cutter, cut cookies out of the dough. Brush excess flour off the cookies and place them on cookie sheets.
5 Cut a small off-center circle out of the cookie with a canapé cutter or the large end of a pastry piping tip to resemble the part of the palette that the thumb and brushes go through.
6 Divide the egg yolk, mix it with different colors of food coloring, and paint it on the cookies in circles around the edge to resemble the paint on a painter's palette.
7 Bake cookies for 12-15 minutes. Cool on a rack.
Proper Attire
Inform your guests on the invitation to wear or bring their own painting smocks because they will be creating their own edible artwork at the party. Suggest that they “brush up” on their knowledge of modern artists and hold a game of guess-the-artist by showing pictures of paintings with the artists' signatures covered. Award various art supplies, such as paints and brushes, for prizes.
Titanic Tragedy
In 1912 when Peggy was thirteen years old, her father, Benjamin Guggenheim, brother of Solomon Guggenheim of art museum fame, went down with the Titanic in full evening attire. After his death, heiress Peggy was thought of as the “poor relation” in the family.
The Queen of Palm Beach's Luncheon
Marjorie Merriweather Post
Marjorie Merriweather Post was the only daughter of breakfast food innovator C.W. Post. Her father's inventions include Postum, a coffee substitute, Grape-Nuts cereal, and Post Toasties breakfast flakes. Born in 1887 in Springfield, Illinois, Marjorie was involved at an early age in her father's entrepreneurial projects. As a child she glued Postum labels onto the product's packages and when her father moved the family to Battle Creek, Michigan, she accompanied him on sales trips to win shelf space in a Grand Rapids grocery store next to his fellow inventor and competitor Kellogg. After Postum's success came a ready-to-eat breakfast food that was touted as “Marjorie's Baby Food”—Grape-Nuts. Marjorie later made her own mark on the company her father started by purchasing Clarence Birdseye's “frosted foods” company, General Foods. She was sympathetic to the average housewife's drudgery in the kitchen even though she didn't cook herself, and she was determined to make a difference by providing them with convenient alternatives for preparing the family meals.
The heiress to the cereal fortune became the toast of Palm Beach society along with her second husband, E.F. Hutton, in the 1920s, a time when the stuffy Old Society was breaking down to make way for the Jazz Age's cult of youth. The virtues of hospitality and sociability from Marjorie's middle-class Midwestern childhood and her participation in her family's acts of charity to the ill and needy combined with her fortune to pave the way for the elaborate benefit balls she staged in Palm Beach. Marjorie, now the “Queen of Palm Beach,” threw theme parties and costume parties with friends such as the flamboyant showman Flo Ziegfeld and his actress wife Billie Burke. In a tribute to those sophisticated soirees, here is a dinner menu suitable for entertaining your friends Palm Beach style.
A Cereal Queen's Party
This luncheon menu starts with a Cold Cucumber Soup that was once on the menu of one of Marjorie's friend Billie Burke's dinner parties. The dainty Palm Beach Finger Sandwiches are so called because a sandwich filled with pimento cheese is sometimes called a “Palm Beach.” (The vintage Highland Park Pharmacy lunch counter in Dallas has it on their menu.) Macadamia Nut Crusted Trout is an elegant entrée and it happens to have one of Marjorie's pet projects in the ingredients: macadamia nuts. Ms. Post financed a cousin's idea to plant macadamia seedlings in Hawaii and made arrangements with General Electric to create a macadamia nutshell cracking machine. Before this, there was no macadamia nut industry.
For dessert, a nod to the breakfast cereal that made Marjorie Merriweather Post's ascendancy to the throne as the Queen of Palm Beach possible, Grape-Nuts Ice Cream.
Cold Cucumber Soup
SERVES 6
INGREDIENTS:
3 cucumbers
½ cup chicken broth
1
