It’s been way too long since we had a showstopper of a dessert. When I look over the last four years of archives, it seems that practical, slightly boring and grownup things like salad and dinner have nudged out cooking purely for the purpose of generating and distributing decadent joy. The Celebration Cake category looks like the land that time forgot. And so on this very snowy/slushy day, and the day before Valentine’s, no less, I’d like to recommend: Not a weeknight dinner.

Here is a three-tiered chocolate pavlova, a crackly-edged, pillowy-centered meringue, with a few messy, wonderful things between and on top of it: raspberry curd, barely sweetened whipped cream, a drizzle of chocolate ganache, fresh raspberries, and a dusting of snow, almost as pretty as what’s out my window right now. There are corners you can cut if you wish: you could use a drizzle of storebought chocolate sauce, you could make a quicker raspberry dessert sauce instead of making the curd, but as the curd uses 6 egg yolks and the pavlova uses 6 whites, you might find the balance of ingredients when you make both as satisfying as I do. You could also revert to the single-layer chocolate pavlova in the archives, should you need less of everything.

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