Stuff yer bake

Having seen a lot of failed attempts at Chocolate fondant puddings on Celebrity Masterchef this week, I thought I would like to give one a try. I have had shop bought ones before and relished their divine rich taste. To me they are the ultimate of decadent puddings, and the worst things for you always taste the best.

The recipe I followed from the BBC Food page seemed simple enough but I fell at the final hurdle of timings and ended up with a runny, albeit delcious, mess served with orange and vanilla ice cream. I remained undeterred, though, had another go the following night and left them in for a few minutes longer, which was much more successful but still not quite done enough. They still tasted absolutely divine, but I will keep trying until I get the perfect consistency. It’s a hard job, but somebody’s gotta do it!

When Nick Pledger from Island Seafare Ltd said he would like to send me some Queenie scallops to try I was very excited. It was all in aid of the up and coming Isle of Man queenie scallop festival and marine day which is taking place for the first time to celebrate the well loved local seafood. There is also a competition to enter your best queenie scallop recipe, with the prize being that the Hairy Bikers will cook your recipe on marine day and you will receive a personalised trophy and £100 worth of seafood. 

While waiting for my exciting delivery I wracked my brains as how best to capture their subtle soft flavour and came up with a few ideas but since he very kindly sent me 1 Kilo of the little beauties I could try them all.  The first one I wanted to try was a saffron risotto but I didn’t want to mix the scallops into it, I wanted to showcase them round the edge of a risotto-y mound and have some sort of butter melting over them. The presentation is a little pretentious but I think it looks good and it shows off the most important part of the dish. The taste was really good too, even if I do say so myself.

Ingredients

12 Queenie scallops

200g risotto rice

750ml of fish, vegetable or chicken stock

half a wine glass of white wine or vermouth

a very large pinch of saffron

a tblsp of olive oil

a stick of celery, finely chopped

1 medium onion, finely chopped

zest of an orange

40g butter

a handful of pine nuts, toasted

salt and freshly ground black pepper

smoked Maldon sea salt (optional)

extra virgin olive oil to serve.

Begin by making the butter. Coarsely chop the toasted pine nuts, place them in a bowl with the orange zest, a little seasoning and the butter and mash together with a fork. Leave to one side. Heat the olive oil in a pan over a medium heat, add the onion and celery and cook for about five minutes to soften. Stir in the rice to coat it with the oil and cook for a minute then add the vermouth or white wine and stir until it is all absorbed. Bring the stock up to simmering point and add the saffron. Start adding ladles of the stock into the rice and stir continuously until it is absorbed. Repeat the process until the rice become soft, but still retains a very slight bite. Once cooked, take the risotto off the heat, dollop half the butter on top and cover with a lid for about 10 minutes.

Take your scallops, remove the coral and toss them both separately in olive oil. Heat a frying pan over a medium to high heat and add the corals. Cook for a couple minutes until nicely coloured then stir into the risotto. Season the risotto to taste then place a mound of the risotto in the middle of a warmed plate. Take the scallops, add them to the pan and cook for about a minute on each side. Dot the rest of the butter on the top of each scallop and allow to melt. Remove from the pan and arrange around the plate, drizzling with the buttery juices from the pan and a little extra virgin olive oil. Finally crumble a few crystals of the smoked sea salt on top of each scallop and serve immediately.

This is another cake that I made for someone in work. It was for their Grandmother’s 90th birthday and she apparently was very keen on knitting, sewing and cross stitch so I decided on a sewing box cake. The name is done in brush embroidery, which is a really nice effect where you pipe the required design and then take a very slightly damp paintbrush and drag the icing in. I am definitely getting better at the icing and having less mishaps which is good really as I’m doing my Cousin’s wedding cake in October!

I have seen quite a few recipes for panna cotta recently and since I have never tried to make it, I wanted to give it a go. I found this recipe and thought it looked nice and simple and now that the strawberries in my garden were starting to blush into a vibrant red colour, I wanted to serve them with it.

I first of all made the lemon thyme sugar. I bought a bunch of lemon thyme the other day to go with squid but I don’t actually like it much in savoury things as I think it tastes a bit soapy so I wondered whether I could make something sweet with it. Basil sugar seems to be very fashionable at the minute so I thought I would try and do the same with lemon thyme.

Pick the leaves off a small bunch of lemon thyme and blitz in a blender with about 6 tablespoons of caster sugar. It should go a nice green colour but will also be a bit damp so spread it out on a baking sheet and put in a very low oven for about 10-15 minutes until it has dried out. You can then keep your sugar in a sealed container and use it whenever you like. 

I made the panna cotta next and left it to cool in the fridge for an hour or so. 

