Inspired by Chris Noth’s Kitchen Secrets, this week I made a mini pièce montée / croquembouche – which is a French celebration cake made out of a pile of profiteroles.

To mix things up a bit, I used this profiterole recipe (I did need all the eggs, ignore the comments!) and this mocha custard filling.

I made the profiteroles, filled them, and then made a pile by sticking them to the plate with a caramel made of sugar and sherry.

The learning points from the cooking:

You can make profiteroles in advance, but best fill them on the day.

I need a lot more practice piping.

Profiterole filling needs to be completely lump free if you are to have a hope of getting it through a piping nozzle.

Don’t try and make caramel out of unbleached sugar. If you use white, bleached caster sugar, it’s much easier to see when it is turning into caramel. If you use unbleached sugar, it starts off caramel coloured and you have no idea when it is turning.

Here’s a picture:

In a rare happening, I volunteered to make the main for this week’s outing, and so this week’s pudding is not a pudding at all.

What I actually wanted to was lamb shanks, as I have recently discovered these. Well, I ate them ten years ago, in Bistrot les sans culottes ((Nicholas Parsons shouldn’t climb trees)) and much more recently I discovered you can get them in the butchers, they are not particularly expensive, they are delicious, and they are easy to cook.

However, for once I was catering for 6 not 4, and I wasn’t sure I had a pot big enough to cook six lamb shanks, so I decided to do a Lancs hot pot instead.

A dish for that many would have entailed quite a lot of vegetable chopping, so I got the food processor out and fitted the slicing attachment. There is always the danger, when chopping veg for stews in the processor, of chopping too finely and ending up with an unrecognisable mush. I sought to avoid this by using the slicer instead. I used the fine slicer – and next time I will use the coarse slicer instead.

This nicely filled my 5 litre orange le Creuset wedding present pot, and it cooked on the oven floor. I was undermining my veggie Valentines menu by cooking this at the same time for the following day.

In the end, only four of us were there to eat it, but the leftovers hotted up nicely the following day, so it did do six generous portions.

750 grams lamb chunks
olive oil and butter for
3 small onions
4 sticks celery
3 carrots
garlic to taste ((I am rapidly becoming one of those annoying people who ‘likes garlic but it doesn’t like me’))
handful mushrooms
1 large bottle, Manns Brown Ale
3 large potatoes (I had baking potatoes to hand)
Oxo cubes and Worcester sauce

In your stove-to-oven casserole, brown the meat and remove from the heat. Chop the veg and brown it bit by bit, caramelising the onions as much as possible, then return all the veg and meat to the pan.

Add the bottle of beer, two oxo cubes dissolved in a little hot water, and a good glug of Worcester sauce.

Slice the potatoes finely and layer on top of the stew.

Cook the lot for 90 minutes at 180. Or longer, or shorter. Or do what I somehow managed to do, which is actually whack the dial on the oven up to 250 and not notice for 40 minutes. This seems to be a pretty forgiving dish.

Shortly before the end of cooking time, remove from the oven and brush the potatoes with melted butter or dripping. Whack under the grill to get a nice brown finish on the spuds, and serve.

Delish.

The latest outing to Pudding Club was Eric Lanlard’s Tarte borguinione, a pastry shell filled with a chocolate frangipane and topped with red wine poached pears.

I first thought of making it back in March last year, when Lanlard’s Glamour Puds was on TV. I wrote about it on my blog and linked to the recipe so that I knew I could find it when I wanted it.

When it came to clicking it and finding the recipe, ach, horror of horrors, it was gone!

I found a copy here at Homemade Delights and made it according to those instructions. More or less.

Finally, I have also found the Lanlard version here on the C4 website.

It is a ramped up version of this tarte, which I made once a few years ago.

The night before: halve, core ((coring pears is difficult. Any tips?)) and poach three similar sized pears in 200mls of red wine, 250 grams of sugar and a cinnamon stick. Boil it up with the pears in and leave to steep until cold, then refrigerate overnight.

The following morning, blind bake a pastry case: 8oz of flour, 4oz of butter, 1oz sugar, enough milk to bring the dough together. Fridge for a bit then squidge it into the pastry case or roll out and press it in. Blind bake at 180 till golden.

Then make a chocolate frangipan out of 125g butter (it says use unsalted, but I never bother buying that specially), 95g caster sugar, 3 eggs, 125g ground almond, 55g cocoa powder. Mix together in the Kenwood and pour into the cooled pastry case.

