I think the raspberry probably overpowered the delicate honeysuckle flavour somewhat so I'm going to attempt honeysuckle macaroons soon instead... watch this space!
Raspberry and honeysuckle chocolate cups
Thursday, 20 October 2011
Chocolate cups filled with honeysuckle scented cream and crushed raspberries... I saw these golden raspberries on my way home yesterday and just couldn't resist them. I used honeysuckle syrup in my filling which I found on Wild England's stall at Jimmy's Harvest festival.
I think the raspberry probably overpowered the delicate honeysuckle flavour somewhat so I'm going to attempt honeysuckle macaroons soon instead... watch this space!
I think the raspberry probably overpowered the delicate honeysuckle flavour somewhat so I'm going to attempt honeysuckle macaroons soon instead... watch this space!
Smoking duck, lots of cheese...and a French-style supper
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
I managed to spend a small fortune on cheese recently (a Beaufort, St Marcellin, Tomme de Savoie and Tommette a l'huile to be exact) under the pretext that this would be 'dinner' rather than a snack which therefore justifies the expenditure (female post-purchase-rationalisation logic).
This is actually not that far from the truth - I love the French way of eating - good cheese, good wine, meat and fresh bread, shared with friends. Perfect.
The cheese was mopped up with a date and walnut bread and a smoked duck breast, orange and red chicory salad.
Sometimes, it's the simpler the better with food, and what could be more simple than cheese, bread and red wine...
This is actually not that far from the truth - I love the French way of eating - good cheese, good wine, meat and fresh bread, shared with friends. Perfect.
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| Clockwise from right - St Marcellin, Tomme de Savoie, Tommette a l'huile and Beaufort |
The cheese was mopped up with a date and walnut bread and a smoked duck breast, orange and red chicory salad.
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| Smoked duck breast - from Venn Street Market |
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| Date and walnut bread - from the Old Post Office bakery |
Leiths week 4 - pan fried sea bream with sauce vierge & red onion focaccia
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
This week at Leiths was a busy one... we filleted a sea bream, made bread, and created a sauce vierge.
My sea bream was pan fried on a griddle pan with lots of butter, to ensure the skin was really crispy. This was served with fresh green beans, crushed new potatoes and a sauce vierge. The sauce was made by heating good quality olive oil (200ml) on a low heat for 20 minutes with finely diced shallots, one clove of garlic, a bay leaf and a sprig of thyme. The oil was then removed from the heat and finely chopped parsley, chives and concasse of tomato were added (see Leith's week 2 for concassing method!)
Next, we made a red onion focaccia. The dough for making a good focaccia is notoriously wet so this does make working it fairly tricky. Once we had managed to scrape the mixture off the table, left it to rise and smothered it in roasted garlic and caramelised red onion, the bread was baked in a hot oven for around 20 minutes...
Next week, spatch cock quail with pomegranate molasses and a watercress and feta salad... plus a pear and Medjool date strudel.
My sea bream was pan fried on a griddle pan with lots of butter, to ensure the skin was really crispy. This was served with fresh green beans, crushed new potatoes and a sauce vierge. The sauce was made by heating good quality olive oil (200ml) on a low heat for 20 minutes with finely diced shallots, one clove of garlic, a bay leaf and a sprig of thyme. The oil was then removed from the heat and finely chopped parsley, chives and concasse of tomato were added (see Leith's week 2 for concassing method!)
Next, we made a red onion focaccia. The dough for making a good focaccia is notoriously wet so this does make working it fairly tricky. Once we had managed to scrape the mixture off the table, left it to rise and smothered it in roasted garlic and caramelised red onion, the bread was baked in a hot oven for around 20 minutes...
Next week, spatch cock quail with pomegranate molasses and a watercress and feta salad... plus a pear and Medjool date strudel.
Jane's chocolate cake - officially the most amazing chocolate cake ever...
Sunday, 16 October 2011
OK, so with a title like that, this cake had better live up to expectations...
The recipe is from Jane - a family friend - and I have been eating this cake for birthdays and special occasions for most of my life.. and yes, I even had it as my Wedding cake. I had originally suggested having a Wedding cake shaped like a lobster (because I love the beast yet we could not afford to feed all our guests real lobster). However, this idea was vetoed and instead the cake was heart shaped (admittedly much more romantic and Wedding-appropriate) and covered with Gullian sea shells (and a plastic lobster!) to subdue my crustacean cravings.
Admittedly it's a fair bit more work than a simple all-in-one chocolate sponge but I promise you the results are more than worth the effort... the resulting cake is sticky, densely chocolatey and utterly moreish. Don't cheat on the icing either, it might seem like an extra slog to make proper ganache instead of a quick buttercream but it really is the icing on the cake (scuse the pun)
The recipe for this little beauty is below...
