Sometimes the most plain dishes can turn out to be culinary and artistic pleasures.  I got really lucky the past couple times it was my turn to make dessert (well, uhm, that’s pretty much any time we got pot luck at the office or at Jung Suwon).

Dr. Tae Yun Kim invited a lot of us over to her place for a July 4th BBQ bash.  It was a wonderful time, and we had a lot of fun and training at the BBQ, where Grandmaster Scott Salton cooked up a bunch of mean steaks and gave a good reason to call the hamburgers “flame broiled!”

So for July 4th, my dessert contribution for the great Jung Suwon BBQ had to be red, white, and blue.  I took a very simple cheese cake recipe and substituted honey for the sugar, and instead of a crust, or pre-baked cracker crust, I simply crumbled a gluten-free cookie (any flavor works fine) into the bottom of a cupcake liner, and filled the liners with the cheese cake batter.  Once baked and cooled, I put blueberries and raspberries on the top – there is your red, white and blue!

And for our surprise guests yesterday, I didn’t even bake anything – it was way too hot, and not much time either.  So I did something very similar to what I did for the July 4th BBQ:  individual dessert cups, with a thin cookie at the bottom, and some pudding, made with coconut milk (for our die-hard cheesecake loving guests I mixed in some already whipped, low-fat cream cheese), and added a simple raspberry on top.  Since this dessert didn’t firm up as much as I had thought it would, the beautiful flower shaped cupcake liners didn’t hold their shape, so I kept them in the metal muffin pan.  But how to serve that?  Here is what I came up with:

Because, as Dr. Tae Yun Kim reminds us, whatever you can see in your mind, you can also do! The power of visualization!