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Panna cotta with fresh raspberries

Panna cottaPanna cotta is Italian for cooked cream. It’s a light mixture of cream, milk and sugar (along with some honey in my version – I love the combination of milk and honey), set with gelatine and served cold. If you see panna cotta moulds for sale, buy a few – they make the job much easier. If you don’t have panna cotta moulds, ramekins work well too, but you will have to be a bit more patient when it comes to turning the set puddings out.

The vanilla is important here – I’ve used both vanilla sugar (sugar which has been stored with a vanilla pod buried in its jar) and the seeds from a vanilla pod in this recipe. Vanilla is expensive, but there’s nothing like the fragrance of the real stuff in this dessert. If, however, you can’t find any or prefer not to shell out for the real thing, a few drops of vanilla essence will work here too.

To serve six, you’ll need:

1 tablespoon powdered gelatine (from the cake-making shelves at the supermarket)
200 ml whole milk
600 ml double cream
Seeds from one vanilla pod
5 tablespoons honey
1 tablespoon vanilla sugar
Pinch salt
Raspberries or strawberries to garnish

Put the milk in your heaviest-bottomed saucepan and sprinkle the surface with the gelatine. Leave for ten minutes away from the heat for the gelatine to soften.

When the gelatine has softened, put the pan on a low heat and, stirring continually, warm until the milk is heated through and the gelatine dissolved. The milk should not boil at this stage. Add the cream, vanilla seeds (slit the pod down its length and use the handle end of a teaspoon to scrape all the seeds out – you can keep the pod and put it in another sugar jar), honey, vanilla sugar and salt to the pan and stir until the sugar has dissolved.

Divide the mixture between six panna cotta moulds. Cover and put in the fridge until set (it’s best to leave the mixture at least overnight to make sure it’s completely firmed up). To turn out the moulds, dip their undersides in water from the kettle to loosen the mixture and pop a plate over them, then turn the whole assembly upside-down. Decorate with berries and serve chilled.

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Carrot cake

Carrot cakeCarrot cake is often referred to by the squeamish, afraid of disturbing their guests by mentioning root vegetables, as passion cake. I’ve never been quite sure why, since the carrot (and, in my version, a mushed up banana) is a real star here; it’s what goes to make the cake so sweet, dense and deliciously moist. This is an easy recipe of the ‘bung everything in a bowl and stir’ variety, and it’s pretty foolproof, rising evenly and maintaining that lovely moist texture throughout. This cake keeps well for about five days in an airtight tin.

Cream cheese icing is a particular favourite of mine. You’ll see some recipes where other flavourings are added to the cream cheese and sugar (orange zest is a common one, and some add crushed nuts), but I find the cool icing much better when it’s plain, allowing the warm spices in the cake to come to the fore. (This cake is especially heavy on the nutmeg, which is fantastic with that banana.) For one cake, you’ll need:

Cake
160ml melted butter
175g light brown sugar
3 eggs, beaten
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
½ a nutmeg, grated
150g carrots, grated
1 banana, mashed
50g chopped pecan nuts
250g plain flour
1 tablespoon baking powder

Icing
160g cream cheese
80g icing sugar

Carrot cakePreheat the oven to 180°C (350°F). Grease and line a 20cm diameter springform cake tin.

Put all the cake ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat well. Put the mixture in the greased, lined cake tin, and bake for 45 minutes (at which point the cake should be golden – a skewer inserted in the middle should emerge clean). Cool the cake completely on a wire rack.

When the cake is cool, beat the cream cheese and icing sugar together with an electric whisk until it becomes fluffy. Spread over the cake, slice and munch.

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Hokey pokey ice cream

Hokey pokey ice creamIf you made the cinder toffee from last week and have managed to avoid eating it all so far, you’re in for a treat. This ice cream reflects two of my favourite sweeties – Maltesers and Crunchie bars. The cinder toffee (the middle of a Crunchie) is crumbled and blended into a malt-flavoured ice cream, flavoured just like the inside of a curiously creamy Malteser.

