Dessert: Lolly Shop Tasting Plate Part 1: Strawberry Sherbet, Apple Pie Caramels and Musk Lolly Icecream (with recipe!)

Whee! Onto the finale! So is part one of two posts, because there is a lot going on here.

Having dreamt about this (literally) putting it together always was going to be a challenge. Some of it was great, some of it not-so-much.

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 first three dishes 

Strawberry sherbet and liquorice

This dish was simple to prepare and fun. In fact, the most difficult thing was finding the freeze dried raspberries! In the end I settled for strawberries, though I was tempted by the mango and peach options I found.

This dish has a grand total of four ingredients. Plus liquorice to serve.

 

Take your ingredients, blend them. (I used the herb chopper attachment on my food processor). It’s a kind of pretty pale pink colour.

 

I put it in a ziplock bag and left it to serve later. (It keeps fine, so I prepared it the weekend before.)

 

Apple pie caramels

Given all the various items I was doing I skipped the edible wrapper – not to mention not wanting to shell out for all those petri dishes.  The idea behind these is they should have an apple pie underlying flavour. I was intrigued, and so onto the list they went.

Making these caramels was interesting, and includes some unusual (for caramels anyway) ingredients.

 Like.. yeast.

So anyway, we're making caramel. I've done this before, making salted caramel icecream, hard caramels, caramel sauce, millionaire shortbread, etc. This isn't terribly different.

You take the apple juice, sugar, liquid glucose, butter, cream of tartar and salt in a pan.

 And heat it up.

 Then keep heating away until...

...it hits this magic temp and changes colour. (And just like the other times, this invovles a lot of whisking heavy molten sugar. Treat it like lava !)

Ok, so we've hit the magic 154 degrees, and so we add in the cream, to which we've added the yeast.

 Then you sieve the caramel to ensure you didn't have any lumpy sugar bits.

And then it just sits on the bench until cool. That's pretty much it, apart from the cutting into squares bit.

Musk Lolly Icecream

So onto the final recipe for today - musk lolly icecream. I love musk lollies. If anything, I'm fonder of them now than I was a kid. Eating them makes me feel immediately better, bringing on waves of nostalgia great enough to wash away the most mundane of adult days. I was surprised in discussions with a work colleague that these are not a widely known lolly, mostly being an Australian thing. But then, this dessert is based on my memories of lollies as a kid. I think Heston would approve ;)

So. Remember that dream I had? Musk lolly icecream was front and centre. So it had to be made.  Call this one "Heston inspired".

As a base I used the basic recipe from Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams at Home. Which I thoroughly recommend. (After all, it has that great Salted Caramel Icecream recipe). Jeni's icecreams use a little cream cheese in them to help them serve easier. I'm not sure it's needed in this, but I added it so have included it here.

Ingredients:
2 cups of full cream milk
1.25 cups whipping cream (not the stuff with thickeners, just the regular pouring type)
50 g cream cheese
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 packet of musk lollies (about 200g)

Method:
So easy, it's kind of embarrassing how well it turned out.

Heat your milk and cream.

Open your musk sticks. I bought extras, as I wasn't sure how many I would need. I am pretty sure I only used the single pack. I could only get cheap generic brand ones. (Shrug).

Put the musk sticks into the heated to just boiling milk and cream.

Heat them until they are melted.

The odd thing I didn't expect that worked oh-so-well? Musk sticks are basically sugar held together with gelatine and flavouring.

So the end result is pretty thick without help.

Measure out your salt and cream cheese, and mix them together with a fork.

Add some heated pink cream mixture to smooth it out... until you get rid of the lumps.

And stir through your cream mixture.

Chill to cool. It will be the texture of strawberry pudding. Kind of gooey.

Pop it into your icecream maker...

And be blown away by how easy that was.

Finished icecream. Smooth, with a lovely musk-lolly scent and flavour!

Things I learned:

• Be braver. My friends are kind, and and will gleefully go along for a food adventure ride. Not everything needs to work out for it to be worth doing.
• Making caramel is a worthwhile skill. Once you get the knack you can make it in a range of versions without fear.
• I can create my own recipes! Fancy that!

Guest verdicts:

Strawberry sherbet and liquorice
Not everyone is a fan of liquorice, but the sherbet was excellent. I'm tempted to try making it in other flavours for future dinner parties. Peach sherbet anyone? A great element for this dish.

