2020: Starfleet

During the COVID-19 quarantine that extended through summer 2020, I was not sure I would do a birthday dessert project, seeing as there were to be no standard birthday festivities, but Casey suggested I could do something inspired by Star Trek since I had been binge-watching a lot during quarantine. After I thought about it, I remembered I had bought supplies to make cream cheese custard, definitely wanted to make lemon bars anyway, still had a bag of frozen rhubarb...but what dessert is blue?...

In the final result, the insignia was cream cheese custard with a black licorice star; the command (or TOS operations) section was strawberry rhubarb, left unsweetened because of the amount of sugar around it; and the operations (or TOS command) section was lemon bars. The sciences section was (appropriately) the most experimental—unable to think of anything else blue in my month or so of planning, I made a mousse flavored and colored with blue Jell-O.

Apart from the custard, this was extremely easy to make since I am very used to making lemon bars, and the other parts were super simple. Assembly was a little more work—I made a mold out of foil to freeze the custard in, and then for final assembly, kept moving the dish between the refrigerator and freezer so the custard would stay cold enough but the rhubarb did not freeze. It was absolutely not a perfect system, and I probably could have put more thought into it, but given this was my the simplest birthday dessert project in years, I am not going to complain.