I haven’t used any chocolate in this ice cream because I wanted the malt and toffee to stand on their own, but if you would like to make this even more similar to the sweets, add five tablespoons of milk chocolate chips at the same time you add the crumbled cinder toffee to the mixture. To make about two pints of ice cream, you’ll need:

4 egg yolks
½ pint (250ml) milk
1 pint (500ml) double cream
100g caster sugar
2 sachets Horlicks Light (see below)
5 heaped tablespoons roughly crushed cinder toffee

Horlicks is an English malted milk drink. (If any US readers could let me know what the equivalent across the pond is, I’d be very grateful!) The full-fat version is usually stirred into hot milk. Horlicks Light is stirred into water, and I use it here because it contains powdered milk, which makes the ice cream all the more creamy and delicious.

Start by making a custard base for the ice cream. Beat the egg yolks, the milk, the Horlicks and the sugar together in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Continue to stir vigorously over a very low heat until the custard starts to thicken. You’ll notice that it forms a glossy sheen on the back of a wooden spoon when ready. Be very careful not to allow the custard to boil, or it will separate.

When the custard has thickened, transfer it to a jug and add the double cream. Stir well and put the jug in the fridge until the mixture is chilled.

If you have an ice cream machine, add the mixture to the machine and follow the instructions. Halfway through the freezing time, add the crushed cinder toffee to the drum. (I’ve found the easiest way to crush it is to put it in a plastic freezer bag, knot the top, hold onto the knot and bang the bag against the work surface.) Continue until the ice cream is stiff enough to serve.

If you don’t have an ice cream machine, put the mixture in a Tupperware box and place it in the freezer. After twenty minutes, remove it from the freezer and beat the partially frozen mixture with a whisk. Remove and beat every twenty minutes, breaking up the ice crystals, until the ice cream is frozen evenly but very soft – stir the cinder toffee in at this point. Keep freezing and beating until the mixture is solid. Serve sprinkled with a little extra crushed cinder toffee. And remember to brush your teeth.

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Cinder toffee

Cinder toffeeThis is an easy and delicious home-made sweet. Cinder toffee is made with vinegar and bicarbonate of soda in the mix. They react together so it froths before it sets into millions of little bubbles, and hardens into something a lot like toffee-flavoured pumice stone. Any taste of vinegar is neutralised, leaving you with a buttery toffee flavour. It’s a recipe which I don’t cook very often although I love it, because it inevitably leads to my eating the whole batch and then feeling really bad about my thighs.

Here in the UK, cinder toffee (also called honeycomb toffee) has a formative role in our childhoods as the shatteringly crisp stuff that Cadbury’s put inside Crunchie Bars. I actually prefer it without chocolate, but if you enjoy a chocolatey morsel just melt some milk chocolate over a bain marie, dip the hardened chunks in and firm up on greaseproof paper.

In the Cork and Bottle, a London wine bar specialising in a big chunk of meat called the Hemingway Burger, the New Zealand staff call cinder toffee ‘hokey pokey’, and use it in a very fabulous ice cream. I have held back from eating all the stuff I made yesterday and will use the rest in a creamy, malty ice cream over the weekend. Watch this space for the recipe.

To make one thigh-swelling batch of delicious toffee, you’ll need:

50g salted butter
30ml water
4 teaspoons malt vinegar
3 tablespoons golden syrup
450g granulated sugar
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda (baking soda)

Golden syrup(American readers can buy golden syrup at Amazon. Golden syrup is a by-product of the sugar refining process, with a delicious light golden toffee flavour. We use it in the UK in many of the situations where maple syrup is used in America. Don’t be tempted to substitute corn syrup or honey – they won’t taste the same, or have the same characteristics when heated.)

Grease a large baking tin with butter (mine was 11 x 7 inches). Heat the butter, water and vinegar together in a large saucepan with a jam thermometer (the saucepan should be larger than you think necessary – remember that this recipe will froth and swell) until the butter has melted. Stir in the sugar and golden syrup over the heat until they dissolve. Stop stirring, and bring to the boil. Keep boiling without stirring until the toffee reaches the hard crack stage on your thermometer (if you don’t have a jam thermometer, a teaspoon of the molten toffee dropped into a saucer of cold water at hard crack stage will form brittle into strands and crack when you try to shape it). ***Update – it is incredibly important that your toffee really does reach hard crack stage, which is 154°C, or else it may sink after rising.*** Be careful – the mixture will be unbelievably hot, and very dangerous if there are children or pets around. Remove the toffee from the heat, and gently stir in the bicarbonate of soda.

