Wibble wobble

When I think of milk I generally don’t think of jelly. Milk is meant to be liquid, and the only time it’s not is when it’s congealed in the bottom of the bottle after too long in the fridge. Obviously a winning introduction to a dessert. But the idea of milk jelly intrigued me – we have fruit jellies and they’re so commonplace you can even get ready-made (or at least, almost ready-made) cubes of the stuff to mix up at home, as if stirring gelatine into fruit juice was too complicated for the average person. And yet milk jellies have been consigned to the history books, along with junket and syllabub. I’m not really sure why, they’re ridiculously easy to make and for those of us in need of extra calcium, something different to do with milk. I think this method would work very well with cocoa and a bit of sugar added, to make a sort of chocolate milk jelly, but I’ve yet to try that variation.

Lemon verbena milk jellies with rhubarb compôte
Adapted from Food for Friends and Family

I forwent the honey and sugar in the jellies; it didn’t seem necessary since milk is hardly bitter. The result is a jelly that tastes more of the delicate lemon verbena and dairy than of sugar, which is how I like it. Make sure you use the freshest milk you have though; any hint of sourness will be noticeable.

Ingredients
400ml milk (I used semi-skimmed, it’s just what I had)
5-6 heads lemon verbena
1 sachet gelatine

Compôte
100g rhubarb
2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon lemon zest

Method
1. In a small saucepan bring the milk to a simmer. Turn off the heat and add the lemon verbena to the milk. Leave to sit and steep for an hour or until the milk is cool.

2. When the milk is cool remove the lemon verbena. Put the milk back on a medium heat and whisk in the gelatine until completely dissolved. Do not allow the mixture to boil. Once the gelatine has dissolved pour the milk into 2 large ramekins and leave in the fridge for at least 3 hours, or overnight, to set.

3. To make the compôte place the rhubarb, sugar and lemon zest in a saucepan. Cook over a medium heat for 10 minutes, or until the rhubarb is soft and yielding. To serve upend the ramekins on a plate and serve with a couple of spoonfuls of compôte.

Serves 2.

Perfect parfait

If you read that in French it reads perfect perfect. Actually, since the first word is English it probably reads more like “garble perfect”. Ok, perhaps I should stick to my language instead of trying pun in other peoples’…

Over the summer I had the opportunity to spend five hours in a kitchen with a real-life chef, who owned her own restaurant for eight years. It was a fairly cool, if slightly scary experience (she frowned when I tasted the sauce by dipping my finger in it. Apparently in top restaurants they have these hygiene rules that mean you have to use a spoon. Urgh.) During this time, besides learning how to make a huge selection of dishes, mayonnaise and Hollandaise from scratch (one is basically a cooked version of the other), a really good tomato sauce (use butter. Lots and lots of it) I also learned how to make a parfait.

I’ve never really been into making frozen desserts at home, partly because I don’t have an ice cream maker, which I thought was a fairly crucial tool for such delights, and partly because I don’t have the space in my freezer. Not to mention that desserts consisting of double cream and egg yolks are not a sensible thing to have lying around in large quantities. However, it turns out parfaits are really easy to make, you don’t need any special equipment (except maybe an electric whisk and, as discussed, I’m not such a fan of them anyway) and you can freeze them in individual moulds so you only eat one. At a time.

The basic recipe for parfait is very simple, egg yolks whisked with sugar and a little alcohol (this helps to make the parfait softer once it’s frozen), with whipped cream and some fruit or other flavouring of your choice. The higher the water content of the fruit, the more alcohol you need to soften the parfait, or you could add some melted white chocolate, to increase the fat content and stop it setting so firm. The flavour combinations you could go for are basically limitless. Having bought a bag of beautiful cranberries, only to discover they are far too sour to eat out of hand (um, is this common knowledge?) So i turned these into a lovely cranberry sauce/jelly-type affair, some of which I used to flavour the parfait, and some of which was served with the parfait. I decided to use some cointreau as well, to give it a nice cranberry orange flavour, and since it was for a dinner party I smartened the whole thing up with some cinnamon tuiles (as far as I can tell, they’re just really, really thin biscuits). All the components can be made in advance so it’s ideal for parties when you have more than enough other things to be worrying about.

Cranberry-orange parfait with cranberry jelly and cinnamon tuile

This was a pretty flawless dessert, if I do say so myself. The one thing I would change next time is to sieve the cranberry jelly before it sets. Although as a rule I despise passing things through sieves since it is tedious, time-consuming and essentially pointless as chances are what you’re discarding is edible, it would make a big difference here. Though I’m sure most of the goodness in cranberries is in their skin, the skins roll up and add a slightly spiky texture to the jelly otherwise. Obviously if you’re not a perfectionist, don’t bother. It tastes just fine with the skins in.

Ingredients
Cranberry jelly
300g fresh or frozen cranberries
120g white sugar
1 tablespoon water
1/2 teaspoon lemon juice

Parfait
3 egg yolks
3 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon cointreau
250ml double or whipping cream
2-3 tablespoons cranberry sauce

Method
1. To make the jelly put the cranberries, sugar, water and lemon juice in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook on a high heat, without a lid, for about 15 minutes, or until the cranberries are soft and bursting out of their skins. The harder you boil the mixture, the firmer it will set. Using an immersion blender puree the mixture. Quickly push the sauce through a sieve to remove the cranberry skins and then set aside to cool.