Then slice the pears perpendicular to the stem and use a large knife to transfer the slices artistically onto the chocolate almond cream.

Bake at 180 deg C for 30 mins. If it’s going to be a while before eating, glaze it with heated seedless raspberry jelly.

Yum!

Rather helpfully, after I had made this last week, the Evening Post phoned, saying they wanted to do a full page spread about Come Dine With Me and could they take an action photo of me in the kitchen? I could helpfully pretend to have whipped up a tarte specially for their photo.

Here’s their story. Must buy a copy of the picture.

Something else I cooked over the festive season.

Made per this recipe.

I used bourbon biscuits instead of whatever the recipe says, as per her grasshopper pie recipe.

This makes rather a lot, and was definitely one of those for leaving half the leftovers with your host.

For the origins of Pudding Club, see here. For all the recipes in the series, click the tag.

Pudding club restarted in the new year, and I made a steamed pudding. I had planned to try and make my own Christmas pudding this year, and for much of the time I had all the right ingredients but no pudding basin. I toyed with the idea of re-using the plastic ones that supermarket Christmas puddings come in, but in the end, as with so many things Christmas this year, I prevaricated for too long and put it off till next year.

But with the idea in my mind that steamed puddings might be something I would like to tackle, I was thrilled to see a variety of pudding basins in Lakeland remaindered to sell. I plumped for a rather nice Mason & Cash affair with robins and snowflakes painted on it, at least partly because I couldn’t find the 2l metal with a sealing lid which I didn’t see until after I’d passed through the tills.

So to christen the basin, I decided to make a Sussex Pond pudding, following this BBC recipe, for once, almost entirely to the letter.

The one exception was the size of the basin. The recipe calls for a 1.5 litre basin; in the shop they told me the Mason & Cash affair was 600ml. When I measured it for myself, filled to the brim, it was more like 800. But it was definitely smaller than the recipe called for.

And yet, I made it to the measurements, and it all fit in perfectly.

Here’s the ingredients going in:

A good thick layer of suet pastry, butter and dark sugar at the base, then skewered ((the recipe suggests using a larding needle or skewer. I wonder how many more people have skewers than larding needles)) lemons on top, then the rest of the butter and sugar.

Into the basin, covered with a foil and parchment lid with a pleat in it, and tied up with string. I was dead chuffed with how this looked when it was completed as so often my craft attempts look far from good when done.

Then steamed. I used my stock pot and a smaller pudding pot to hold the basin off the bottom. I then steamed for four hours, with a view to allowing the pudding to cool completely, transport it to our friends, and then boil again for about forty minutes to warm before serving.

At this point it was a little nerve-wracking. The pudding was sealed in its basin and I had no idea whether it would turn out, whether it was properly cooked and how it would taste when it turned out.

It turned out just fine.

Then the question was clearly how would it taste? And would the lemons actually be edible, after all that cooking?

What happens is the lemon juice leaks out of the skewer holes, muddles with the melted butter and sugar and forms a dense syrup. With the pith from the lemons still there, this certainly ends up a very adult taste, sweet, lemony but with also a fairly strong marmalady bitterness as an edge to the flavour.

The lemons were not edible.

Some of us had it with custard; others with cream. Our toddler friends preferred the custard to the pudding.

Tonight was to have been pudding club, but with a large amount of snow on our road, our cars are effectively stranded, and the journey out to Long Eaton by public transport, nursing a cake tin, unfortunately didn’t quite appeal so much.

I had been toying with making three things: Nigel Slater’s orange jelly (which was on his TV show a few weeks ago but in the Guardian nearly 10 years back!) (although I made grapefruit jelly recently, so… too soon?); Gordon Ramsay’s Mocha Mousses or some sort of coffee cake / gateau.

The desire to make a coffee flavoured dessert stems from a realisation that has come years too late. My husband P does not drink coffee, so I had assumed he also didn’t like coffee flavoured things. Thinking back on it, I’ve seen him eat tiramisù enough times in restaurants to know this wasn’t true. And discussing it, whilst he still doesn’t want to drink coffee, it turns out he is more than happy with coffee flavoured desserts. Which makes me very happy as coffee is perhaps my most favourite dessert flavouring in all the world. (A similar amount of happiness comes from the almost simultaneous discover that he DOES like blue cheese – for some reason it’s been in my head that he didn’t for about seven years!)

