Chocolate Coated Caramelised Nuts

The final item that I made for this year's goodie boxes was chocolate coated caramelised nuts, using instructions from the December 2007-January 2008 edition of Dish.

For my nuts, I selected hazelnuts and brazil nuts (about 150g of each). Roast them in the oven for about 10 minutes, then rub the coarse brown skins off the nuts in a clean linen tea towel.

Next, place the nuts in a heavy based frypan with 4 tablespoons of tap water and 1 1/2 cups of sugar, and stir over a medium heat until the sugar melts then recrystallises to thickly coat the nuts with a crunchy coating. Place the nuts onto a baking paper lined tray to cool, and separate them out so that they don't stick together as they cool

Melt 250g of chocolate over a bain marie or in a microwave (I prefer the bain marie). Once the chocolate has melted, and depending on your squeamishness level, you can:

(a) coat each nut in the melted chocolate using two forks to dip them in; or

(b) dip your right fingertips into the melted chocolate for a right handed person (and vice versa for a left handed person), and using your fingertips, pat a generous amount of melted chocolate into your left palm (or right palm, for a left hander), then pick up each nut and roll between your chocolate coated palm and fingertips until coated.

I learnt technique (b) at the Savour Chocolate & Patisserie School, and it worked better for me than the forks, which tended to be slower and promoted solidification of the chocolate around the tines.

Place each coated nut on a piece of baking paper to set, turning occasionally as it sets to avoid chocolate "feet" forming on your nuts (personally, this doesn't bother me, and mine had small feet).

Once the chocolate has set, you may optionally roll the nuts in cocoa before storing them in an airtight container (but not in the fridge).

I had a drama with the first coat of chocolate on my nuts "blooming" (ie the chocolate when set was grey, spotty and matte in colour because it reset with an incorrect crystalline structure due to the chocolate being too hot when the nuts were dipped). After a bit of Internet research on tempering chocolate, I successfully recoated the nuts.

These nuts tasted rather nice, although I don't think I will do this very often (because with the number of individual nuts involved, it is rather time consuming).

I wrapped my nuts in cellophane tied with ribbon for the goodie boxes, but they would look great on the dinner table in a ramekin, as pictured above.

Chocolate roulade

One of my colleagues, Julien, celebrates his birthday in late December; however, as he finished up on Friday to go on leave for 5 weeks, I decided to bake him his birthday cake this week.

Chocolate is a very popular flavour choice at work, so I made a chocolate roulade for Julien. (It is based on Jamie Oliver's Black Forest Swiss roll from Cook.)

I liked this cake because it combined sweet with sour; the sour cherries balanced out the chocolate and cream, so you were not overwhelmed by sweetness.

For a roulade, it was also surprisingly easy to work with; roulades have a reputation for cracking, and I was dubious about not rolling up the cake while still hot. However, I was ultimately pleasantly surprised by the result, which was relatively crack-free.

My version of the chocolate roulade is as follows:

4 eggs
125g sugar
65g butter
100g plain flour
30g cocoa
400g bottle morello cherries in syrup
2 tablespoons brandy
300ml whipping cream
70g dark chocolate, broken into small pieces

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease a Swiss roll pan, line with baking paper and then grease the paper.

Melt the butter in a microwave or on the stove top. Beat the eggs with an electric mixer until they have fluffed up to roughly three times their original volume. Slowly whisk the melted butter into the eggs by hand so as to retain the air in the egg mixture. Sift together the plain flour and cocoa into a small bowl, then using a wooden spoon, fold the flour and cocoa into the egg mixture, again trying to avoid knocking the air out of the mixture.

Spread the cake batter out over the Swiss roll pan, and bake for 15 minutes or until the cake springs back when touched. After removing the cake from the oven, leave it to cool in the pan.

Drain the syrup from the morello cherries, and warm the syrup with the brandy in a small saucepan. Brush over the cooled cake.

Heat one third of the cream in a small saucepan until it almost (but not quite) boils, then remove it from the stove and stir through the chocolate pieces to form a chocolate cream.

Whip the remaining cream with an electric mixer to stiff peak stage.