Startling frothing will occur. Keep stirring gently until the bubbles settle down a bit, then pour the mixture into your greased tin. Wait for between ten and twenty minutes until the mixture is set up but still warm, and break the toffee into pieces. Lay these pieces out on a wire rack until the sweets are cool, then transfer to an air-tight container (or your mouth).

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Elderflower fritters

I spent yesterday making this year’s batch of elderflower cordial. The wet weather earlier this year in the UK seems to have been a great thing for the elder bushes, which are positively groaning under the weight of all their flowers. The flower heads were so heavy with creamy pollen that I picked six extra heads to turn into fritters.

Foraging is brilliant. There is nothing like the warm glow you get from eating food which is, to all intents and purposes, free; it’s also a great pleasure to know that the food you’re eating is from a healthy environment (be careful to pick your elderflowers well away from any roads, and, as always, leave plenty of flowers on the bush – you’ll want them to turn into berries later in the year) and is perfectly fresh. Look for blossoms which are in full flower, and which have not yet started to brown or drop petals. For fritters, try to pick the heaviest, most pollen-filled flower heads you can find about three hours before you cook them. Pop them in the fridge in a plastic bag. Their scent will develop after picking and they’ll be very perfumed when you come to cook them (don’t leave the flowers in the fridge any longer than three hours or their scent will start to turn in the direction of cat wee).

To make six large fritters, you’ll need:

1 egg
200g flour
50g sugar
1 pint (450ml) milk
Six large elderflower heads
Flavourless oil to fry
1 tablespoon honey
Juice and zest of 1 lemon

Using a fork, beat the egg, flour, sugar and milk together with the lemon zest. Squeeze the lemon and put its juice aside. Let the batter rest for an hour.

In a large, non-stick frying pan, heat about ½ cm of oil over a high flame. Check the elderflowers for any arthropod inhabitants, but don’t wash them (you want to hold on to that pollen). Hold a head of elderflowers by the stalk and dip the flowers into the thick batter, then drop them, flower side first, into the hot oil. Fry the fritters in pairs so you don’t crowd the pan; they’ll brown better this way.

Turn the fritters after about two minutes – the flower side should be a golden, crisp brown. Fry until the stalk side is also crisp, then remove from the pan and drain on kitchen paper.

Remove to a serving plate and scatter the perfumed fritters with some fresh elderflowers, pulled from their stalks, and drizzle with the honey and lemon juice. Serve piping hot and crisp.

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Chocolate brownies

I’ve had a couple of emails asking for a brownies recipe to accompany the blondies I posted here a few weeks ago. Your wish, dear reader, is my command.

These brownies are very easy to make. They’re squodgy, squishy, chocolatey and have that lovely caramel-nut flavour that only toasted pecans can give. It’s very easy to adapt this recipe – if you want to try toasted hazelnuts instead of the pecans, or to add some chocolate chips, you have my blessing.

For families who fight over the slices of brownie which have come from the edge of the tin (the pieces with a crisp, chewy edge and a wonderful gradation of softness into the middle), there’s a solution to your problems: the Edge Brownie Pan. This baking tin is designed like paths in a maze, and ensures that every slice of brownie you bake has at least two edges. (The cook deserves the pieces with three.) I really must buy one of these.

Use a chocolate which has as high a percentage of cocoa solids as you can find. To make a large tray (mine measures 10 x 14 inches, just right for making enough brownies for a party), you’ll need:

1 pat salted butter (8 oz, or 110 g)
4 oz (100g) plain dark chocolate, high in cocoa solids
4 eggs
1 lb (450g) caster sugar
4 oz (100g) plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
Pinch of salt
6 oz (150g) toasted pecan nuts

You can toast the nuts yourself in a dry frying pan over a medium flame. Watch carefully to make sure the nuts do not burn – they can turn from nicely toasted to bitter and burned in moments.

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350°F).

Melt the butter and chocolate together. You can use the microwave or a bowl suspended over some boiling water (a bain marie).

While the butter and chocolate are melting, beat the eggs, salt and sugar together with the vanilla essence, and line a baking tin with greaseproof paper. Stir the chocolate mixture into the egg mixture and sieve the flour into the bowl. Stir until everything is well blended.

Turn out the brownie mix into the lined tin, and sprinkle the pecans over the raw batter. (I prefer to add the pecans to the mix when it’s in the tray rather than adding them in the bowl, as it means you’ll get a more even distribution.) Bake in the oven for about 30 minutes, until the mixture starts to come away from the sides and the top has a dry, crackling look to it. It will still be soft in the centre.