I experimented making mocha mousses before by just adding a shot of moka pot espresso to a chocolate mousse. It didn’t work. For one, I got the chocolate quantities wrong, and so the resulting foam never actually set.

The Gordon Ramsay recipe does not somehow seem to me to be a chocolate mousse, which is a very simple recipe with but two ingredients: chocolate and egg. Is it possible to make a mocha mousse with so few ingredients, without resorting to cream and cream cheeses?

The other Big Question in coffee flavour desserts is how to get the coffee flavour in? I’m a huge coffee snob, and I don’t give house room to instant coffee. But a blog post from Dan Lepard and a paper article from Nigel Slater both suggest that there is a place for instant coffee in cake making. Slater puts it:

About the coffee. I have flavoured cake and frosting with both strong home-made espresso and instant coffee granules, and I have come to the conclusion that the latter gives a richer, more rounded flavour.

The only bore is having to go out and buy the stuff. And if anyone looks as if they are about to get snooty with you, just remind them that Elizabeth David apparently drank instant coffee by the mugful.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to buy it. Somehow I am on Starbucks’s mailing list ((I know, I know, says he’s a coffee snob in one paragraph and mentions Starbucks in the next.)) and they are currently hawking a new brand of instant coffee, and they keep posting me samples of sachets of their instant coffee, so I used that.

I toyed with various different coffee cake recipes: Dan Lepard’s Waitrose recipe; Nigel Slater’s again. At one point I even looked a bit at “Delia’s Austrian“.

The cake I eventually made used Dan Lepard’s cake recipe, but with a different filling and syrup. I liked the idea of using veggie oil as the sponge fat because I have a bottle of the stuff that P bought that I almost never use. (I’m an oil snob as well as a coffee snob). Another thing that attracted me to Lepard’s recipe was this exhaustive photoblog on his website forum responding to a comment that suggested his recipe was unusable.

Unsurprisingly, my cake did not look as good as Dan’s.

His recipe has an awful lot of raising agents – self-raising flour AND baking powder, and on top of that, separating the eggs and beating the whites to fluffy peaks – and despite that, my cakes did not rise like his.

A two egg sponge has often felt a bit mean to me for two 20cm sponge tins, and indeed when I was pouring the batter in, there was barely enough to fill the bottom. I think I could possibly have got away with even more liquid, but there certainly wasn’t enough to depress the centre bits, which is what you are supposed to do to ensure the sides of the cake rise as much as the middle. And when it came out, short of the time allotted, it was a little crisp and biscuity.

No matter, I intended to moisten the cake using a coffee syrup, making a sort of kind of coffee drizzle cake. So I made a shot of espresso using a moka pot, sweetened it with the last of the Madeira wine we brought back from honeymoon, and drizzled that over both halves of the cake. Next time I will make the syrup an awful lot sweeter.

For the filling, I used some ambient chocolate crème patissière I found in the supermarket last week. It is not great, I have to say. I can taste the UHT-ness of the cream it is made with, and it has a bit of a synthetic taste to it.

All in all, not a huge success. We’re still doing our best to eat the cake, however.

225g self-raising flour
2 tsp baking powder
225g caster sugar
225ml vegetable oil
2 medium eggs, separated
2 heaped tsp instant coffee granules, dissolved in 2 tsp boiling water
75ml whole milk

(method for using Kenwood food processor)

Heat oven (I used non fan, 170 deg, this prob too hot) and grease and line two round 20cm sponge tins.

Separate the eggs and beat the whites to soft peaks. Remove from the bowl and reserve.

Sift the flour and baking powder into the bowl, and, still using the whisk attachment, mix the yolks, oil, sugar, coffee and milk into a batter. Add back a third of the egg white and whisk until mixed. Fold in the remaining egg white and divide between the tins. Bake until cooked, about half an hour until the middles of the cake are spongey to the touch.

Allow tins to cool slightly on rack then remove cakes from tins before cold.

Allow cakes to cool fully before moving on to filling and syrup.

Make a syrup out of espresso, sherry and sugar and drizzle over the cake.

Make a filling out of whatever you like – buttercream? Coffee flavoured buttercream? A simple flavoured icing of icing sugar and coffee? Just stay away from shop bought chocolate crème patissière.