Dessert: Lolly Shop Tasting Plate Part 2: Malteaser icecream balls, Rosewater marshmallows and hot chocolate

Dessert: Lolly Shop Tasting Plate Part 2: Malteaser icecream balls, Rosewater marshmallows and hot chocolate

Last post for the dessert for my last dinner party. (I was reminded recently that it's been a long time since I made anything new Heston related, so I'll be planning another dinner soon.) Also, I wrote this ages ago but forgot to post it (it was pending edits).

To recap, this was the dessert from my Old Fashioned Lolly Shop dinner. (That's lolly as in "sweet" for the British here, or "candy" for any Americans. They are called lollies here - you know bags of sweet things kids like? Not chocolate but the other sugary stuff.)

We had: (Heston Blumenthal dishes indicated with an asterisk (*)

Pre dinner drink

• Mini Brandy Alexander. (Okay largely because they are my favourite cocktail.. but they are kind of spiced-chocolate flavour, so suitably on-theme!)

Entrée

• Not-Sea-Bass with Vanilla Butter*

Mains

• Roast venison with chocolate sauce and beetroot puree
• Glazed Carrots*
• Potato Rosti

Dessert
Lolly Shop Tasting Plate:

• Strawberry sherbet and liquorice*
• Apple Pie Caramels*
• Musk Lolly Ice-cream
• Vanilla-Malteser Ice-cream balls
• Rosewater Marshmallows*
• Hot Chocolate*

Today I’m covering the last three dishes. The dessert made me happy and was very popular with our guests. And our neighbours, who we shared extras with, because they are lovely people.

Rosewater Marshmallow

I loved the idea of non-standard flavoured marshmallows, and the idea of pale pink marshmallows felt like it would be a great partner for the other components.

I like marshmallows. I've made them before, as a kid, making the rolled in coconut type for fetes etc. They were always very easy. This one seemed easy too:

1. Mix the cornflour and icing sugar to coat everything
2. Whisk egg whites
3. heat up the sugary stuff
4. add it to the egg whites
5. whisk it some more
6. pour into the prepped tray
7. cool , cut & serve

Let's take a look, hmm?

 

Mix the cornflour and icing sugar

Yeah, not a difficult one. This is to stop the marshmallow sticking to the pan, and to coat it in.

Whisk the egg whites

Mixers make stuff that would be a pain so easy, truly.

 

Heat the sugar stuff

It's confectionery. If you are dieting.. yeah. Well. Lots of sugar - both granulated type (caster) and liquid form (liquid glucose). And some water - we're after sugar syrup, not caramel here.

 

Then heat it up to 128 degrees. (I don't have a electric thermometer - Heston swears by them but present-shopping husband was convinced they are not worth the money by the kitchen speciality shop person, due to slow accuracy on them and very high price. I am ambivalent for now.)

Sugar syrup into the egg whites

Pour it in slowly, the last thing you want it either cooked egg or big lumps of hardened sugar instead of light frothy marshmallowy goodness.

Then the gelatine sheets (pre softened get added).

More whipping! 

(Did I mention how glad I am to not be doing this by hand?)
This gets whipped until cool. See how big and fluffy and white it is?

I added a little red food colouring (the paste type) so as to not mess with the consistency. It's a pretty pastel pink. Maybe even ballet pink. (That's a very light shade of pink, for those of you without ballet dancing girl children.)

Then it gets poured into the tray 

and dusted with the icing sugar and cornflour mix.

The next morning, I was a little concerned it was still sticky to touch. I put a small tray of salt, to try to reduce the moisture content.

Tray ready for cutting out marshmallows

Ready for dusting.

It was still wetter than I am used to for marshmallows, but came out ok. Very sticky. Yes, even for a marshmallow.

A finished cut, and dusted marshmallow. Roughly an inch cube. Ta da!

Vanilla-Malteaser icecream balls

So, I don't have any pictures of this, which is probably not a big deal since they weren't really a success.
I made some vanilla bean icecream.