Ingredients:
For the cake...
- 9oz plain flour
- 4 oz drinking chocolate
- 6 oz margarine
- 6oz golden syrup
- 3 oz soft brown sugar
- 2 x eggs
- 7oz milk
- 3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
For the chocolate ganache...
- 200g double cream
- 200g good quality chocolate
To start, make sure you have 2 sandwich tins greased and lined. Melt the margarine, syrup and sugar in a saucepan and then add to the sieved flour and chocolate powder. Add the beaten eggs and whisk. The mixture will be very thick at this stage - and I have a tendency to cover myself and my kitchen with thick chocolate mixture (although I'm sure the cake will work just as well if you miss this stage out).
Heat the milk to blood temperature (i.e. just lukewarm) and then ad to the bicarb. Add the milk mixture to the chocolate and whisk thoroughly. The mix will now be very runny (it's supposed to be).
Split the chocolate mixture between the two sandwich tins and cook at 150C for 40 - 50 minutes (or until a skewer comes out clean).
To make the ganache, you need equal parts of double cream and good quality chocolate (I use one bar of green and blacks dark chocolate and one of their milk bars). Heat the double cream until it's nearly boiling then remove from the heat. Add the chocolate (broken into small pieces). The heat from the cream will melt it. Leave to cool and then whisk until thick. Smother your cake and then lick the bowl clean.
Enjoy with cream, ice cream, or just on its own with a cup of tea.
The recipe is from Jane - a family friend - and I have been eating this cake for birthdays and special occasions for most of my life.. and yes, I even had it as my Wedding cake. I had originally suggested having a Wedding cake shaped like a lobster (because I love the beast yet we could not afford to feed all our guests real lobster). However, this idea was vetoed and instead the cake was heart shaped (admittedly much more romantic and Wedding-appropriate) and covered with Gullian sea shells (and a plastic lobster!) to subdue my crustacean cravings.
Admittedly it's a fair bit more work than a simple all-in-one chocolate sponge but I promise you the results are more than worth the effort... the resulting cake is sticky, densely chocolatey and utterly moreish. Don't cheat on the icing either, it might seem like an extra slog to make proper ganache instead of a quick buttercream but it really is the icing on the cake (scuse the pun)
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| The best wedding cake ever! |
Ingredients:
For the cake...
- 9oz plain flour
- 4 oz drinking chocolate
- 6 oz margarine
- 6oz golden syrup
- 3 oz soft brown sugar
- 2 x eggs
- 7oz milk
- 3/4 tsp bicarbonate of soda
For the chocolate ganache...
- 200g double cream
- 200g good quality chocolate
To start, make sure you have 2 sandwich tins greased and lined. Melt the margarine, syrup and sugar in a saucepan and then add to the sieved flour and chocolate powder. Add the beaten eggs and whisk. The mixture will be very thick at this stage - and I have a tendency to cover myself and my kitchen with thick chocolate mixture (although I'm sure the cake will work just as well if you miss this stage out).
Heat the milk to blood temperature (i.e. just lukewarm) and then ad to the bicarb. Add the milk mixture to the chocolate and whisk thoroughly. The mix will now be very runny (it's supposed to be).
Split the chocolate mixture between the two sandwich tins and cook at 150C for 40 - 50 minutes (or until a skewer comes out clean).
To make the ganache, you need equal parts of double cream and good quality chocolate (I use one bar of green and blacks dark chocolate and one of their milk bars). Heat the double cream until it's nearly boiling then remove from the heat. Add the chocolate (broken into small pieces). The heat from the cream will melt it. Leave to cool and then whisk until thick. Smother your cake and then lick the bowl clean.
Enjoy with cream, ice cream, or just on its own with a cup of tea.
There's a crab in my kitchen!
As impulse buys go, a live crab is probably going to be one of my more random purchases...
Walking through Brixton market I spotted a big brown crab crawling around on top of ice and thought 'I have to have that'. On the walk home - which involved a very much alive crab, with no ties round its claws, trying to break out of a flimsy blue carrier bag - I started to ponder about what I was going to do with this beast.
The simple solution would be to boil it and serve it with lashings of warm butter. But I am going through a 'fennel phase' at the moment so dug out a French recipe for crab, fennel and orange soup from the fish master Rick Stein. This recipe is traditionally made with spider crab - but these seem to be in short supply in London Town - so a brown crab had to suffice.
