My friend Marisha adores Port Wine. She offers it to me whenever I visit and I'll politely sip a glass, but I find it too sweet and cloying to drink more than a couple tablespoons at a time. Somehow, Marisha mistook my manners for a genuine interest in the spirit, and I showed up to work one day to find an entire bottle of the stuff sitting on my desk.
The bottle found it's way to my home, where it gathered dust in an upper cabinet for a year. When Raul visited us last month and announced he was taking over our kitchen for an evening, he asked if I had any port. I told him I had plenty of it, and hoped he had a good use for it.
Indeed, he did. We were treated to a luscious dessert featuring summer berries, port wine and ice cream.
Berries and Port Wine over Norwegian Gold Cake
1 pint fresh strawberries, cleaned and halved
1 pint fresh blueberries
1 pint fresh blackberries or red raspberries
1-2 cups port wine, enough to cover berries
sugar to taste
several large scoops of premium vanilla ice cream
Clean the berries and place in a non reactive bowl. Pour the wine over the fruit and allow to marinate for a couple hours in the fridge. After a couple hours, scoop the ice cream into the fruit mixture, return to the fridge for another hour.
Serve the above mixture over Norwegian Gold Cake, a luscious, dense pound cake that can stand up to a rich mixture like this.
Norwegian Gold Cake
1 1/3 c. unsifted flour
5 eggs
1 1/3 c. sugar
1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. almond extract
1/2 tsp. salt
Nutritional information: 1,643 g carbohydrates, 10,478 calories, 136 g fat
