As Comic Book Guy would say… Worst. Xmas. Ever.

This buche de Noel is brought to you by three festive doses (in varying strengths) of the flu—proper flu, none of this “I have a bad cold, so I’ll call it flu” crap—two aggrieved prolapsed discs (me), food-allergy triggered blotchiness & swelling (Dave), and a distinct lack of appetite for anything (all of us).  Even for dessert.

It probably goes without saying that I’m a little cranky, too.

At any rate, on to the challenge.  This month’s challenge is brought to us by the adventurous Hilda from Saffron and Blueberry and Marion from Il en Faut Peu Pour Etre Heureux.  They have chosen a French Yule Log by Flore from Florilege Gourmand

I was so excited about this month’s challenge.  I babbled for days to Lorraine about it, and started it with such enthusiasm.  And then the ‘flu hit.  Now I have zero enthusiasm for the buche or indeed, any form of food.  (I don’t feel any thinner yet, but I’m still hopeful.)

My chosen flavour combinations were a coconut dacquoise, white chocolate ganache insert, mango mousse, ginger creme brulee, and a gorgeously glossy (but very tempermental) white chocolate icing.  I went all Blue Peter and created a mould out of an old plastic bottle, some cardboard and sticky tape.  I’m really happy with how ithe shape turned out and I’d certainly make my own mould again rather than buy a tin that’s only going to be used once a year.

Oh, I should mention that I added some popping candy to the coconut crisp insert and it stayed nicely pop-py, which was quite cool.  It was a shame that I didn’t like the taste of the rest of the layer.  I suspect, that gavottes aren’t quite my thing and I should have just bought a box of Rice Krispies or asked around and begged some from a friend.

On the whole, I did like the buche, but I was by no means blown away or impressed.  Which makes me really sad, considering how excited I was and also that I dragged myself through its creation when I should have been languishing in bed.  But I would like to thank Hilda and Marion for giving us such a wonderful challenge to end 2008 with!

Sparkling royal icing snowflakes adorn the top of the buche.

Making this cake was torture.  Darkly sweet, delicious torture.

I can’t remember the last time that a chocolate cake smelled so rich, dark and divine while making the batter.  And once it went into the oven, it just smelled even better.  Like I said, torture.  And I couldn’t even have a slice when it was cooled… it had to sit overnight in the fridge before it could be released from its tin.  Still, all good things come to she who waits…

When the lovely Lorraine aka NotQuiteNigella announced her Ultimate Chocolate Cake Challenge, I knew I had to make something.  We haven’t had chocolate cake in what feels like a lifetime, and this was the perfect excuse.  Thanks, Lorraine!

My copy of Alice Medrich’s Chocolate and The Art of Low-Fat Desserts has been sitting on the shelf without having seen much action since last summer.  After all the buzz surrounding this book a few years ago, I had been a bit disappointed with the couple of recipes that I had tried.  But I wanted to give it another chance, so after flashing a few recipes in front of Dave, I settled on making her ‘The New Chocolate Decadence’.

Chocolate decadence aka chocolate nemesis, was the cake of the 90s.  The River Cafe’s version was infamous for not working as written in their big blue book, but sinfully good if you ever managed to get a table at the restaurant.  Almost every restaurant had their own version on the menu.  And then it fell from grace somehow and disappeared.

You know what?  I think it’s time that the chocolate nemesis had a renaissance.

As you might expect from the name and description, this is an incredibly rich cake.  I can’t quite see how the original could be any richer, but given that the standard chocolate nemesis contained double the amount of chocolate, more eggs, and an obscene amount of butter… I guess it really can get even richer!

This version was plenty rich enough for me, though, and I wear my chocoholic’s hat when I say that.  The texture of the slice pictured may look dense, but looks are deceiving as this cake is light as air and melts as soon as it hits the tongue.  I fear that my cake was overcooked slightly—alas, the thermostat is a bit dodgy now—as it cracked on top, and it wasn’t terribly gooey in the middle when I took it out of the oven.  I suspect that it would have had a more mousse-like texture with a few minutes less, but it was still wildly and extravagantly delicious!

