Walnut Dessert Mess

We went to see Master Pancake Theater last night. It's basically Mystery Science Theater 3000, but live. The current movie is the first Lord of the Rings and it was amusing. There were a lot of gay jokes, followed by sex jokes, followed by pop culture-y things so much of it was lost on me, but overall, it was a good time. Surprisingly, the best part was the beer. Alamo Drafthouse, being much more than just a theater, has an extensive beer list and among those offered was Magic Hat #9, my most favorite apricot fruit beer. The last time that I looked for it in Texas, I was told that Magic Hat didn't sell any of its beers in Texas, so it was an exciting and tasty find.

The movie didn't start until 11, so we didn't get back until around 1:30, which meant that I had ample time to play on the internets and look for things to cook. After looking through tastespotting, I found a recipe for pistachio brigadeiro, which looked delicious. I'm still not completely sure what a brigadeiro is, but I think it's a Brazilian chocolate truffle and the use of it in those pistachios is loose; however, the recipe calls for nuts, sweetened condensed milk and butter. If you combine those and it's not delicious then you're doing something way wrong.



We had a can of sweetened condensed milk lying around that I had purchased with the intent of making caramel. I had read somewhere that if you just boil the entire can for a few hours, the insides would just turn to caramel. It sounded wonderful, but Colby didn't want to deal with explaining to the landlord why we set off a bomb made of metal and caramel in our apartment, so that idea was quickly nixed. Nevertheless, the sweetened condensed milk was sitting around begging to be used and the pistachio brigadeiro was the perfect choice.

Given the recent pistachio scare, we didn't have any on hand, but we did have some walnuts that we impulsively bought from costco (then again, which purchases from costco *aren't* impulsive?). It turns out that it takes awhile to use up three pounds of walnuts, so they've been slowly used and living in my freezer for awhile.

Walnut dessert mess
3.5 oz by weight walnuts, unroasted, unsalted
1 can sweetened condensed milk
1 tbs butter + more for coating
1/2 tsp fleur de sel sea salt

Grease a shallow dish (i used a pie pan) with butter. Process walnuts until they're ~.5 mm (or sort of look like lumpy wet sand). Over low heat, combine walnuts sweetened condensed milk, butter, and fleur de sel. It's important to use a salt that works well with sweets because it's not going to taste good with iodized table salt. Also, the next time I do this, I'm going to use 1/4 tsp of fleur de sel instead. heat until the mixture thickens a bunch. pour into the greased dish and let cool.




At this point, you could form them into cute little balls and serve them on tiny wooden spoons with ribbons, but I don't have those so my dessert thingy is still sitting in the pie plate. Colby just took some and ate it from a bowl. We have no pretensions in this housepartment. ;)