Apple pie caramel
This is a apparently a very nuanced recipe. This is a nice way of saying most people, myself included, couldn't taste the apple and just enjoyed them as caramels. My super-tasting husband could not only taste the apple, but picked (sight unseen) that I used green apple juice. Mostly, I'm not sure they were worth the effort and I kind of wished I'd gone with an earlier plan to make home made cobblers. (Anyone else remember them? Kind of like generic Fantales with harder, chewier caramel?)

Musk Lolly Ice-cream
Guests varied. If you like musk lollies, they were a hit. If not, it was just meh. I thought it was delicious, with excellent soft ice-cream, sweet and just the right amount of flavour. Pretty much exactly like I dreamed they'd taste!

Next post: my quick coverage of Vanilla-Malteser Ice-cream balls, then two more Heston dishes - rosewater Marshmallows and Hot Chocolate!

Quick catch up : more uses for Heston Chocolate Biscuits, and a recap of the Tiramisu (Mk II)

So this is a quick one, because I don't have a full dish to cover. (I promise, there is one chilling in the fridge, to be written up soon..)

Anyone actually waiting to read a new post - sorry, Christmas happened. And then my daughter's birthday. That time of year is crazy for me.

But! Let's cover the two quick recipe commentaries...

Tiramisu, Mk II.

First: That dessert. So a long time ago, waaaay back in December, I did that lunch.

We did Tiramisu for dessert.

This one:

As before, I used the online recipe.

I'd learned a few things from the last time, so I made a few changes.

Firstly, I used smaller flowerpots. These were about half-cup sized.

Secondly, this time round I followed Heston's layering - which puts the sponge fingers at the bottom, and then just layers of marsala cream and chocolate.

And finally, having learnt my lesson, I used a finer layer of chocolate "dirt" and put the mint in at the last minute.  I only used enough dirt to just cover the marsala cream.

Outcome: They were more successful this time round (not that they were a failure last time)!

They were light, and a more suitable size, especially after so many other courses. The thinner layer of dirt was much better, providing flavour and texture without being the hugely sweet hit from last time.

Guests loved them, and happily devoured them despite, initial comments of "probably only eating half, I've eaten enough..." I slightly preferred the more layers of sponge/coffee, but that's a personal preference - one guest preferred the more cream version, as she finds Tiramisu having "too much wet cake".

However. Because it was a Special Birthday Lunch (yes, it needed capitalising), I didn't mess with the quantities (except to make a single batch of dirt). This means I made enough for 8 - a double batch.

Result? I had enough leftovers to make two large glass bowls of tiramisu. Enough for two extra standard dinner party's worth.  Enough for my mum to take to work for everyone she works with. Craaazy volumes. (But it made her very, very popular.)

Heston Chocolate Biscuits, re-imagined.

These chocolate biscuits have become so "standard" in our household, that my daughter made several batches to give to her grandparents for Christmas.  But, since (it would seem) she takes after me in the food stakes, she made a request for her birthday icecream.

What, you mean every family doesn't have a "You get to pick the icecream flavour for your birthday" rule?

My daughter picked "Chocolate cecream, with chocolate fudge and Heston chocolate cookie dough".

We used the "Milkiest Chocolate Icecream in the World" recipe, from my Jeni's Splendid Icecream cookbook, with a miscellaneous chocolate fudge sauce recipe. And the obligatory lumps of cookie dough.

One batch of icecream, about 2/3 a batch of fudge sauce and about half a single batch of cookie dough made up about 1.5L.

It was good.

It was so rich, we switched the second planned dark chocolate ice-cream for a straight vanilla. (My girl is all about the chocolate.)

I was worried the lumps would be too hard, but they were fine. The only possible complaint is the ice cream was pretty sweet, so the salty made the cookie dough seem almost unsweetened. (Not quite though.) The girls LOVED it. One stated it was the best ice cream she'd ever had.
In my opinion, it was pretty good, I'd certainly make the ice cream again.

Oh, um. I forgot to take a picture. Sorry. We were busy, making pasta, making pizzas and generally having a birthday party. (Yes, it was a cooking party. No, not my idea.)

Next: Caraway biscuits!

And then some planning for dinner parties :) Anyone want to contribute to costs to help them get an invite? *grin*

Something for the side.. Salted Caramel Icecream

This recipe is not a Heston one, but is designed to go with a Heston dish next week.

It's from a book I got for Christmas - Jeni's Splendid Ice Creams.