Now, before I could make the soup, the crab had to be dispatched. I know I should have done this myself, and honestly I was planning to - I even googled 'how to kill a crab'. But having to drive a screwdriver through a living creature was always going to be a job for my husband (aka crab slayer) if I'm honest. Dropping a live crab into boiling water could - for some - seem more preferable than stabbing a moving, wriggling beast to death, but it's really not the most humane way (you also get really tough meat and will find that the crab will shed its legs and claws).You can find a great overview of how to kill a crab humanely here (it basically involves turning it upside down and piercing quickly in the hole under the tail flap).
Once dispatched,my crab was boiled for 20 minutes in salted water, left to cool and then picked apart to get the white and brown meat. Mental note... in the future, I will only ever bother buying picked crab and whole crab claws... picking meat from the cavity of a crab body is fiddly and overrated.
Making the soup involved boiling up the crab shell (I chucked in the claws and legs too) with fennel and leek trimmings for half an hour to make a stock. In a separate pan, I sauteed leeks and fennel with crushed fennel seeds, dried chilli, orange peel and 1/2 a teaspoon of tomato puree. I then added Pernod and set alight to burn off the alcohol. The stock was then added along with the juice of an orange and a pinch of saffron.
Finally the crab meat and a peeled, deseeded chopped tomato was mixed in.
I'm not sure I'll be buying a live crab again - it was pretty traumatic hearing it moving around in the fridge - but the resulting soup is fragrant and delicate and did my crab justice...
Walking through Brixton market I spotted a big brown crab crawling around on top of ice and thought 'I have to have that'. On the walk home - which involved a very much alive crab, with no ties round its claws, trying to break out of a flimsy blue carrier bag - I started to ponder about what I was going to do with this beast.
The simple solution would be to boil it and serve it with lashings of warm butter. But I am going through a 'fennel phase' at the moment so dug out a French recipe for crab, fennel and orange soup from the fish master Rick Stein. This recipe is traditionally made with spider crab - but these seem to be in short supply in London Town - so a brown crab had to suffice.
Now, before I could make the soup, the crab had to be dispatched. I know I should have done this myself, and honestly I was planning to - I even googled 'how to kill a crab'. But having to drive a screwdriver through a living creature was always going to be a job for my husband (aka crab slayer) if I'm honest. Dropping a live crab into boiling water could - for some - seem more preferable than stabbing a moving, wriggling beast to death, but it's really not the most humane way (you also get really tough meat and will find that the crab will shed its legs and claws).You can find a great overview of how to kill a crab humanely here (it basically involves turning it upside down and piercing quickly in the hole under the tail flap).
Once dispatched,my crab was boiled for 20 minutes in salted water, left to cool and then picked apart to get the white and brown meat. Mental note... in the future, I will only ever bother buying picked crab and whole crab claws... picking meat from the cavity of a crab body is fiddly and overrated.
Making the soup involved boiling up the crab shell (I chucked in the claws and legs too) with fennel and leek trimmings for half an hour to make a stock. In a separate pan, I sauteed leeks and fennel with crushed fennel seeds, dried chilli, orange peel and 1/2 a teaspoon of tomato puree. I then added Pernod and set alight to burn off the alcohol. The stock was then added along with the juice of an orange and a pinch of saffron.
Finally the crab meat and a peeled, deseeded chopped tomato was mixed in.
I'm not sure I'll be buying a live crab again - it was pretty traumatic hearing it moving around in the fridge - but the resulting soup is fragrant and delicate and did my crab justice...
Leiths week 3 - twice baked crab souffles and roasted partridge
Tuesday, 11 October 2011
Week three started with twice baked crab and chive souffles. Egg whites were whipped up and mixed with a creamy concoction of egg yolk, béchamel flavoured with nutmeg, white crab meat and chives. Put into buttered pudding basins, these mini souffles were cooked until golden, fluffy and risen (about 15 minutes). We then turned them out, added a mixture of lobster bisque and cream and put them back in the oven (hence the 'twice baked' bit).
Next up, proper Autumn grub - roasted partridge, browned and then roasted on top of puy lentils, smokey pancetta, garlic, chicken stock and onions. Served with buttered green beans this is the type of food I love to eat on a chilly evening.
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| A couple of juicy birds... |
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| A carved juicy bird... |
Food for sharing...
Sunday, 9 October 2011
Feeding people is one of my favourite things to do. I think that the best thing about creating something in your kitchen is sharing the results with loved ones... it makes any effort so worthwhile.
Something as simple as a whole camembert, baked in the oven for 15 minutes with honey, garlic and thyme and served with crusty bread and a few fresh figs is just made for sharing.
Something as simple as a whole camembert, baked in the oven for 15 minutes with honey, garlic and thyme and served with crusty bread and a few fresh figs is just made for sharing.
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| Whole camembert baked in a ceramic pot with garlic, thyme and honey |
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| fresh figs on my windowsill... |
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