Leaving the cake on the paper that it was baked in, spread the cake with chocolate cream, leaving a 5cm border around the edges. Top this with the whipped cream. Sprinkle the drained cherries on top of the cream. Using the baking paper as a guide, roll the cake up tightly, removing it from the baking paper as you roll. (Some of the filling may be squeezed out at this stage, so retaining the border around the edges of the cake when filling it is important.) Once the cake has been completely rolled, wrap it in baking paper and refrigerate it until set.

You can sift icing sugar over the cake before serving, but I think this is superfluous, and the cake was fine without it.

If you have a chocolate and fruit lover to bake for, then this is the cake for them. As mentioned above, the balance of the tart fruit against the fattiness of the cream and the sweetness of the chocolate is just devine, and I would make this cake again.

Eat Christmas Cookies - Spiced gingerbread

Susan of Food Blogga is hosting a once-off event to celebrate Christmas - Eat Christmas Cookies! The brief is simple - post about a Christmas cookie.

As part of my Christmas goodie boxes, I made spiced gingerbread prepared as hanging tree decorations, so thought these would be perfect for the Christmas cookie event. They are pictured at the bottom of this post.

These cookies are sooooooo cute and are fairly easy to make. They are fun to decorate (if you have the time!), and taste really good - they are not overwhelmingly spicy, nor are they hard and uninviting to eat, like gingerbread cookies can sometimes be.

The recipe is from one of the books in the Kitchen Classic series, Celebration, and is as follows:

140g softened butter
115g brown sugar
1/4 cup golden syrup
1 egg
2 cups plain flour
3 teaspoons ground ginger
3/4 teaspoon ground cloves
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

Grease 2 baking trays. Cream the butter and the sugar with an electric mixer, then beat in the syrup and the egg. Fold through the sifted flour, bicarbonate of soda and spices with a wooden spoon to form a biscuit dough. Knead the dough on a floured surface until smooth, divide into two and press into discs, wrap each disc in clingwrap then refrigerate for 25 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Remove the chilled dough from the fridge, and roll each disc of dough on a floured surface to a thickness of 4mm. Cut out shapes from the dough using Christmas cookie cutters. Place the biscuits on cookie sheets for baking, and if you wish to make them into tree decorations, use the small end of a round metal piping tip to cut a hole for ribbon in the top of each biscuit. Bake the biscuits for 10 minutes or until cooked, and cool on the cookie sheets for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

Ice the cooled biscuits with glace icing (icing sugar, a teaspoon of lemon juice, and water) of a colour of your choosing, and decorate with sugar decorations (eg silver cachous, sprinkles). I chose silver and white because I liked the colour scheme. If you have made a hole for tree decorations in each biscuit, cut short lengths of thin fabric or paper ribbon and thread through each hole, and knot at the top to secure. Hang the biscuits on your Christmas tree as edible decorations.

You can see the cookie roundup here - I never knew that there was so many types of cookies!

Easy chicken curry

I have recently added Nigella Lawson's Nigella Express to my burgeoning library of recipe books (yes, I too am a cookbook addict!). There are plenty of great, fast recipes in this book, and you can avoid the fried foods and cream cakes if this is not your thing.

As an example of one of the delicious but healthy recipes in this book, I made Nigella's "Curry in a Hurry" with variations to suit my tastes and what I had on hand. This curry can be made using light coconut milk instead of full fat, and you can easily substitute the chicken thigh fillets for leaner breast meat. It produces a light, delicious curry that can be eaten in smaller serves as a quick snack, or for a main meal.

The recipe is as follows:

1 onion, chopped
45g Thai green curry paste
600g chicken breast fillets, sliced into thin strips
400ml light coconut milk
250ml chicken stock
1 tablespoon fish sauce
600g mixed frozen vegetables

Spray a large frypan with oil. Brown the onion, then add the curry paste. Add the chicken pieces and brown them, then add the coconut milk, the stock, the fish sauce and the frozen vegetables. Simmer for 15 minutes. Serve with steamed or boiled rice, or stir through some udon noodles.

The Mini Pie Revolution - Blackberry and Apple Pies

Ann from Redacted Recipes and Karyn from Hot Potato are rebelling against the ubiquity of cupcakes and hosting a Mini Pie Revolution. As the name of the event suggests, Ann and Karyn require participants to bake mini pies of any variety, provided that they meet the size criteria ie baked in mini muffin or muffin size tins, and have a crust or other topping (ie they are pies!!).