Next take a couple of handfuls of fresh ripe strawberries (you can pretty much use any fruit you like here) hull and halve them and put into a saucepan with a tablespoon of icing sugar and about half a tablespoon of Limoncello liqueur. Warm the berries until the juices start to run but don’t let the strawberries go too soft. Take off the heat and leave to cool. 

Once the panna cotta is set, loosen it from it’s mould and turn out onto a plate, scatter the strawberries around and garnish with the lemon thyme sugar.

The texture and taste of the panna cotta was lovely but the only thing I didn’t like was that all the vanilla seeds sunk to the bottom of the mould and made the panna cotta look burnt and I also need to work on getting them cleanly out of the mould. I think my blowtorch may have to be used. I will definitely have another go at making panna cotta and might try a few different flavours too. 

I bought this months BBC Good Food magazine and was very excited when I came across a recipe for cherry vodka. The other half and I are partial to the odd gin, but haven’t really drunk much vodka for years. I knew I had a bottle in the cupboard that had been untouched for some time, so I thought a revamp of it’s flavourless, colourless contents would be a tremendous idea and in a few weeks time we would be able to able savour it’s luscious sweet flavours in a cocktail or two sat in the sun (hopefully). 

I took 400g of ripe red cherries, slit them, but not completely through and then added them to a saucepan of 200g caster sugar and 150ml of water. The cherries were then heated gently to dissolve the sugar and release the juices, then popped into a large jar and 700ml vodka added. I then sealed the jar, gave it a shake and will now wait patiently for four weeks until it is ready.

I still had most of a jar of preserved lemons left after buying them for the cous cous dish I did a while ago and since my other half would happily have pie every day of the week and has been bugging me to do this recipe ever since I got the book, I decided to give it a go.

The book is called Sophie Conran’s Pies and is full of lovely pie recipes to get you salivating.

The recipe serves 4

Ingredients:

Couple of glugs of olive oil

knob of butter

4 leeks halved length ways and sliced thinly

1 tsp ground cumin

4 small preserved lemons, rinsed and roughly chopped

1kg chicken thighs, boned, skin removed and cut into about 1 1/2 inch cubes

2 tbsp plain flour

250ml chicken stock, as good quality as possible

200g green olives, ( I quite like black olives too, but are a bit stronger in taste) stoned and roughly chopped

3 tbsp flat leaf parsley, roughly chopped

300g puff pastry (you can make this yourself if you are feeling adventurous, but I never have)

1 free range beaten egg

salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat a large casserole on a medium heat and add a glug of olive oil and a knob of butter. Fry the leeks for about five minutes until soft but not coloured. Add the cumin and fry for another minute to release it’s aromatic flavour. Stir in the chopped lemons and leave to one side.

Then heat a frying pan over a medium to high heat and add olive oil. Brown the chicken off in batches, trying not to over crowd the pan. Add the chicken and all the cooking juices to the casserole with the leeks in it and sprinkle over the flour.

Stir in the flour and cook for a few minutes before gradually adding the stock. Simmer gently for about seven minutes and when the sauce has thickened nicely add the olives and parsley. Remove from the heat and allow to cool.

Pre heat the oven to 200 deg centigrade. Once cool,spoon the chicken mixture into a suitable pie dish. Roll out a the pastry so it is large enough to cover the pie dish, brush the rim of the pie dish with beaten egg and place the pastry on top. Press down around the edges with a fork or your thumb and then trim off the excess. Make a pretty pattern with the excess if you like (I made a disabled chicken, do you like it?.. I forgot to brush him with egg though so he didn’t show up too well). Brush all over with the beaten egg and then make a cut in the middle so that steam can escape and help the pastry to crisp up nicely. Place in the oven for about 25 minutes until golden.

You can serve it with whatever you like. We had it with basmati rice, as the author suggested, but it would also be nice with mashed spiced sweet potato.

Well not really tropical, but it has been really warm here all of a sudden so, having remembered that I had loads of egg whites in the freezer, I decided to do a tropical tasting pavlova. I tend to use this recipe from the BBC food web site and it works really well, giving a nice marshmallowy meringue. 

After making the meringue and allowing to cool, toast a handful of desiccated coconut in a dry frying pan and leave to cool. Take 250g of mascarpone and the same of yoghurt and put into a bowl. It doesn’t matter what yoghurt, but nothing too thick as the mascarpone is very thick. Add the zest of a lime a couple of tablespoons of icing sugar and about 50ml of dark rum (or malibu would also be nice to give an extra coconut flavour) and mix well. Spread the mixture evenly all over the meringue and top with 1 ripe mango cut into chunks and finally the toasted coconut. Then sit out in the sun with a fork and a large wedge of meringue on your plate.