I served the cake in small slices with some milk ice-cream which did a wonderful job of tempering the richness of the chocolate and providing balance.  As a bit of an experiment I added some glacé rhubarb which tasted divine, but wasn’t quite ballsy enough to stand up to the chocolate.  I think a Seville orange sauce would work really well—it’s a classic combination for a reason!!  (Although, I can’t help wondering what this would be like with some warm coffee-infused creme anglaise puddled round it…)

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I’ve always been envious of those food bloggers who got together to bake, whether via Skype—and may I just say how brave you are to have laptops in the kitchen with flour and batter flying—or in person.  So when my friend Kate, who was visiting for the weekend, said that she quite fancied doing some baking, I practically bit her hand off.

After some deliciously sugary discussion, we settled on making some chocolate cupcakes—two ways—which would slake her craving for chocolate and let me indulge my new-found fondness for cupcakes.

Amusingly, Lucas has re-christened Auntie Kate to Auntie Cake, which is terribly appropriate given how much chatting we’ve been doing recently about cakes and baking in general.  He did look a little sad when we picked Kate up at the train station and discovered that she was not, in fact, made of cake.  He did perk up again when he realised that we would be making cakes, though.

I’m months, years behind the curve on the whole Cupcake Craze thing, but now that I’ve discovered their joys, I’m really enjoying baking them.  I recently treated myself to the Wilton Cupcake Decorating Kit, which seems to be the only way (in the UK) to get hold of the huge 1M piping nozzle for big, sexy swirls of frosting atop your cupcakes.  I don’t mind duplicating some tips, but it does seem a bit mad that you have to buy a set when you just want one tip!  Along with that, I managed to find some nice foil liners at a decent price, so pretty cupcakes are mine at last!

Anyway, cupcakes.  We turned one simple chocolate cupcake recipe into Black Forest (ish) cupcakes and Chocolate Decadence cupcakes.  I say ‘ish’ as I’m acutely aware that it should really have a whipped cream topping and loads of Kirsch soaked into the cupcakes, but neither of us fancied whipped cream (shock, horror) and there was no Kirsch to be found.

We experimented with adding a chocolate truffle to half of the cupcakes, the idea being that when you bit into the cupcake you’d get a lovely melty centre.  That was the theory at any rate.  Alas, we should have chosen a more solid truffle than a Lintdor, in itself quite melty.  The majority of the truffle disappeared into the cupcake once baked, but it tasted wonderful so we weren’t that sad.  I will try again at some point as I’m certain that it can work.  Perhaps freezing the truffle would help, too…

This half of the cupcakes were iced with a bittersweet whipped chocolate ganache, using a recipe that the lovely Tartlette posted recently.  This was an incredibly rich and heady experience, and whipping the ganache seemed to open out the flavours in the chocolate.  (Do trust me when I say incredibly rich… one was almost too much!  And I’m a chocoholic!)

The other six cupcakes were first filled with some black cherry jam and then topped off with some cream cheese frosting, a cherry, and a final flourish of some grated dark chocolate.  These were utterly scrumptious—I loved all the different textures and biting down through cool, creamy frosting into a fluffy chocolate cupcake is one of life’s little pleasures.

I can’t decide what is better… a dangerously dark and decadent cupcake which leaves you slightly stunned and unable to go back for seconds as you’re still too busy recovering from the first contemplating the complexity of flavours, or a slightly kitsch yet very delicious cupcake that just begs for second helpings.  But… do I really have to decide? Quite simply, these were some of the best tasting—and looking—cupcakes that I’ve ever made.  I reckon that’s because they were made with lots of love and laughter.   And you know, along with friendship, those are the secret ingredients of baking…

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Cookies always go down well at our summer BBQ/party. For one thing, you don’t need a plate to eat them, so you can keep drinking without any awkward juggling of crockery. Always a good thing with alcohol-diminished dexterity! Secondly, and most importantly, no one will notice if you go back for seconds–or thirds–but if you have a huge slab of cake or cheesecake, then people will notice.

These white chocolate and lemon cookies disappeared in double-quick time once the locusts our friends descended, leaving Dave distraught at his lack of cookies. So, I kindly whipped up a second batch for him the next day!

