Dessert is pretty much the last thing that I want to write about today. I’m on the home stretch of a 7-day sugar detox which may not seem all that commendable to you, but let me remind you that I write about sugar for a living and a significant part of my job is to taste dessert, create new dessert concepts and to stare at photos of dessert for eight hours a day. If that sounds like a dream job to you, I assure you that it is. It’s just not a dream job during the seven days you’ve sworn off sugar (or on Doughnut Friday at the office, for that matter).
For an entire week, my detox partner-in-crime Courtney and I said no to all things sugar which is pretty much the same as saying no to all things happiness. If that sounds dramatic, think of a world where coffee doesn’t have creamer, wine doesn’t exist and you can’t put five spoonfuls of brown sugar in your oatmeal—like I said, all things happiness. There were a few casualties along the way (looking at you, ketchup, ranch and cafeteria tomato basil soup), but for the most part, it was a rather successful venture. Huge shout out to Google who never judged my “does ____ have sugar in it” search inquiries every day.
Innocent P.S.A. here: educate yourself on sugar and evaluate what it’s doing to your life. This experimental detox blew my mind (and in the words of my mother, made me a little on edge). Although I didn’t see any physical results or benefits from it, the mental self control was totally worth it.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s move on to discussing how you should totally make this sugar cookie-crusted, cream cheese-filled, raspberry-topped dessert. Hey, even the nutrition experts advise having a cheat day.
The Recipe
April’s Recipe of the Month is coincidentally the Dessert of the Month on bettycrocker.com. It’s a five-star recipe and I can tell you from experience that each star is well deserved. This Raspberry Almond Tray Tart is one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen and it feeds a crowd, which was perfect for me since I over-enthusiastically signed up to make it for all of our church volunteers—on Easter Sunday.
It starts with a sugar cookie crust mixed in with chopped almonds. The cookie crust is covered with a creamy layer of sugar and cream cheese and then topped with raspberries and a red currant glaze. This dessert is legitimately a taste of spring and although my photo and raspberry placement doesn’t do it justice, it’s really, really pretty. I will warn you however, the recipe calls for six cups of raspberries. Raspberries are not cheap, but you can easily adjust the recipe to use blueberries or strawberries.
Click here for the recipe>
The Book
If there ever was a person who entered the deepest parts of my soul and came out with a unequivocal illustration of the rawest, realest, most vulnerable parts of my heart, it would be author Lysa TerKeurst. She may sound familiar to you because I shamelessly re-post her quotes regularly on Facebook, but you maybe also know her as the founder of Proverbs 31 Ministries.
I took two weeks to dive into her latest book, Uninvited: Living Loved When You Feel Less Than, Left Out and Lonely and I can’t possibly put into words how fundamental this book has been in my personal life. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on your own healing journey, reeling from an unexpected goodbye, or happily embracing each and every person in your life—rejection doesn’t discriminate and each of us has fought our own war with insecurity, abandonment or feeling like we’ll never measure up. Whether it’s the result of a broken relationship or friendship, a closed career door or a parent who walked out on you, we have all walked the lonely hallways of rejection, and coming back from that is a war all in itself. If you’re not healing from a past rejection, you’re likely experiencing some sort of fear about a future rejection. Rejection is powerful and we fear it in the deepest parts of our being; it affects our relationships, our decisions and if we’re not careful, it becomes permanently sewn into our identity.
I spent many mornings drinking coffee and curled up in bed letting the words of Uninvited invade hidden hurts that I had hoped I buried deep enough. It was painful, it was ugly, it was real and it was healing. I would venture to say that this is the best book I’ve ever read—and it’s one that I plan to buy and to go through again and piece apart. Three chapters aligned so closely with my heart that I had to walk away from the book a few times: “Miracles in the Mess,” “Moving Through the Desperate In-Between” and “I Want to Run Away.”
There were other compelling chapters like “Her Success Does Not Threaten Mine,” “What I Thought Would Fix Me Didn’t,” and “When Our Normal Gets Snatched.” I’m actually begging you to read this book. I’m tempted to go on, but I’d rather share a few words from Uninvited that I loved.
Quotes that I Journaled From This Book
“There is something wonderfully sacred that happens when a girl chooses to realize that being set aside is actually God’s call for her to be set apart.”
“My heart struggles to make peace between God’s ability to change hard things and His apparent decision not to change them for me.”
“You can’t expect stability from a broken identity.”
“I couldn’t keep my old broken beliefs, nail a little Jesus truth to the side and expect stability. I knew I had to stop assessing God’s goodness by how my life felt at any given time.”
“If God is good and God is good to me, then I must fill in the gaps of all the unknowns of my life with a resounding statement of trust: God is good at being God.”
“Giving with strings of secret expectations attached is the greatest invitation to heartbreak.”
“Relationships don’t come in packages of perfection. Relationships come in packages of potential.”