While the brownies are still hot from the oven, divide into squares. After about ten minutes they will have firmed up enough to transfer to racks to cool.

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Dr Weasel’s lemon raspberry cake

Dr Weasel, my fine and upstanding husband, has an uncontrollable urge to bake about once a year. This year’s annual cake orgy has just taken place – he made several for a shared birthday party at work, where twenty ageing computer programmers played competitive Dance Dance Revolution in the office and ate cake at each other.

There were cupcakes, a couple of chocolate cakes, trays of brownies and this lemon raspberry confection. This particular cake was going to be a nice short semolina sponge, sliced across and glued together with jam and whipped cream. Unfortunately, it didn’t really rise enough in the middle to be sliced in two across the bottom successfully, but Dr Weasel, undaunted, raided the fridge and made one of the best quick cake toppings I’ve tried. He successfully disguised any sag in the middle, created something quite delicious, and ended up with something nearly as popular as my brownies. I am shocked. Has he been having lessons while I’ve not been looking?

This cake will work just as well if your semolina sponge rises better than Dr Weasel’s did (I think his egg whites were not whipped sufficiently – it still tasted brilliant, though). You’ll need:

4 oz (100 g) caster sugar
2 oz (50 g) fine semolina
½ oz (15 g) ground almonds
3 separated eggs
Juice and zest of a lemon
5 fl oz (150 ml) whipping cream
5 tablespoons lemon curd
Fresh raspberries to cover (about a punnet)

Preheat the oven to 180° C. Grease and line a round cake tin.

Whisk the egg yolks and sugar together with an electric whisk until they are pale and frothy. Add the lemon juice and keep whisking until the mixture thickens. Fold in the lemon zest, semolina and almonds.

Clean the blades of the whisk very carefully to remove any trace of egg yolk. In a different bowl, whisk the whites of the eggs until they form soft peaks. Fold the beaten whites into the semolina and yolks mixture, turn into your lined cake tin and bake for about 30 minutes until golden (and, hopefully, risen).

When cool enough to handle, turn the cake out onto a wire rack and cool completely. Meanwhile, whisk the cream until it is stiff, fold in the lemon curd and use a palate knife to spread the thick lemon cream over the top of the cake. Stud the surface with raspberries and serve in slices.

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Blondies

UK readers might not be familiar with blondies, one of my favourite American baking recipes. Imagine a giant, tray-baked, chocolate-chip cookie, or a squashy brownie made from a sweet cookie dough instead of the regular chocolate dough. This is an easy, quick recipe, and it’ll make you a heap of blondies big enough to feed everyone in the house several times over.

I don’t buy chocolate chips or chunks for baking; instead, I use a really good bar of chocolate (Green and Black’s is excellent for cooking) and chop it up with a large knife. It only takes a couple of minutes, and doing it this way means you’ll be able to use a much higher quality chocolate in your baking than you can usually find in ready-chipped chunks.

To make 30 squares, you’ll need:

2 cups plain flour
1 heaped teaspoon baking powder
1 cup melted butter
2 cups soft light brown sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon almond extract
2 eggs
1 cup pecan nuts
A 150g bar of good dark chocolate, chopped into chunks with a large knife

Preheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Melt the butter and use a fork to mix it well with the sugar and almond and vanilla extracts, then beat in the eggs with the fork. Add the sieved flour and baking powder, blend well with the fork, then stir in the nuts and chocolate. Spread the mixture evenly into a non-stick baking dish to a depth of about a centimetre, and bake for 30 minutes, until the blondies are coming away from the sides of the dish. They will be crisp at the edges and soft in the middle.

Feel free to experiment a bit with these – use milk chocolate, a different kind of nut, more chocolate, dried fruits and whatever you feel like.

Slice into thirty pieces and serve as soon as the blondies are cool. These keep well in an airtight box, although my guess is that you’ll have eaten them all before you get a chance to test how well they keep.

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Raspberry Eton Mess

Raspberries are one of my favourite fruits. Not only are they great raw, in jam or baked into cakes and puddings; they freeze like a dream, so you can have a ripe, squashy taste of summer all year round.