Normally I make the classic combination of white chocolate and macadamia–Dave’s favourite–but I fancied something a bit different… Lemon and white chocolate are happy bedfellows, so I figured that they’d make good cookies. And so they did.

Interestingly, not all of the white chocolate chunks firmed up after baking, so here and there in the cookies were little melty pockets that tasted just like lemon curd. Mmmm… yummy!

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Our hosts for this month’s Daring Bakers challenge are the lovely Meeta of What’s for lunch, Honey? and Tony Tahhan. They took pity on us and offered up a fairly straightforward recipe that wouldn’t leave us sweltering in the kitchen for too long: Pierre Herme’s chocolate éclairs.

I adore éclairs and also have a little bit of a crush on Pierre Hermé, so I was thrilled with this challenge recipe. I often flick through Chocolate Desserts by Pierre Hermé, sighing longingly over each recipe, but always reluctant to commit myself to so much butter and sugar. The Daring Bakers have provided me with the perfect excuse to indulge myself–learning, camaraderie and fun–and I couldn’t be happier.

While I could have made the entire recipe within a day, I chose to spread it over two so that I could take things easy. I’ve only recently been allowed back into the kitchen after having surgery on my right eye, so I felt the need to move slowly, especially where sharp objects are concerned.

I kicked things off with the pastry cream. The challenge rules stated that we had to make the choux pastry with no changes, but we had the option of having one non-chocolate component. I opted to make a coconut pastry cream as I suspected that an all-chocolate experience would be a little too much for my two expert taste-testers.

Anyone who has ever eaten a dark chocolate Bounty bar will tell you that it is a match made in heaven and I hoped that this would be the case with the eclairs.

The pastry cream came together like a dream. Richly scented and flavoured with coconut; I had to hurriedly press a sheet of clingfilm to it otherwise I’d have eaten the whole lot in the name of ‘tasting’.

The chocolate sauce–a necessary component of the chocolate glaze–was next and was so easy to make. It provided a really intense hit of chocolate, unlocking the layers of flavour and making it easy to pick out the more subtle nuances. I’ll definitely be using this recipe again as it wasn’t overly rich or cloying.

The next morning I moved on to the choux pastry which turned out to be pretty damn fabulous. It was a world away from the previous recipe I used in every respect–texture, colour, flavour and behaviour. Taking an extra few minutes to cook out the choux pastry after it forms a ball in the pan really makes a difference to the finished pastry. Clouds of steam billowed up from the bowl of my KitchenAid when I beat the initial paste to cool it slightly before adding the eggs and it looked ever so slightly oily, but I persevered. Upon adding the eggs, that old magic happened and the most beautiful choux pastry emerged. Thick, glossy, silky smooth and sporting the most gorgeous golden glow. This will be my ‘go-to’ choux pastry recipe in future. I can’t say enough how much I loved it.

And so to the actual eclairs. Interestingly Pierre said that the choux pastry must be used warm so I began piping straight away. I am not very good at piping. In fact, I suck at piping so I was dreading this part.

We were instructed to use a 2cm diameter piping tip and after looking at my meagre collection of tips I determined that the best thing to do would be to use the coupler without any tip at all, as that was closest to 2cm. This did seem to make the piping more difficult, but I persevered and by the time that I’d piped my fourth line of pate aux choux I’d managed one presentable line.

You see, in an effort to create perfect éclair shapes, I had opted to follow the lovely Tartlette’s advice to pipe the choux in long lines, freeze, and then cut the éclairs to size. This worked out really well, and if I manage to improve my piping skills then I can see my turning out some really beautiful eclairs in future. Just not today.

Once baked, the éclairs were a little… rustic in appearance, but chocolate glaze can hide a multitude of sins. This is where things went really, really wrong. I think I over-stirred the chocolate when it was melting into the hot cream, as when I added the butter the entire mixture split. After staring in horror at the mess before me, I poured off the fat and gently stirred in the warm chocolate sauce at which point it miraculously recovered. Being greatly daring, I re-added the butter, drop by drop, and the glaze was rescued!