I was asked to do a birthday cake for someone in work, so I set about trying to find a book that I could get some inspiration from and also some hints and tips after my disaster with the castle cake. I have a habit of looking at instructions for things then ditching them and having a go at it myself, normally because I can’t be bothered to read them. This time, though, I read through a new book and followed the advice given. The recipient likes gardening and I had seen an idea of doing an upturned flowerpot and thought I could give that a go. The book recommended baking the cake in a terra cotta pot to get the shape and then I split it, filled it with buttercream and iced it. I then had a go at making the little man following rough guides from the book and I added the other little embellishments to finish it off. I’m really pleased with the result and I got a few more requests for cakes to keep me out of trouble for a while. 

I am struggling to get my act together to write blog posts recently. Maybe it’s just because of the amount of energy that goes into making the cakes and I need a couple of weeks to recharge my batteries after making one. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. So to make amends I will tell you about this dessert I made last weekend.

Last Saturday I saw James Martin making an iced coffee and honeycomb parfait on Saturday Kitchen. I had never made parfait before, but it looked nice so I thought I would give it a go. As usual my inability to stick to anything written down or done for me, i.e a recipe, lead me to make a totally different, but delicious, chocolate and amaretti parfait.

Ingredients

150g dark chocolate

3 free range eggs - separated

150g caster sugar

500ml double cream

50ml Amaretto (optional)

100g Amaretti biscuits

Line a loaf tin with cling film. Lightly Crumble 50g of the amaretti biscuits into the base of the tin. Put the egg yolks and half the sugar in a bowl over some simmering water. Whisk the mixture for about ten minutes until thickened. Remove the bowl and set aside. Melt the chocolate in another bowl over the simmering water with the Amaretto and then add to the egg mixture, stirring to combine. Whisk the egg whites until soft peaks and then add the rest of the sugar to make a raw meringue mixture. Stir this into the chocolate mixture. Finally softly whip the cream and fold this into the chocolate mixture with the other 50g of the amaretti biscuits crumbled lightly. Pour this into the pre-prepared tin and tap to settle out properly. Put in the freezer for about four hours until set. To get the parfait out of the tin, either use a chefs blowtorch around the outside of the tin or sit the tin in warm water for a minute, then simply turn out. Cut into slices and serve.

I was watching Jamie Oliver a couple of weeks ago and spotted this tray baked meringue. Incidentally I’ve just had a look at his new website and it’s worth a look. I always save egg whites when I’m only using the yolks and freeze them so I can whip up meringue really quickly and with a meringue not having many ingredients, it was ideal to make while we were on holiday in self catering accommodation last week. I love chocolate and hazelnuts so anything with those in is winner in my book.

Serves 6 to 8

Ingredients:

4 large free-range egg whites

200g unrefined golden caster sugar

a pinch of sea salt

100g hazelnuts, skins removed

2 x 400g halved pears, in syrup

2 pieces stem ginger, thinly sliced

200g dark chocolate

400ml whipping cream (he suggests double but I just can’t bring myself to do it)

50g icing sugar, sifted

1 vanilla pod, halved and seeded

zest of an orange

Preheat the oven to 150 degrees centigrade and line a large baking tray with grease proof paper. Put the egg whites into a very clean bowl and whisk until it forms soft peaks (this is when it forms a peak but it flops over at the end, the eggs whites will not whip up properly if there is any grease or yolk in them). Keep the mixer on and gradually add the sugar and the salt. Whisk the eggs on full power until they are soft, silky and smooth. Heap the meringue onto the baking tray and spread out into a rectangular shape with the back of the spoon making sure you don’t spread it out too thin. Bake in the oven for about an hour until crisp and slightly golden. Whilst the meringue is cooking, place the hazelnuts on another baking tray and put in the bottom of the oven to cook with the meringue until golden brown (this should take the same amount of time as the meringue but keep an eye on them). Once cooked, remove from the oven and leave to cool

To make the topping softly whip the cream and add the icing sugar and vanilla seeds  (you get these by slicing the vanilla pod down the centre and scraping out the seeds with a sharp knife). Drain the pears and reserve the syrup from one of the tins. Add this to a saucepan with the ginger and warm gently. Take off the heat. Chop the chocolate and add to the pan stirring to combine.  I didn’t have any ginger but instead added a little pear brandy. Heap the whipped cream on to the meringue, tear the pear halves into chunks and place on top, scatter the roughly chopped hazelnuts, drizzle the chocolate and zest the orange over the top to finish. Perfect to revive you after a long walk along the beach on a very windy day.