Ambrosia has always fascinated me, not the food of the Greek gods, rather the good ol’ American buffet speciality. (And maybe by fascinated I should clarify– repelled.) I remember a few family BBQ’s at my grandma house. All the food would be lined up on the dinning room cum buffet table: potato salad, crocks of baked beans, ears of corn, and way down, at the end of the table, a Melmac bowl full of ambrosia.

You would think this salad would be endlessly pleasing to a child’s palate, mandarin orange segments, chunks of pineapple, dried coconut, mini-marshmallows tumbling about. Sounds pleasing enough. But it was the “dressing” that turned me off every time. The thick, globby, preservative-laden dressing, or sauce…maybe covering is the best choice of words for the concoction, which was so dense you could not even see what it concealed. Sometimes it was made of sweetened sour cream, other times an entire container of whipped topping was mounded then mixed into the fruit, and other times, it was a combination of the two. Regardless of its nature, this mixture just did not do it for me.

I’m not even sure what made me think of this “salad” of yore, but I started thinking about making a new ambrosia. How about mixing in a bit of plain creme fraiche, unadorned, and just enough to coat but not smother? And why must the fruit be peaked, easily hidden by this sweet dressing? I wanted something bright, not buried– I wanted berries. And this is what I got.

Pink, delicious ambrosia. These cherries and raspberries were the berries and cream of my dreams. I pitted so many cherries, bursting with juice, for my ambrosia, that my fingertips became sanguine, but I didn’t care. I spooned in a tablespoon or two of creme fraiche, and mixed carefully. The topping turned from stark white to a stunning, rosy pink shade. Then I folded in the much more delicate raspberries, each knob of the berry getting a proper, thin coating. The creamy topping was buttery and just rich enough, nothing like adding a bit of decadence to a normal fruit salad.

And there you have it. I’m not sure if this ambrosia would have gone over very well at my childhood BBQ’s, but as a dessert at my adult dinner, I loved it.