Strawberries are the fruit traditionally used in Eton Mess, but at this time of year they’re very bland and prohibitively expensive. To be honest, I prefer the tart sweetness you get from raspberries anyway, so this isn’t a hardship. Using defrosted frozen raspberries in this dish will leave a lovely pink swirl in the cream. If you are using fresh raspberries, crush about a quarter of them for the same effect.

Eton Mess originated at Eton College in the 1930s, when something rather like it (a mixture of strawberries and bananas with whipped cream or ice cream) was sold in the school tuck shop. It’s evolved into a lovely flopsome, light desert punctuated with shards of meringue, crisp and chewy all at once. In the spirit of making a very quick, easy dessert, I’ve used supermarket meringue nests – you can make your own if you prefer.

To serve six, you’ll need:

1 pint double cream
1 lb raspberries
8 meringue nests (Waitrose and Marks and Spencer carry meringue nests which are ideal for this – crunchy on the outside with a soft give in the centre)

Crumble the meringues into bite-sized chunks with your hands. Whip the cream into soft peaks and fold in the raspberries and crumbled meringue. Spoon into serving bowls and decorate with a few spare raspberries (sometimes you’ll find mint leaves dressing an Eton Mess – I prefer mine mint-free). Serve immediately.

We ate our Eton Mess with an accompanying glass of Framboise liqueur. I’d planned to fold it into the dessert, but it was so very, very nice that a corporate decision was made among those dining to drink it instead. I think we made the right choice.

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Flavoured chocolates

I’ve recently started fixating on good, high-cocoa chocolates with unusual flavourings. Forget Terry’s Chocolate Orange – I want a bar full of exotic fruits, flower flavours and exciting spices. They’re increasingly popular at the moment; branches of Hotel du Chocolat are springing up all over the place, and Rococo Chocolates, NewTree and good old Green and Black’s are now supplying supermarkets. (Those after the ultimate posh chocolate experience should put in an order at l’Artisan du Chocolat, where flavours include banana and thyme, tonka bean and tobacco. The chocolates are expensive, but those I’ve had have been absolutely excellent – sadly, though, I have eaten the grand total of two of the things in my entire life. If I can get my hands on a box for Christmas, you’ll see them reviewed here.)

At the supermarket this week, I found myself scooping bars of chocolate into the basket like a woman possessed. Made to put most of them back by Dr Weasel, I held onto an organic bar of dark chocolate and cardamom from Rococo, and a bar of lavender and lime blossom milk chocolate from NewTree.

Rococo are based in Chelsea’s King’s Road, and have been producing organic chocolates of remarkably high quality for nearly 20 years. Luckily for you, they’ve discovered e-commerce and now ship worldwide, and some of their artisan bars and gift collections now appear in Waitrose. Their flower fondants are my very favourites, and have solidly replaced Charbonnel & Walker’s rose and violet creams in my affections. Always a sucker for good packaging design, I’m absolutely enchanted by Rococo’s wrappers, which use images from an 1850s French catalogue of chocolate moulds.

This cardamom artisan bar is, for me, about as good as dark chocolate gets. Cardamom has that same affinity with a bitter chocolate as it does with good, bitter coffee, and the 65% cocoa solids and high percentage of cocoa butter give the bar a beautifully clean snap when broken. The crisp, granular shards of cardamom seeds are glorious against the silky texture of the chocolate. It is unfortunate that these are so darn good; I can quite happily eat one in a single sitting.

NewTree (beware – very busy Flash site with music) a Belgian chocolate makers, are a brand I’d not come across before, but once I saw the label on their Tranquility milk chocolate, boasting lime blossom extract and lavender, I was sold. A single bar is said to have the same relaxing properties as three cups of lime blossom tisane. The milk chocolate was slightly granular, but delicately fragranced and delicious. If in quibblesome mood, I might complain that the chocolate was a little sweeter than the ideal, but this seems almost churlish given how well blended the unusual flower flavours were. I don’t really feel qualified to comment on whether or not I was left tranquil; any calming effect may have come from the glass of violet liqueur I was drinking on the side.

NewTree’s schtick is an appealing one; they flavour their chocolate bars with spices and herbs used not only for their flavour, but also for their health applications. With names like Pleasure, Eternity, Young, Digest, Vivacity, Sexy, Tranquility, Serenity and Cocoon, NewTree seem to have hit on something the rest of us have suspected for years – chocolate really is a universal panacea. Grab a bar if you see one, and please report back in the comments section and let me know whether you really did feel serene and cocooned.