Category: cream

Categories
cream food hazelnuts meringue strawberry

strawberry crunch trifle

heston blumenthal's strawberry crumble crunch

Waitrose and Heston Blumenthal have released strawberry crumble crunch as a recipe card in store to help celebrate the Jubilee. Sounds a bit like Mr Tumble Jumble to me. I’ll be honest; I didn’t seen the recipe card before making this but I had seen the recipe video on YouTube. Based on that I slung it together at work; during my lunch break I wasn’t able to get everything possible and I had to make do with the equipment to hand (microwave, kettle and fortunately a George Foreman Grill!) All things considered I think I ended up with a pretty tasty dessert! Perfect for such a hot day and created lots of smiling faces in the office. Took about 15 minutes and is well worth it!

Heston’s a bit obsessed with trifles. If you’ve made the real thing I’d love to know how it ended up.

Heston Blumenthal’s strawberry crumble crunch (serves 8 – 10):

300g strawberries, hulled

1 tablespoon of sugar

400ml double cream

8 meringue shells

A small pot of strawberry yoghurt

A satsuma

20g hazelnuts

  1. Put your serving bowl in the fridge to get nice and cold. Put the sugar and strawberries in a bowl (keep back one strawberry) and mash roughly with a fork. Add a splash of water and microwave for 4 minutes. Once the fruit is mushy add a grind of black pepper, pop into the base of your trifle bowl and refrigerate while you do everything else.
  2. Whip the cream until thickened to where it barely falls off a spoon. Stir through the yoghurt and squeeze in the juice of ½ a satsuma. Crush the meringue shells and stir through.
  3. Preheat a dry frying pan or George Foreman Grill to its highest setting. Thinly slice the remaining strawberry, sprinkle with sugar and grill until starting to turn black, and then flip over and grill the other side. When they’re done remove to one side, bash up the hazelnuts and pop those on the grill for a couple of minutes until lightly toasted.
  4. Once the strawberry mix in the fridge is cold, layer on the cream mix, top with the nuts and sliced strawberry.
Categories
cake chocolate coffee cream food mascarpone

diplomatico

Lavazza are sponsoring Wimbledon this year and have released a rather snazzy themed espresso machine. They sent one along for me to try out, and it’s one of the neatest pod-style machines I’ve used. I’ve been necking espresso at a GP-bothering rate but not before I came up with some coffee recipes to celebrate. Here’s a fudgy-textured and sweet dessert recipe to get us started: the diplomatico, the distant relative of the tiramisu lacking any kind of PR. I’ve blended elements of both desserts to create a sort of diplomisu, if you will. This can be made a day or so in advance and for best results leave it out of the fridge for 20 minutes or so before eating; the textures soften and taking the chill off enhances the silky, creamy texture. If you like boozy coffee-alcohol puds, this is definitely one to try.

Sponge finger tip: I think this works best with really sodden sponge biscuits. You can obviously only submerge them for a few seconds before they turn to mush in your hands. To avoid this, give them a short dip until starting to soften and place them in the dish. Then gently drizzle with more marinating liquor to increase their drunkenness. Do this slowly to ensure the fingers have time to absorb the liquid.

Diplomatico:

500ml double cream, whipped to soft peaks

250g mascarpone cheese

120g dark chocolate, melted

50g icing sugar

150ml espresso, cooled

5 tablespoons marsala

About 30 sponge fingers

Grated chocolate, to serve

  1. Whip the cream to soft peaks, and reserve about a third of it.
  2. Stir the icing sugar and mascarpone together, then fold into 2/3 of the softly whipped cream. Gradually fold in the melted chocolate. Check for sweetness at this point as this will be where most of the sweet taste from the pudding will come from, and add more icing sugar as necessary.
  3. Stir the coffee, marsala and a tablespoon of icing sugar together. Dip the sponge fingers in the mix until soggy, and then make a layer of them in a rectangular cake tin (I use a silicone one to get the dessert out easier later).
  4. Add a layer of chocolate cream, then follow with more boozy biscuits. Keep layering, ending with sponge fingers. Add the remaining cream on top of this and refrigerate for at least a couple of hours.
  5. Before serving garnish with grated chocolate, then cut into thick slices.