The glaze started to thicken really quickly, despite the warmth of the kitchen, so I had to work fast. After all the trauma of making the glaze I did not want to have to reheat it. So I quickly dipped the éclair tops in the glaze which worked out really nicely and they looked like a million dollars with their slick of chocolate.

And now the home straight… I added some sweetened coconut flakes to the pastry cream, just for a bit of textural interest as well as an added hit of flavour and lightened it with some whipped cream before piping it into the éclair bases and tumbling over a few raspberries. Popped their tops on and voilà! Dark chocolate and coconut éclairs!

I much preferred the éclairs after they’d chilled overnight. I love crisp profiteroles, but for me… éclairs need a bit of extra squidge to reach the proper heights of decadence. The crisp exterior gave way to the most delicious coconut pastry cream which gave up more and more flavour with each chew. And then the chocolate hit. Oh my god, the glaze was obscenely good!

It all melded together to create the Bounty flavour that I was aiming for, but so, so much better. This is a sophisticated and decadent–if not particularly elegant–éclair. Thank-you so much, Meeta and Tony, for a wonderful recipe!

Don’t forget to visit the Daring Bakers Blogroll for more wonderful éclairs!

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Rain, rain… go away. Come again another day.

…please?

The weather has been crazy of late. One minute we have a torrential deluge of rain and the next the temperature rises, sun comes out, and you get that hopeful feeling for just a second… maybe this is it. Maybe this is finally summer!

And then… pitter-patter. More rain.

It was on such a day that I threw together this quick–yet relatively traditional–gelato for Lucas and our niece Maria who we were baby-sitting for the afternoon. They’d both been so patient while I poked around a cookware shop and a bookshop. (Admittedly they did spend ages playing in a toyshop, too. And okay… so I really wanted ice cream, too!)

Stracciatella means “torn apart” in Italian, but in the case of gelato it means the finest chocolate-chip you’ve ever had: cool vanilla ice-cream flecked with tiny pieces of milk chocolate which melt quickly on your tongue alongside the ice-cream. It’s odd how such a simple flavour can take you by surprise. I only added the chocolate as a fun touch for the kids, but it really was fantastic.

This is a Philadelphia-style ice-cream which means that it is egg-free and takes moments to put together. It’s totally kid friendly, especially when you start drizzling chocolate into the ice-cream maker and you suddenly find two little helpers beside you…

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Despite the unpredictable weather we’ve had this summer, there have been some truly glorious berries and fruit available. Succulent strawberries have been a particular favourite with us and this strawberry soup, inspired by Aran’s recipe, is a great way to showcase them.

I love the purity of the soup as Aran served it, but I wanted to gently spice it to further enhance the flavour. Not enough to be able to pick out the flavours of the individual spices, but enough to give a hint of the Orient with each spoonful.

The soup is endlessly versatile. Reduced, it makes a fantastic sauce for ice-cream sundaes or other plated desserts. You can add some gelatine and create beautiful summer-berry jellies, or go all Heston and create tiny cubes of strawberry jelly to scatter over salads with some gorgonzola. I’ve played with textures a little and added a sprinkle of crunchy strawberry granita for a bit of contrast.

This is the perfect dinner party dessert. Everything is prepared in advance and all you have to do is tumble a few berries into deep soup plates, add a scoop of frozen yoghurt, sprinkle granita on top, and then pour the ruby red soup around.

Beautiful.

This post is my entry for this month’s Waiter, There’s Something… event, hosted by Jeanne. The theme is Berried Treasure.

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This month’s Daring Bakers challenge, hosted by Deborah of Taste and Tell and Elle of Feeding My Enthusiasms, is Cheesecake Pops. Or, as I like to think of it, cheesecake-onna-stick.

My love of cheesecake is legendary and of course, I’m more than a little fond of chocolate, too. Alas, I’m firmly back on the Weight Watchers bandwagon, so making the cheesecake pops, while great fun, was absolutely tortuous. Still, I valiantly baked and dipped my pops without sneaking any “little tastes.” I did taste all the different pops after dinner, and as they’re very, very more-ish, I shall be packing the rest of them off to work with Dave tomorrow morning!

