"Matzo Mia!" by Roberta Alexander

I grew up in a secular household, so no one is more surprised than I am to find myself attending Friday night services.

But, I like this temple community very much and I like the fact that the prayers are sung. Never mind that I don’t understand Hebrew; it seems that I, who earn a living using words, don’t care what the words say.

And thus I found myself with a new task: making a dessert for the community Seder, one that is kosher for Passover.

Did I mention that I don’t bake? My idea of dessert is a piece of fruit or some ice cream. Still, I’ve always enjoyed cooking, and when my kids were growing up, I introduced them to some of the traditional Eastern European stuff that I grew up with. Stuffed cabbage went over a lot better than pickled tongue.

I wanted them to understand the culture they came from, but I was also interested in experimenting with other cuisines.

As it happens, my history with serious ethnic cooking is not encouraging.

Take, for example, the great hamantaschen experiment. Hamantaschen are triangular pastries filled with fruit or poppy seed that are eaten during Purim, a spring holiday. The cookies are named for Haman, the bad guy in the story, and his three-cornered hat. I invited some friends to join the kids and me one year.

I’d never done it before, but I had a recipe and I knew how to read. How hard could it be? The answer turned out to depend on knowing that in baking you cannot just substitute whole wheat flour for white. That is why we had fruit-filled hockey pucks. Did I mention that I don’t bake?

So here I am, years later and presumably wiser. I still don’t bake, and haven’t a clue how to make something using potato starch, or some acceptable substitute for flour.

One of the things about Passover is that it comes with a lot of picky rules about what you can eat. Really picky, beyond the usual bans on pork and seafood. The whole matzo thing really complicates the cooking. I use matzo all year long, but matzo that’s kosher for Passover is available only during a small window in the spring.

Still, what I lack in culinary ability, I make up for in research skills. On one of my very own shelves was a book on Jewish cooking, including a section on food for Passover. I eliminated a lot of stuff because it looked too complicated or required ingredients I’d have trouble finding.

Then I found the recipe for chocolate covered matzo. It sounded promising, since I would eat cardboard if it was covered in chocolate, and there are certain similarities between cardboard and matzo. Plus, it had only three ingredients.

The basic recipe is this: you break the matzos into pieces, you cover them with melted preserves, then refrigerate until they set. Then, you paint over them with melted chocolate and chill them. Then, you repeat the process on the other side of the matzo.

Not hard. But time consuming and very messy. When the phone rang and I had to get back to work, I spent the ensuing conversation picking chocolate out from under my nails, up onto my forearms and on my shirt. Most disappointing, the results didn’t look, well, nice. The chocolate was lumpy, and didn’t cover all the preserves, which were also lumpy. They tasted fine, but I could hardly ask everyone to close their eyes while they ate them. They had an amateur look that I didn’t like. It did not occur to me that when it came to melting chocolate and making desserts, I was an amateur.

So it was back to the drawing board. My next experiment was a kugel (pudding) made of matzo, eggs, preserves, nuts and fruit. I make a pretty good noodle kugel but, of course, noodles are banned for Passover. This was easy enough to make, and it too was delicious. But it looked … pale. Kind of pasty. Sort of like oatmeal that’s been sitting too long. By now I had a refrigerator full of Passover dessert trial runs that did not meet my suddenly exacting esthetic standards. Since this would be my first year of Seder attendance, I wanted something that looked good. Not too spectacular, or I might get drafted into making stuff on a regular basis. Still, I didn’t want to bring something that was the culinary equivalent of a guy who couldn’t be bothered tucking in his shirt.

It seems my pride was involved. I know pride is a big sin for Christians; I am unclear on whether this is also a no-no for Jews. Didn’t matter … I wanted something that looked nice.

My fall-back position had been the knowledge that I could always bring fruit or buy a box of macaroons.

I shoved aside the dessert trials in the refrigerator and found half a bag of oranges from the farmers market. A little work with a grapefruit knife gave me cute orange cups, which I filled with slices of orange, strawberry and mango.

On a table amid a sea of Baked Things, Chocolate Things and Baked Chocolate Things, they looked sweet and pretty.

Ritually pure.

And no baking.

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