I have wanted a Salted Caramel ice cream recipe ever since I had some on our honeymoon (almost a year ago! eep!). I did some research and found out that this woman (and her ice cream parlour) have salted caramel ice cream as their signature dish. Now, I do own several ice cream cookbooks, but the recipes in this one seemed sufficiently unique to justify it's wishlisting.

At any rate, its interesting for more than a few reasons - and not just the Gorgonzola Dolce Ice cream with Candied Walnuts. One of the things I find very interesting it the absence of eggs.

I am accustomed to ice cream basically being a process of making a form of flavoured custard, with or without stuff mixed through, and then frozen in an ice cream maker. No from-scratch egg custard here though! Instead, she uses cream cheese, corn syrup (aka glucose syrup) and other stuff.

Let's quickly cover the basic process.

1. Prep 4 bowls - milk & cornflour; salt & cream cheese; cream & corn syrup; ice bath
2. Dry burn the sugar into caramel
3. add cream
4. add milk, boil for a little while
5. add cornflour mix, heat for 1 minute til thick
6. add the mix to the cream cheese
7. chill in ice bath until cold (~30 mins)
8. Freeze.

So those of you who've made ice cream before would recognize just how different this is. I was really curious to see if the lack of eggs made it at all icy or affect the flavour otherwise. So let's see..

 

Stuff all ready to go...

 Bowl 1: cornflour and a little bit of milk.

 A bunch of freshly ground sea salt goes into..

 Bowl 2: cream cheese & salt. then  whisked to get the lumps out

 Bowl (well jug) 3: cream and glucose syrup. I had to do some checking before I was able to confirm that many glucose syrup (such as this one) are made from corn. Apparently, in the US because corn is plentiful, glucose syrup is normally made from corn - hence corn syrup. To be honest, I am pretty sure you could substitute a home-made sugar syrup here just fine, but I managed to get corn-derived glucose syrup at the local supermarket and called it a win.

 Sugar in a big saucepan, over high heat. No water, this the version for grown ups.  At this point you wait until there is a melted layer of sugar at the bottom, then push it around until it caramelises. I don't have pictures of that sorry, as I needed my focus (to not burn it) and then needed two hands to add the cream in. At that point it gets rather excitable.

 This is with a little cream/glucose added, once I felt I could pick up my camera again. It's a medium brown colour. I suspect I could have gone darker but I don't like a super-dark caramel - a little too bitter for me.

 Milk's added and it gets to boil for a little while. Then mix in the cornstarch, and cook another minute. There is a photo of that too, but trust me it looks identical to this photo.

 Add in the caramel mix to the cream cheese and salt. It was pretty tasty at this point. But I absolutely did not lick the ladle when I was done. At all.  Or the bowl. Or the saucepan. Or the spatula. Believe no such lies that are told to you, I am too much a lady to consider such things.

 So now it's sitting chilling in the ice bath in tis giant ziplock bag. This felt kind of silly and unncessary (the bag especially). I suspect next time I will follow my usual routine - chill the glass bowl of icecream mix in a larger bowl of ice and a little water to get it cool, then refridgerate overnight. Then put it in the icecream maker.

This method was supposed to get it ice cold in around 30 mins, but I wasn't really convinced it was cold enough. Anyway, it went into the icecream maker.
 In the book, Jeni notes that you shouldn't stop your ice cream maker before the ice cream starts to pull away from the outside. Neither of my ice cream makers do this. I even checked this one. If I wait that long, it starts to visibly melt again. Hence, I will stick to churning until soft serve consistency. Maybe its colder where she is. (shrug) Or maybe I just need to wait until i get one of those huge refrigerated units (ha! yeah right! Law books sadly take precedence in this household).

 But anyway here is the icecream pouring into its freezer container.

 

And the finished product - just a taste before Sunday. To make sure it was ok ... and so I could blog. See the sacrifice I made there?

Things I learned:

• I'd cook the caramel just a tiny bit darker. Now I am familiar with it, I think I would be braver and tempt fate that little more.
• I'd cool the mix like I normally do - over ice till cool, then into the fridge overnight.

Verdict

The recipe is solid and an interesting alternative to using all those eggs (I have some recipes that call for 10 egg yolks!)  It spoons pretty much straight from the freezer, which is a nice change.

The flavour is really very nice. Not too salty, not too sweet. Very very tasty. Should partner well with my chocolate dessert. And I think makes a very nice more 'adult' ice cream flavour.

Next post - Roast chicken, potatoes, glazed carrots. (to be followed by the chocolate dessert) 

....Probably 2 posts at least!