I made three-fifths of the cheesecake batter and baked my cheesecake in an 8×8-inch ceramic dish for 40 minutes and it set beautifully. It had just gone from jiggly to firm in the centre when I pulled it out and this meant that when it came to scooping the balls, it rolled really well.

It definitely pays to think up flavour/topping ideas before you put the cheesecake balls in the freezer. I came up with some fun ideas for the centre of each ball by which time the pops were solidly frozen, and pressing chopped stem ginger into the balls would have been much easier before they were frozen!

Stem ginger pops

I love the combination of hot ginger with smooth dark chocolate, so this one was a real winner for me. Next time round I’ll press even more minced ginger into the cheesecake as I found myself wanting it to be really hot.

Limoncello pops

First dipped in a limoncello-spiked lemon jelly, then in white chocolate, these pops had a great flavour but the jelly had a disappointingly icy texture. Still quite delicious, though.

Toffee pops

Dipped in dark chocolate and quickly rolled in chocolate-toffee pieces, these were awesome. I had wanted to use Dime bars, but couldn’t find any, so instead substituted Cadbury Chomp Bars which are similar but chewy rather than crunchy.

Classic cheesecake pops

Dark chocolate and a roll around in crushed Digestive biscuits equals classic cheesecake flavour in my book. The biscuits were salty in comparison to the cheesecake and chocolate, making this my absolute favourite of the bunch.

Overall, these were a huge success. I reckon that they’d make the perfect party dessert for kids and adults alike, so I’ll definitely be making them again. Thanks for choosing such a great recipe, Elle and Deborah!

(Please excuse the photo. I forgot to take one before it started being devoured. Think of this as an action shot, if it helps.)

A few weeks ago a friend of ours invited us to her birthday BBQ/garden party. Dave suggested that it would be a good idea to make her a cake as a present, to which I agreed readily. Ten minutes later a feeling of dread stole over me: a memory of someone saying that she couldn’t eat pasta. (Bear with me here.) Another ten minutes later and I’m on the phone to her boyfriend who is half-way through dismantling a tent for some reason.

Me: “I’d like to bake your missus a cake for her birthday, but I seem to remember that she’s gluten intolerant?”
Him: “Yeah. But she’s wheat intolerant too…”

A short pause ensued while I mentally swore.

Him: “Oh, and she’s lactose intolerant, too. So no cream or the like.”

Hereupon there was a longer interlude as I swore robustly.

Me: “But… what does she eat?”

Spluttering phonecalls aside, this was a real challenge and one I took to with relish. I googled the heck out of food intolerances, read vegan recipes, researched soy products, investigated the Food Intolerance/Allergy aisle in the supermarket–did you know that regular baking powder contains gluten?–and generally obsessed. If I’m going to make a cake for someone, then aside from the ultimate goal of having it taste fabulous, I’d quite like to ensure that the recipient’s health won’t be placed in dire straits.

In the end, I had two options. An almond cake flavoured with lashings of lemon or an eggless, dairyless, gluten-free chocolate cake. While the almond cake would have been easier to prepare (and with a more predictable outcome) I decided to take the plunge and try the chocolate cake, despite all the unfamiliar ingredients. Lemons, as much as I adore them, simply don’t say birthday! to me. (Well, unless it’s a lemon cake filled with lemon curd and whipped cream, but that was out of the question.)

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Chocolate brownies are always a hot topic of discussion among foodies. Which makes a better brownie? Melted chocolate or cocoa? Are fudgy brownies better than cakey ones? All very good questions, but impossible to answer. Brownies are, I think, the most individual of cakes and desserts.

These chocolate brownies are cocoa based, nigh on perfect, and amazingly quick to make. They took me right back to the days when I made a huge pan of brownies on a weekly basis for my friends at university! Brownie classification is rather arcane, so I can only say that the brownies around the edge of the tin were slightly cakey, but in the middle of the tin they were fudgy and delicious. This suits our household very well; Dave likes the firmer cakey outsides, and I love the fudgy goodness of the middle. The top of the brownies baked to a delicious crackly crust that shimmers and crunches slightly as the knife slides into the pan.

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