Previously on Pudding Club: Chocolate mousse / Pear and Ginger cake / Chocolate/Chestnut torte / Beef Wellington canapés / Crème renversée au caramel

So last night at pudding club, I opted for a new tactic – take ingredients and use our friends’ large well equipped kitchen to assemble a pudding on site.

A tactic with varied results. I was making soufflé, which you really need to know your oven for, and have a bit of a practice. My practice run earlier in the week had gone reasonably well:

This is based on Eric Lanlard’s recipe from the series Glamour Puds

Soufflé, like chocolate mousse, is one of those things that looks really impressive, but is made with very few ingredients and is quite easy to make, particularly with an electric whisk. Unlike chocolate mousse, you have to get the oven timings right, which needs a little practice. And preferably, the same oven when practising as on the night.

So, the night before, I peeled and cored 6 cox apples, sprinkled with cinnamon and a small amount of water, and roasted in a fairly hot oven for 45 minutes. Push the roasted apples through a sieve. (peeling them first makes it much easier to get them through the sieve, and adding a little water means you don’t leave half the apple as burnt bits on the roasting tin)

Come the evening itself, prepare 4 large ramekins: line with sponge fingers and sprinkle a little calvados over them. We have some fab calvados, bought directly from the farm in Normandy where it is distilled, so we always have a story to tell about the spirit.

Separate four eggs and mix the yolks in with the apple purée, and beat the whites to stiff peaks. Once the whites are ready, slowly add 200grams muscovado sugar whilst continuing to whisk. Then take a third of the egg white and mix well with the purée/yolk mix before folding the in the rest of the egg whites carefully to preserve the air. (This thing about adding in a third and mixing well, and carefully folding in the remaining amount is a new thing to me – but I have now seen it on several different cooking programmes in the same week.)

Pour the mix over the sponge biscuits and bake in a hot oven, 210 deg C for 9-12 minutes. It’s a soufflé, so don’t open the oven door until they are cooked. Hope you have an oven with a window! When they are cooked, the soufflé will rise quite considerably in height, and a skewer should come out clean.

My effort last night wasn’t quite cooked enough, but still a little tasty.

I think it could probably have stayed in another five minutes without burning too much on top.

Another similar Eric Lanlard recipe is “Soufflé Pompadour” – which uses oranges instead of apples, and is cooked in the hollowed out orange shells, which are place in teacups to serve.

Advantages of using friends’ kitchen and equipment?

• less washing up
• getting to use their non-stick ramekins (which look fancy but were £1 each from Wilco)
• getting to use theirKitchenAid Classic Stand Mixer (White)

Recipes which might make an outing for a future Pudding club:

Eric Lanlard / Glamour puds:

• Galette des rois (looks relatively simple, but relies on good presentation, which always lets me down)
• Tarte borguinione – which looks pretty similar to this old favourite, but with the welcome addition  of chocolate and red wine…

Raymond Blanc recipes

• Délice au chocolat – fiddly, much?  But a biscuit base made from praline and bran flakes?!

PS, is it just me, or Raymond Blanc – Chris Noth – separated at birth?

Previously on Pudding Club: Pear and Ginger cake / Chocolate/Chestnut torte / Beef Wellington canapés / Crème renversée au caramel

Chocolate mousse for me has a number of associations. My short-term Swiss boyfriend / sugar-daddy when I lived in Paris ((that’s quite a little fact to drop into conversation, n’est-ce pas?)) once told me that it is the only dessert that it is acceptable to eat with a spoon – all other desserts, protocol insists, should be eaten with a pastry fork. That’s a little dogmatic.

Scroll forward to 2005, and the Cheadle by-election, where we had a group of us living in a holiday let whilst working hard to get Mark Hunter elected. For a couple of nights we took it in turn to cook and we went to various degrees of OTT when it came to the meals, complicated by dietary requirements that included a veggie who ate fish, and a lactose intolerant. Chocolate mousse was someone else’s recipe that impressed everyone, including me, but she modestly explained it wasn’t difficult, and at the time, no-one quite believed her. Particularly since, in a holiday let, we only had fairly basic cooking kit, including no electric whisk.

Chocolate mousse also features regularly on Come Dine With Me in various exciting forms, including combinations of mousse – white, dark, coffee – and with various different accompaniments.

So all of this was a little in my mind when I tried to make chocolate mousse as one of the puds during our February Scottish holiday.

And it went fine, and was ridiculously easy, even with only a manual whisk. For two, chocolate mousse was most of a 200 gram bar of chocolate and two eggs. Melt the chocolate. Separate the eggs. Add the yolks to the melted chocolate, ensuring it’s not hot enough to cook them. Beat the whites until you get stiff peaks, and combine with the chocolate mix. Pour into serving vessels and chill.

For the finishing touch, I melted some white chocolate and laced it onto the top of the mousse:

So with this triumph fresh in my mind, I resolved to make chocolate mousse for the next outing of Pudding Club. And with that decision made, when we were touring a flea market in Callander the following day, I picked up a rather kitsch set of espresso cups, rather more with desserts in mind than actual espresso.

When it came to making mousse for four, I upped the numbers to 4 eggs, and 400 grams of chocolate, using a mix of dark and milk chocolate for the mousse. The white chocolate drizzle plan did not come to fruition – it transpires if you buy expensive white chocolate instead of the cheap stuff, it’s very hard to get it to the right consistency.