2. In a large bowl whisk together the egg yolks, sugar and cointreau until very pale in colour and foamy. In a medium bowl, with a clean whisk, whisk the cream until stiff peaks form. Gently fold in 2-3 tablespoons of the cranberry jelly, depending on how strong a flavour you want. You can also swirl this in instead, to achieve a marbling effect.

3. A couple of spoons at a time fold the cranberry/cream mixture into the egg yolks. When done, divide the mixture between 4 ramekins. Cover with clingfilm and freeze for at least 2 hours, or until required.

Makes 4 0.2l ramekins, and plenty of leftover cranberry jelly.

To serve, remove the parfaits from the freezer. Run a knife (nothing too sharp) around the edges of the ramekin and up-end each parfait on a small serving plate. Spoon some of the spare cranberry jelly on, or to the side of the parfait and garnish with a cinnamon tuile.

Cinnamon tuiles

Adapted from AP – and this is a lesson in why you should use recipes from a reputable source, since they clearly tested this recipe exactly zero times. Eight egg whites and two cups of flour produces 36 teaspoon-sized pieces of dough, WTF? However, adapted to make something completely different, and generally ignoring most of the quantities this recipe produced some great tuiles. So that’s ok.

Ingredients
2 egg whites
1/2 cup white sugar
1/2 cup gf flour blend
Pinch salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons (27g) melted butter
1 tablespoon double cream

Method
1. Preheat oven to 190 C.

2. In a large bowl whisk the egg whites with the sugar until soft peaks form. Fold in the gf flour, salt and cinnamon very gently. Add the cream and cooled melted butter and stir just until mixed.

3. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Drop 2 tablespoons of the mixture onto the sheet and spread into a very thin layer using an offset spatula. Add another tablespoon of mixture if necessary, but the tuiles should be fine enough you can almost see through them. When the mixture has been evenly smoothed out pop in the preheated oven for 5 minutes, until the edges are just beginning to turn brown, and the centre is almost set.

4. Remove the pan from the oven and working quickly, using a cookie cutter cut out circles from the tuile. Don’t worry about lifting them off the baking sheet just yet, just make sure you have cut all the way through the tuile (it’ll be quite sticky) and through to the paper. Then leave the sheet to cool on a wire rack. Once cool you should be able to lift the tuiles off the sheet with a knife. If the circles have extra bits of tuile still clinging to them these should snap off readily.

5. If you’re not using the tuiles straight away pack them away very carefully between layers of greaseproof paper. Be careful as they will be very fragile. The irregular bits of tuile left over can be eaten straight up, or used to decorate desserts.

Makes at least 6 or 7 baking sheets of tuile, and each baking sheet gave me 10 complete circles (though some snapped). If you have enough tuiles then pour the remaining mixture onto a lined baking sheet so it’s half an inch thick and bake for 10 minutes, until set in the middle. Cut this into little finger biscuits and serve with tea, coffee, or ice cream.

Jam and cake

Things I learned this week. One: If you bake a loaf of bread with poppy seeds on top, be prepared to get poppy seeds all over the kitchen. Oops.

Two. Always bring meat to room temperature before cooking it. If you’re making a steak dinner there’s no point focusing on the french fries/Hollandaise/veggies/mulled wine/guests if you end up serving steak that’s cold in the middle. Big oops. On the plus side, at least I won’t be doing that again for a very long time.

Three. You can use up odds and ends of jam or fruit sauce by putting it in a cake pan, before adding a very plain white sponge cake on top and voila, you have a fruit upside down cake, plus marginally emptier cupboards. Score. This particular concoction took less than 10 minutes to throw together (one-bowl recipes, always a winner) and a mere 25 minutes to bake. From start to eating, this was under an hour, and it’s a simple enough, plain enough cake, you can make it for no other reason than you felt like it. Plus, it has fruit jelly on top, so a slice counts as one of your five a day*.

Upside-down cranberry jelly cake
Inspired by Food in Jars; cake recipe from Healthy Gluten-free Eating

Ingredients
3 tablespoons cranberry jelly or other jam
70g butter, softened
90g white sugar
2 eggs
80g gf flour blend
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon xanthan gum
Pinch of salt

Method
1. Preheat the oven to 180 C.

2. Lightly grease the sides of a 7-inch sandwich tin. Spoon the cranberry jelly into the base of the tin and even out with the back of the spoon.

3. In a large bowl cream the butter together with the sugar. Beat in the eggs, one at a time. Slowly stir in the flour, baking powder, xanthan gum and salt. Pour the batter into the tin, on top of the jelly, and bake in the oven for 25 minutes, until lightly brown on top and a skewer inserted in the centre comes out clean.

4. Leave the cake to cool in the pan for 5 minutes. Run a knife round the edge of the pan and then invert the cake on a serving plate. Serve hot or cold with a cup of tea.

Keeps well in the fridge, though the cut edges will go stale very quickly; make sure you cover them with clingfilm or foil to prevent this as much as possible.

 

*Ok I’m not a nutritionist so this may not actually be true.