Love is... Pineapple Tarts

Love is... Pineapple Tarts

Work is high stress at the moment (really! more than usual) and I am at work early morning till late every evening till at least 10pm since mid last week. Coupled with stress at home (literally speaking), it really wasn't a good idea to tell *Gallant that I will be making pineapple tarts for him to bring home to his family.

Too late to put foot in mouth as he has told his mother and I am committed to making tarts! What horrors it must be to be a disappointment or one-who-does-not-keep-her-word to a lady I was keen to impress.

So on a late Friday evening, *Gallant and I went to the hypermart, practically minutes before it closed and bought 10 ripe pineapples.

An hour later we were peeling and chopping. Not exactly the easiest task as a pineapple had all these 'pineapple eyes' to cut out and the core to cut away! Plus the acid was really unkind to the hands, with such a nasty sting!

It was 2am when we started boiling. Constant stirring was required as an unattended pineapple jam would start burning exactly 8 minutes unattended. *Gallant persuaded me to nap for a while but he left me sleeping until the morning - and was stirring the jam until 6.30am in the morning.

Saturday wasn't exactly kind either as both of us had work in the office and lab. Nonetheless, we grabbed a quick lunch at Holland Village and shopped at Da Paolo gourmet for Sunday's lunch (the hand made truffle pasta is heavenly! We combined truffle pasta with zucchini pasta sauce for a sinfully rich but oh-so-yummy-worth-the-calories lunch).

Come 9pm Saturday evening, cookie baking started again. We had trouble with our crumbling dough and our jam's consistency was less than smooth for aesthetic purposes on the cookie. The dough was so dry that no amount of egg or milk seemed to help and we could not even roll out the cute little 'x' that usually adorns pineapple tarts.

I was crushed. Obviously because before this potential mother in law of mine sees me, she will see my imperfect pineapple tarts. And with all this effort, buying cute little cookie boxes, cross referencing recipes online and checking out cookie baking tips on the net and asking about, my tarts seemed like a disaster.

But I guess I was missing out on the less obvious point of this mission for the perfect tarts... his love.

Although unsaid that I was out to impress his mother, *Gallant was there to help out on what other men must view to have been a woman's silly obsession with baking and sweet food.

Chopping, baking, cooking, rolling, cutting dough and shaping cookies... he put in his time and effort (even had to run back to lab to finalize his experiment half way) to help me see this through. I also know my boyfriend isn't the kind to want to be seen baking cookies and we were doing this for two nights in his male hostel.

So who cares if I can't really taste these dry, pineapple chunk cookies for the mess that they really are as for now they are the most delicious thing I've ever tasted!