We Should Cocoa - Happy Birthday!

Chele is hosting this month, and it's also We Should Cocoa's First Birthday! So very appropriately she chose the theme of "a chocolate masterpiece fit for a first birthday party".



Now when I was a kid, my birthday parties were fantastic, because my mum put so much effort into them. But I never had a chocolate birthday cake - back then birthday cakes were always plain sponge cakes in the shape of your age, covered in white buttercream with pink piping for girls and blue piping for boys, and crushed nuts round the sides. EVERYONE had a birthday cake just like that, and I absolutely hated them.

However what I did have at my birthday party every year, and what I absolutely adored, was a veritable mountain of chocolate rice crispie cakes. I bet if you're reading this in the UK you had them too (do they have rice crispies outside the UK?). My mum used to let me "help" make them, and even back then I was happiest with a wooden spoon in my hand.



Anyway, as I do love a bit of nostalgia, here's my rice crispie cake mountain. It's only a small mountain (more of a gentle hill, really) as there are only two of us here to eat them all up. But one day in the nearish future, hopefully I'll have a little mini baker of my own I can pass the wooden spoon along to, and I'll be able to make proper rice crispie mountains just like my mum used to :)


A big HAPPY BIRTHDAY to We Should Cocoa and a huge THANK YOU to Chele and Choclette!


Oh and I've had a bit of a funny month, from technical issues to my dad being in hospital to me changing jobs and I just haven't had time to be baking, let alone photographing it and writing blog posts, but now things have thankfully settled down so I should be back into the swing of things. And I'm still wading through weeks worth of emails so if you've sent one and I haven't replied, sorry but I will!

We Should Cocoa - Stracciatella Ice Cream with Macerated Strawberries

The theme of this month's We Should Cocoa, hosted by Choclette at the Chocolate Log Blog, is strawberries. No problem - strawberries are one of my all time favourite foods, I can eat them by the bucketload. I should be able to come up with an awesome cake or other yummy baked item including chocolate and strawberries.

Except I can't eat it because, as you'll know if you read my previous post, I had a wisdom tooth extracted this week and am on a mushy food diet for a few days.

So I've cheated a little bit. I've still made something awesome with chocolate and strawberries, but it's not a cake. And in fact it reminds me of two really good holidays I've had to Spain and Italy, so it was worth cheating a bit just for the lovely rosy-tinted nostalgic feeling that eating this gave me.



When I was fourteen I went on an exchange trip to Granada in southern Spain. The mother of the girl I stayed with was a fabulous cook, and one of the things she made us was macerated strawberries. We had them for breakfast, eaten greedily from a large bowl with a spoon and sometimes even piled on top of buttered toast (is that weird? I don't care). Ever since, macerated strawberries have reminded me of that trip and of Lola's beautiful meals. You don't need a recipe for this one. All you do is take a punnet of strawberries, hull and halve/quarter them depending on size, throw them into a bowl and sprinkle over 2 tbsp caster sugar and 1 tbsp balsamic vinegar. Leave it for a few hours. The sugar and acid will draw out the liquid from the strawberries and turn it slightly syrupy, and the strawberries will taste sweeter, riper and more gorgeous than any strawberries you've had before. And I PROMISE it will not taste of vinegar. Trust me.



For the ice cream, you'll need a recipe. And an ice cream machine. I have neither the funds nor the space for an expensive one with a built-in freezer, so instead I have this little Kenwood thing which cost under £20 from Amazon, and as long as I remember to put it in the freezer the day before I want the ice cream, it does the job perfectly.



Now officially you're supposed to make a "proper" creme anglaise style custard for the ice cream, which involves heating it over a very low flame and stirring it for ages and ages till it thickens, while trying not to let it curdle. Sorry but life is just too short. So I use a little bit of cornflour which will stabilise the custard and stop it from curdling, so you can turn the heat up a bit and it'll thicken a lot quicker. Which leaves you with more time to spend learning to play Johnny B Goode on the guitar (if you're me, that is).

You will need:

300ml milk (semi-skimmed or whole is fine)
70g caster sugar
4 egg yolks (make meringues with the leftover egg whites!)
2 tsp GOOD vanilla extract
300ml pot of double or whipping cream (some pots are 287ml which is fine)
1 heaped tsp cornflour
70g plain chocolate

Heat the milk and vanilla in a saucepan till it just comes to a boil. Meanwhile whisk the sugar, egg yolks and cornflour in a bowl. Pour on the boiling milk - a little bit first to temper the eggs so they don't scramble, whisk it in, then pour on the rest and whisk it all together. Pour the whole thing back into the saucepan over a lowish heat and keep stirring till it thickens enough to coat the back of a wooden spoon. Pour the custard back into the bowl and stand it in a sink filled with cold water (with ice cubes if you have some) to cool it down quickly. Then chill it in the fridge for at least 4 hours or even until the next day. This lets the flavours develop.

When you're ready to make the ice cream, pour the cream into the custard and mix it all together. Churn this in your ice cream machine. Meanwhile melt the plain chocolate. When the ice cream is looking like it's almost ready, pour the chocolate in a slow, steady stream through the hole in the ice cream machine lid. When it hits the ice cream it will set almost immediately, and little bits of chocolate will work their way through the whole mixture. Lovely. When it's all looking nicely mixed together, transfer the ice cream into a container and put it in the freezer for a few hours before devouring.