To be in with a chance to win one the fantastic Lavazza Wimbledon prizes look out for promotional cups on take away Lavazza coffees, or enter online at http://promotion.wimbledon.lavazza.com/

Prizes include six pairs of tickets to Wimbledon, 90 Lavazza A Modo Mio Favola Plus Wimbledon Limited Edition coffee machines and 500 sets of four exclusive espresso cups created especially for the tournament.

Categories
cream food garlic potatoes

potatoes dauphinoise

WordPress have really improved the sharing and following aspect of their blog networks; it promotes posts being propagated around the network and readership increases all round. I saw a post featuring potato dauphinoise fly past my nose and it reminded me how long it had been since I had a decent dauph.

The really clever part with this dish is raising the temperature of the cream up first to get the seasoning right – all too often a dauphinoise can be bland as it takes much more salt than you expect.

It comes out lovely and thick, spikes of garlic just offsetting the richness beautifully. Just make sure you don’t eat it all and save a bit for while you’re doing the washing-up, as an hour spent cooling down allows the potato to soak all that cream back up again…

There’s a YouTube version of my recipe here:

Print

potatoes dauphinoise

A real treat that everyone will love.
Course Side Dish
Cuisine French
Prep Time 10 minutes
Cook Time 40 minutes
Total Time 1 hour 25 minutes
Servings 4 as a side dish
Author Gary @ BigSpud

Ingredients

  • 1 kg floury potatoes sliced about 5mm thick
  • 300 ml double cream
  • 200 ml milk
  • 4 cloves garlic minced

Instructions

  • Pre-heat the oven to 180°C.
  • Bring the cream, milk to a simmer with the garlic. Add some seasoning and keep tasting until it tastes right. Add the sliced potatoes and simmer for 8-10 minutes until tender.
  • Put a splash of the cream into the base of a large baking dish, add the potatoes then pour over the remaining cream. Make sure everything gets covered, and dot with butter. Bake for 30 minutes until the potatoes are knife-tender and the top is golden-brown.
Categories
bacon broccoli cream fennel food parmesan sausages

sausage and broccoli penne

This is one that swilled around my head for a while until coming together. It’s a hybrid of ideas from a recent appearance of Theo Randall on Saturday Kitchen and a Jamie Oliver 30 minute meal.

The most satisfying part of this is using the part of the broccoli you usually throw away, the stalk. Whizzed up and fried it’s as tasty as it’s flowery florets. Mixed with sausage and cream it’s almost rich. Whouda thunk it, broccoli being rich?! Make sure you’re generous with the chilli to balance it all out.

While I ate it I thought pine nuts would be great with this – must try it next time.

Sausage & broccoli penne (serves 2):

2 rashers bacon, sliced

1 head of broccoli

4 sausages, skinned

1 anchovy

Big pinch of chilli flakes

2 cloves garlic

200g penne

50ml double cream

Handful of parmesan

  1. Heat a little oil in a pan and add the bacon. Get a large pot of water on to boil.
  2. In a food processor blitz the broccoli to crumbs with the anchovy. Drop in the sausages and add a trickle of olive oil to make a paste.
  3. Add the paste to the bacon in the pan and stir fry for a few minutes. Crush in the garlic and get the pasta on to boil.
  4. After the pasta has cooked for about 5 minutes, add the broccoli florets and cook for 5 minutes more.
  5. Turn the heat down low and add the cream and parmesan, stirring well to combine. Add the drained pasta and broccoli and if necessary let it down with a little of the pasta water. When mixed nicely and all slick and creamy, check seasoning and serve with more parmesan.
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