I have decided to make mini blackberry and apple pies, based on Bill Granger's recipe for apple and cherry tarts in the Australian Womens Weekly, December 2006 edition. You can just see the fruit peeking through the crust of one of the pies in the photograph. These pies are luscious and tasty because they are packed with fruit. They are also quite simple to make in muffin tins.

The recipe is as follows:

300g plain flour
80g sifted icing sugar
pinch of salt
160g chilled, cubed butter
1/4 cup iced water
150g blackberries
2 apples, peeled and cut into 1cm cubes
1 tablespoon cornflour
55g sugar
1 lightly beaten egg white

Place flour, icing sugar and salt in a food processor and pulse until combined. Add the butter and pulse until the dough looks like breadcrumbs. Stream in ice water and process until the dough forms a ball. Place in cling wrap and chill in the refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Grease 8 cups of a 12 hole muffin tin and line with strips of baking paper protuding from the sides (to act as handles to lift out the baked pies).

Roll out the chilled pastry to a 3mm thickness. Cut out 8 pastry rounds and line the bottom of the muffin tins. Cut another 8 rounds to be lids for the pies and set aside.

In a bowl, mix the fruit, cornflour and sugar together. Spoon the fruit into the uncooked pastry cases, brush the top of each pastry case with egg white, and top each pie with a reserved pastry lid. Crimp the edges of the pies together with a fork, and brush the tops of the pies with egg white.

Bake the pies for 40 minutes or until golden.

Thanks to Ann and Karyn for hosting The Mini Pie Revolution!

Savour Chocolate and Patisserie School

Today I attended a "Variety Day" cooking class at Savour Chocolate & Patisserie School in East Brunswick, Melbourne. The class description promised that we would make "a gateau, a tart and some chocolates". And that, in fact, is what we did. However, the final results were so much more wonderful than that prosaic description would lead you to believe, as I am sure that the photographs accompanying this post can attest.

This class gave me a glimpse of the differences between being a capable home cook (as I believe that I am) and being a professional pastry chef. Equipment, technique, ingredients and presentation are all essential to ensuring that you can achieve a professional looking, delicious product. Although I doubt that the results I will achieve (or even aspire to!) at home will match those of what was produced in the class, I learned a lot, and hope that I will be able to put at least some of the techniques to good use.

On arrival at the class, we were "greeted" ("Hello, here's your apron and recipes and there's your name tag") by our tutor, Paul, an Irishman with a rather acerbic wit. All ten of us were at the mercy of Paul's tongue for the day; however, at least from our perspective, it was all in good fun and kept us entertained throughout what proved to be a very long day.

After being divided into three groups, we had to weigh out all of the ingredients for every recipe before commencing. This subsequently resulted in some chaos, because although everyone had to label which ingredients were theirs so that they could be found later (each group made different quantities due to different mixer sizes), there was still understandably some confusion and mix-ups, resulting in wrong quantities being used on occasion.

We made three complete items - a "gourmet delight" (a very fancy frangipan-like dessert, pictured at the top of this post), a chocolate and vanilla charlotte (pictured in the centre of this post) and some truffles (pictured at the bottom of this post). The chocolates interested me the least because it is not something I want to do myself, and I am not a huge fan of these types of chocolates, even though I am a chocoholic.

The gourmet delight was comprised of a shortcrust pastry base that proved to be rather cantankerous, a scrumptious berry compote and an almond dacquoise (similar to a frangipan). The charlotte consisted of a joconde biscuit base (actually just a very sweet, thin sponge, not unlike that used in chocolate stripe cake) brushed with sugar syrup, a vanilla bavarian cream body and a chocolate mousse topping.

I have tried the completed gourmet delight, and it is delicious. Although it can be frozen for up to 6 months, I am going to share it with a friend this evening, as I believe that baked goods are best when they are fresh. The individual components of the charlotte are certainly delicious, but the completed cake is presently residing in my freezer, awaiting an occasion for me to cut it.