Then make balls of it and re-froze them.

Then rolled the icecream balls in malted milk powder (the stuff you make malted milk drink from)
Then rolled it in grated chocolate.
They were.. ok. Tasted ok, but the balls didn't hold their shape well and the idea didn't really come across. 
Ah well.

Hot  Chocolate, Heston Style

This is a great recipe, and I actually like it a lot more than the kind of 'spanish' or other fancy hot chocolates you get in places like Chocolateria San Churro  which always taste to me like chocolate custard, and not in a good way.

Mix together a lot of good quality drinking chocolate and water. Bring it to the boil.

Once it's heated, mix in the dark chocolate, a pinch of salt and whipping cream until the chocolate it all melted.

Make it frothy with a hand blender, and serve in little cups. (It's rich. Ignore the 2 person suggestion unless you can handle very rich food).


Possibly the easiest Heston yet.
 
You can see it in the finished dish in the top right.

It's great, but if anything, I'd add more cream or even milk to tone down the richness. (Some guests did this as they found it too rich as specified).

Things I learned:

• Not every recipe works out, but usually is still ok, even when its not as great as you thought it would be.
• Hot chocolate can be great. Just increase the chocolate going into it by a factor of 10. So easy! ;)
• Lolly tasting plates. Such a great plan. Try it!

Guest verdicts:

Rosewater marshmallows
Really a little too soft. Needed more gelatin or less eggs. Probably more gelatin. (Yes everything was weighed exactly). Flavour was nice a light - soft of fluffy Turkish delight. Unsurprisingly, this meant enjoyment of this dish came down much along the "do you like Turkish Delight?" lines.

Vanilla malteaser ice cream
Nice enough, but a bit ordinary. The malted stuff just got sticky and spoiled the effect mostly. Noone disliked it though, so I guess that was in its favour. So.. inoffensive? Fiddly? I don't think I'd bother with this again, though the idea was solid enough. Oooh! Better idea - make malted milk favoured ice-cream, with a chocolate coating! That would work. (Ponders)


Hot chocolate
Rich, but really the best hot chocolate recipe I've tried. Excellent as an accomplishment.One person tried his marshmallows in the hot chocolate, but didn't comment on the success there of. Three of the eight people added extra pouring cream to tone down the richness. I've made it again since as a treat.

Next post: new dinner party! Yet to be decided menu, will definitely squeeze a Heston dish in there though...

Pre-dinner drinks and entree: Brandy Alexanders and Not Sea Bass and Vanilla Butter (Part 1 of 3)

Now, I can with great joy note I have received the remaining photos from my dinner party – Old Fashioned Lolly Shop. My thanks to Ms J.S. for the excellent photos!.

This makes me happy, since we did have quite the rollicking good time and now I have photographic evidence to that effect.

In the interests of getting on with it, let’s take a look at what happened.

So, many months ago I dreamed (literally) of a dinner party. Inspired by Heston – a Sweet Lolly Shop themed dinner. This dinner party was my attempt to capture that into reality. Unfortunately, without the amazing set design my imagination dreamed up!

Pre-dinner drinks: Miniature Brandy Alexanders

Brandy Alexanders are my hands down favourite cocktail. Creamy, a touch chocolaty with a delightful scent.

Simple to prepare..

1. Equal parts of brandy, crème de cacao and pouring cream.
2. Shake over ice in a cocktails shaker.
3. Serve in shot glasses and dust with grated nutmeg.

Cute, chocolaty and tasty!

(no pic, sorry...)

Entrée: Heston’s vanilla butter and sea bass red fish.

As it turns out, getting sea bass in Australia is pretty much impossible. Impractical at least. So, I dutifully went to the good quality fish place and asked for advice. The nearest thing identified to sea bass was Red fish. Yes, it’s actually called that.

It’s this… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redfish not this.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Fish_Two_Fish_Red_Fish_Blue_Fish

(admission: I don’t cook fish often, and thus know very little about choosing fish. I might have been completely misled, but we work with the information we have.)