Previously on Pudding Club: Chocolate/Chestnut torte / Beef Wellington canapés / Crème renversée au caramel

Tonight’s recipe was found here on the BBC / Good Food site after searching for a Come Dine with Me recipe I couldn’t find again. The CDWM version involved making a paste of butter and sugar, spreading it on foil, lining the foil with tinned pears and putting a ginger cake on top. The paste caramelizes and the pears sink into the ginger. I couldn’t quite find that, and didn’t quite want to improvise, so used the recipe instead.

Here are some thoughts: the instruction “core the pears but leave the stems on” – easily said, not so easily done. I stopped trying after a while and cooked them with the cores in. The recipe seems extremely fluid, so don’t know how it will come out. It also gets you to add liquid ingredients to dry ones, which means I couldn’t mix the flour in too well and ended up with loads of white speckles at the top. I couldn’t get the pears to stay standing up, either, so ended up with them on their sides. And because it was so liquid, all the crystalized ginger sank to the bottom.

So, we’ll have to see how it goes.

I’m not supposed to cook at night when the household is supposed to sleep. It’s pretty antisocial after all. The noise wakes the light sleepers – especially the cats – and the tantalising cooking aromas permeate dreams so that P wakes up salivating and with acid indigestion. But… sometimes I’m much more awake at 4am than I ever am at 8, when the household is properly waking up.

Trying to cook quietly is like that old comedy sketch of the drunk guy trying to get into his house without waking everyone up. Every silent moment turns into a cacophony of sound. Getting baking trays out of piles, saucepans out of stacks, opening crinkly cellophane wrappers. Even the fan on the oven – how much noise does it really make – is it audible upstairs? I try closing the kitchen door, but at the moment, it squeaks. Must grease that at some point. Ginger cake smells are indeed wafting up the stairs. Thus far, I have not heard angry footsteps… I think I may have gotten away with it.

Previously, on Pudding Club…

Back to our friends for a New Year’s extravaganza lasting all afternoon and into the night, and up until the change of decade if we’re not flagging by then.

Today’s pudding will be a chocolate/chestnut torte, made like this: blind bake a pastry case made from 8oz flour, 4oz butter, 1oz sugar, 1 egg and enough water to bring the breadcrumbs into the necessary paste. Chill the dough for an hour then press into a greased or lined tin, and blind bake at 180 deg C until golden brown.

For the filling, heat 200 grams of dark belgian chocolate with half a tin of chestnut purée, 125 grams of sugar and 100mls of double cream. Heat in a glass bowl over a pan of boiling water or in a double boiler, so as not to burn the chocolate. Do the best you can to desolidify the block of chestnut, since it comes out of the tin looking worryingly like cat food and is pretty tricky to get to break up.

Once the mix is smooth and lovely, pour it into the pastry case and allow to cool. If there is spare chocolate sauce, pour it into a jam jar – it will work as a toast spread for a few days, or can be reheated as chocolate fondue.

Posh people who know how to garnish can manage something amazing by putting a spot of cream in the centre of the cooling tart, and making swirly patterns. I’m not very good at the old presentation. When I do it, it looks unspeakably awful:

Beef Wellington Canapés

Although this is a pudding club post, there will be savouries as well. There will be a raclette! And I am contributing another recipe I just made up: beef wellington canapés.

Beef Wellington is something I’ve had at posh functions, but never actually cooked myself. It tends to be a little disappointing when it’s being cranked out by the hundred by the rubber chickeners, so one day I must try and make it myself. As far as I understand it, it’s a slice of beef steak, with either pâté or mushrooms duxelles, wrapped in pastry and baked. One day, I shall have to have a go. So to make canapés, after reading around a bit, I settled on thin slices of beef intended for sandwiches, a pot of Co-op Ardennes pâté, and homemade mushrooms duxelles all neatly (!) wrapped in filo.

For the mushrooms duxelles: first prepare about 200grams of mushrooms by chopping off the hard stalk bottoms and slooshing under the tap. Melt a big knob of butter in a frying pan and grate in some nutmeg. Add a little olive oil to stop it burning. Finely chop 50grams of streaky bacon into the pan with scissors and stir until cooked. Using the “slice” side of a box grater, finely slice the mushrooms into the butter / bacon mix. Stir occasionally to stop it from sticking. When all the mushrooms are in, keep stirring until they are cooked and given up their juices. Add a generous teaspoon of Bisto gravy granules (what? what made you think this was posh?!) and stir until dissolved. Add a good measure of sherry or port, and keep on a medium heat until almost all the liquid has boiled away. Don’t burn them, but don’t leave them too moist, or they will soak through the pastry.

To make the canapés, unfurl the filo pastry. Chop up the sandwich beef slices so that there is a portion of beef for each filo sheet. This meant quartering three slices to make 12 pieces, in my case. Fold two opposite corners of the sheet into the middle so they overlap to make 3 layers of pastry underneath the filling. Smear with pâté, add the slice of beef, and spoon a teaspoon of mushrooms on top. Close up the filo sheet so it is reasonably waterproof. Continue until the ingredients run out.

At this point they can be stored in the fridge for a day until they are needed. When they are, cook for 8-12 minutes on greaseproof paper. Try not to get the greaseproof and the filo mixed up when they come out of the oven.