The cute round decals pictured immediately above were made by Paul using special chocolate transfers made from cocoa butter, some chocolate sheets with round cut-outs and white chocolate. Unfortunately, the green one melted slightly on the tram journey home, hence the indentation that you can see. These decals were made as chocolate garnishes for the gourmet delight. Other chocolate garnishes demonstrated by Paul were "black and white cigarettes" (thin chocolate curls made using white and dark chocolate) and bronzed chocolate shards made with metallic cake powders and dark chocolate. These latter garnishes are featured atop the chocolate and vanilla charlotte in the photograph.

We did not make the square and marbled caramels in the photograph immediately above - these were a gift because Paul had an unfortunate encounter with most of our white truffles. The white and dark truffles featured in the photograph were made by filling commercially made truffle shells with vanilla ganache, sealing the hole with more chocolate, then rolling the truffle in melted chocolate between your left palm and right fingertips (for a right-handed person). As you can imagine, the latter was not a pretty process.

I adored this class because of the insights it gave me into making restaurant-standard desserts, and the techniques and ideas that I have acquired (yes Paul, I did learn something!!). I am also pretty chuffed with the final results, all of which were made by a group effort (we each received a whole gourmet delight and a whole charlotte to take home).

Thanks to the Savour Chocolate & Patisserie School for making this class available and to Paul for teaching us and for his entertaining (though cutting!) commentary throughout the class.

Jam drops

Christmas is a time of year that always has me waxing lyrical about the great time that I had at home growing up. (Perhaps I am getting old and pining for the good ol' days??) Making food that was an ever-present factor in my childhood always brings me feelings of comfort and happiness, as a number of my previous posts attest.

In the ongoing vein of old fashioned favourites, I made jam drops (known in the US as thumbprints) for work this week. Basically, these are just buttery cookies with a dob of jam in the middle to add sweetness and make the biscuits look attractive. You can use whatever jam or other spread (eg nutella, lemon curd) takes your fancy.

When my brother and I were young, Mum often made jam drops for the household biscuit tin. We always believed that she liked doing it, and it was only much later that she revealed that her motivation was that it was cheaper to make your own biscuits than to buy them. Regardless of her reasons, we benefitted from her efforts, because I believe that home-made biscuits and cakes taste miles better than the majority of supermarket offerings, and you can avoid all of the nasty preservatives that are essential to promote the shelf life of store-bought biscuits. I also benefitted because I have now been bitten by the baking bug, and I get a special kick out of making things that bring back memories of my childhood. Don't get me wrong - as with life in general, things were never perfect, but they were pretty good, and I have mostly very fond memories of those early years at home.

There are oodles of recipes for jam drops out there, and I am sure that they are all equally good. I don't have Mum's recipe for jam drops, so I used the one from Donna Hay's Modern Classics Book 2. It is as follows:

180g softened butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 cups sifted plain flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
your favourite jam

Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius, and line two cookie sheets with baking paper.

Cream the butter and sugar with an electric mixer, then add the egg and beat well. Add the flour and baking powder and combine until you have a workable biscuit dough that you can roll into balls. (If it is too sticky to work with, just add more flour a little at a time.)

Roll generous teaspoonfuls of the dough into balls between the palms of your hands and place on the baking sheets, spaced so that the biscuits have a little room to spread as they bake. (You can see from the photo that mine were sometimes a little close. If yours are too, that's OK - they still taste the same, but you will need to slice them apart while still warm from the oven, and the shapes will not be as regular.) Stick your thumb in each ball to make a small well (not too large, otherwise your jam will run out!). Place a small dob of jam in each well, just enough to fill it. Don't overfill the biscuits, otherwise the jam will run everywhere during baking.

Bake for 10 minutes or until golden (mine took a little longer than 10 minutes). Cool the bsicuits on the trays for about 5 minutes, then transfer to a wire rack to cool completely. The biscuits will be very soft when they first come out of the oven, but harden slightly as they cool.

These biscuits are great for children because they can easily help to make them, and they are simple and sweet in flavour. I used to love making the wells in the jam drops and filling them with jam, although my overenthusiasm with the size of the holes and the amount of jam often landed me in trouble.

Enjoy! It really is true - the simple things are often the best.