This is actually a very simple recipe. Or rather pair of recipes.

Vanilla butter

Having learned a thing or two about Heston’s quantities, I looked up how much butter I would actually need for the 8 serves I was making. Then scaled accordingly. This was an excellent plan, and one I recommend. Unless you can think of using a lot of frozen vanilla butter in your future. Perhaps your freezer is larger than mine, but I just don’t have the space.

Anyway this is dead easy.

Take vanilla pods. Cut them open and scrape out the seeds. Decide that throwing them out is a big waste and stick them in a zip-lock bag for the next time you make ice cream.

Let the butter soften a bit.

Mix the vanilla seeds through the butter.

Shape the butter into a log shape on your wax paper, roll it up and finesse the log shape a bit.

Put the log in the freezer.

 

When ready to serve, slice into the number of serves you planned. Ta da!

Sea bass Red fish

This bit is really kind of straight forward. Take a hot pan, cover the bottom with oil. Put the fish in it. (I also cooked some asparagus in butter on the side. This is also a Heston recipe, but really. There's not much more to it than that. Oh, and salt and pepper).

When you fish is cooked, put the asparagus on the plate....

Add some fish and a disk of butter...

Get photographed looking dorky serving... (Note my Lolly Shop owner 1950s polka dot dress!)

 Serve and let the melty butter become sauce-like!

Things I learned.

• I need two pans (and probably a larger stove top) if I am going to cook fish for eight people again.
• I'm glad I wore my apron, as the hot spitting oil from the fish was a bit ... energetic. I think it may have scared the guests a bit.
• The 10g of butter per person was just right, don't bother making more vanilla butter than you need.

Verdict:

This was nice. Not.. "amazing, oh-my-god" but tasty and very good bang-for-effort. Makes a good starter. The vanilla was nicely savoury and interesting as your brain tried to figure out if it should be tasting sweet, but wasn't. The red fish was a bit.. average. Not bad, but really I thought it just tasted like white fish. I don't know if sea bass is more flavoursome?? It made a good backdrop to the vanilla butter and was suitably white and soft with nice mouth-feel. Of course, it could be my novice fish-cooking skills (at anything except salmon anyway) that stopped it being amazing.

The asparagus was very nice cooked in butter. I wish I could do it all the time, but wow so unhealthy! But delicious as a special occasion and worked very well with the buttered fish.

Taster opinions

Generally people liked the dish, with positive comments. Most people enjoyed the vanilla butter after the initial surprise. It made a suitable entrée and start to my Lolly Shop theme!
 
Next time - Mains - Roast venison with chocolate sauce and beetroot puree, glazed carrots and potato rosti

Introduction to a Heston inspired dinner: Old Fashioned Lolly Shop

This is not a recipe post, sorry. It's a preamble. I have to wait until I get all the photos to do the food.

Old fashioned lolly shop dinner

So this is a dinner party that I can honest say I've been thinking about for a long while. In fact, I even dreamed about it. And while I wish I could have laid on the dream location I had in mind, the dinner itself was close enough!

The thought was to plan a whole dinner around a Lolly shop theme. The kind of lolly shop I remembered as a kid. I know from seeing him talk at his live show that Heston Blumenthal similarly reminisced about lolly shops from his childhood, so this dinner seemed appropriate for a pseudo-homage.


Pre dinner drink:

• Mini Brandy Alexander. (Okay largely because they are my favourite cocktail.. but they are kind of spiced-chocolate flavour, so suitably on-theme!)

Entrée:

• Not-Sea-Bass with Vanilla Butter

Mains: 

• Roast venison with chocolate sauce and beetroot puree
• Glazed Carrots
• Potato Rosti

Dessert: 
Lolly Shop Tasting Plate:

• Strawberry sherbet and liquorice
• Musk Lolly Ice-cream
• Vanilla-Malteser Ice-cream balls
• Apple Pie Caramels
• Rosewater Marshmallows
• Hot Chocolate

See you when the photos arrive!