My husband is a very discerning ice cream connoisseur and he gave this a very definite thumbs up. Ice cream is something that's more expensive to make at home but worth the extra money and effort because it's just a million times nicer than anything you buy in the shops.

Looking forward to seeing the other strawberry-related entries this month... and hopefully in a few days I'll be baking properly again.

We Should Cocoa - chocolate swiss roll

For this month's We Should Cocoa, hosted by Chele at the Chocolate Teapot, the theme was a chocolate roulade/swiss roll. I knew immediately what I wanted to do, and headed straight for Peyton & Byrne British Baking. I adore this book, I know I've said it before, but it's just so pretty and pastel and... well, English, and the photography is lovely and the recipes are lovely and it's all just lovely. Go and buy it, I'm not giving you the recipe for this chocolate swiss roll, you'll just have to buy the book if you want it.

Anyway I've made a chocolate swiss roll and filled it with vanilla buttercream and raspberry jam (seedless/bitless so my husband, who is afraid of fruit, will actually eat it).



It cracked a bit on rolling but that was my own fault for letting it cool a bit too much before rolling it. It's a really nice, very simple recipe though, and very quick to make.



I've already seen a few other entries for this month's We Should Cocoa and most of them are a lot more elaborate and impressive than mine, but I do love an old fashioned swiss roll so I'm really quite happy with how this one turned out :)

Good news! My poor dead Macbook (RIP) has been replaced by the insurance company. I now have a shiny new one that's absolutely lovely and I've managed to install Photoshop after much faffing about, so hopefully my posts will be a bit more prolific from now on.

We Should Cocoa April challenge - chocolate battenburg

Battenburg, battenberg. How on earth do you spell it? Anyway the theme for this month's We Should Cocoa challenge, as hosted by Choclette, was marzipan. I love the stuff. Originally I thought of doing a chocolate stollen but for some reason I just didn't fancy it today, so a chocolate battenburg it was.


Normally I'd have split the mix in half after creaming the butter and sugar and adding the eggs, and added flour to one half and a mixture of flour and cocoa to the other. However I thought that I should probably use proper chocolate in the spirit of the challenge, so I made the whole basic batter, split it in half and added melted chocolate to one half. I don't like it much, I have to admit. I just don't love this cake (although the vanilla bits are lovely!), and for that reason I'm not going to write the recipe, because I don't want anyone to make one of my recipes and be disappointed. Saying that, my husband has gleefully stuffed a slice of it into his mouth and given me a very enthusiastic thumbs up, so perhaps I'm just a bit hard on myself.


I like the little flowers! I made them from the marzipan offcuts with a flower press tool I bought at the Country Living Spring Fair.

So this is my entry and I'm very much looking forward to seeing what everyone else does, because marzipan isn't the very easiest ingredient to pair with chocolate so it should be interesting!

We Should Cocoa - lime and coconut madeleines with white chocolate

A blog I've been reading for ages called Chocolate Teapot runs a monthly blog event called We Should Cocoa, where you have to make something involving chocolate (well, duh) but also another ingredient that changes every month. Previous months have been caramel (wish I'd had my blog in time to enter that one!) and raspberries, among other things, and this month's ingredient is limes.

Well, I love limes. Love them. And even more so when they're paired with coconut, and even more than that when there's some white chocolate involved. So this was a no-brainer. I would make some white chocolate madeleines. Because madeleines are so pretty, they make just having a cup of coffee seem like a party!


My madeleine tins are from Lakeland, and they don't seem to give a very defined shape. I also have a silicone one from House of Fraser which is a much nicer shape, but the silicone just doesn't seem to give the cakes the nice colour that a metal baking tin does, so they come out looking a bit pale. I've used the Lakeland tins for these, next time I make madeleines I'll use the silicone tin to show you the difference.

Ingredients:

60g plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
60g caster sugar
2 eggs
50g butter (I use salted; if you're using unsalted then add a pinch of salt in with the flour)
20g dessicated coconut (or 30g if you'd like them a bit more coconutty)
zest of 2 limes
About 25g white chocolate

Melt the butter and leave to cool a bit. Whisk the sugar, eggs and lime zest together, preferably with an electric hand whisk or mixer, until they have increased in volume, are very pale and thick and the mixture leaves a ribbon-like trail.

Sift in the flour and baking powder and fold it in gently. Then drizzle over the butter and fold that in gently too, and finally the coconut. Really try to be gentle so as not to knock the air out of the mixture. Stick the mixture in the fridge for an hour or two.



When you're ready to bake the madeleines, preheat the oven to 210ºC. Lightly grease a 12 hole madeleine tin. I use a low fat cooking spray. Fill each hole about two thirds full (I got 14 madeleines out of this mixture, so you might have to bake in two batches unless you've got two tins).

Bake for about ten minutes, or until they are golden and springy when you press lightly on them. They should easily fall out of the tin. Cool on a wire rack.

When cool, melt the white chocolate. BE CAREFUL, especially if you're using a microwave, because white chocolate burns really easily and burnt white chocolate is disgusting. Pour the melted chocolate into a plastic freezer bag and snip off the corner, or make a piping bag from baking parchment if you prefer, and drizzle the chocolate all over the madeleines.


Perfect with a cup of coffee! These are really best eaten on the day they're made.

I'm starting my new job tomorrow, and I can't wait! Wish me luck :)