High Tea vol 3: Florentine biscuits, plus Chocolate sauce (to serve with Madeleines)

So... remember how I was posting about that High tea?

This is the third instalment.

So far we've had :

• Rosemary and Bay Truffles
  
• Passionfruit Pastilles

Which  means I have left the Chocolate sauce for the Madeleines, and the Florentine biscuits.

That'd be this post. (Which I'd like to subtitle the Good and the Ugly).

If you want the recap of the full menu see the first post here.

Chocolate Sauce (as recommended for madeleines)

Heston Blumenthal at Home
I made Heston's madeleines once before, and was under-whelmed with the effort-to-result ratio. This time I used Stephanie Alexander's recipe from the Cook's Companion, 2nd ed. (For those international people reading along, this would be arguably be the most authoritative and well regarded Australian cookbook.) These were lovely. But, I still wanted to try that Heston chocolate sauce. And I'm so glad I did.

 

Process:

1. Bring water, coffee beans, cocoa powder and salt to a simmer. Take off the heat to infuse.
2. Heat the sugar in a pan into a dry burn caramel.
3. Pour in the water mix, stir.
4. Add chocolate.
5. Sieve, cover and cool.

So, a few steps we are well familiar with by now.

 

Assemble your ingredients

I'm sure I've mentioned before, but do use the best quality, dark dutch cocoa. It makes the world of difference over the dodgy light-brown chocolatish-flavouring cocoa.

Bring water, coffee beans, cocoa powder and salt to a simmer, then take it off the heat and let it infuse.

Yup.

 

Heat the sugar in a pan into a dry burn caramel

We've made this a few times now. It's barely scary now.
Put unrefined caster sugar in a pan.

Heat until it starts to melt. Don't touch it before you have a nice layer of caramel under the sugar.

Shake the pan, to move the dry sugar onto the molten caramel parts.

Use a silicone spatula to push any remaining lumps around until melted. Heat until desired colour. Caramel is done.

 

Pour in the water mix, stir.

It will bubble like crazy due to the molten caramel - don't scald yourself!

Add the chocolate lumps.

They will melt nicely..

 

Sieve, cover and cool

Sorry, I didn't take a picture of it served. It looked prettier than this, or at least was in a nicer jug.

Things I learned:

I think I might have found my go-to chocolate sauce recipe. Pretty painless (if you can manage dry burn caramel) and a great outcome.

 

Verdict:

So, basically this is a chocolate flavoured caramel sauce. Sort of. What it is.. is..  delicious.  Really tasty chocolate sauce. One of my best ever. Just the right consistency, the right amount of bitterness. Loved it.

In addition, I have it on excellent authority that the left overs made a kick-ass chocolate ice cream! So win-win! Which is good, because as usual, it made a LOT of sauce. I'd estimate almost a litre. Which is a lot, even if you really, really like chocolate sauce. On the bonus side, it does keep well. 

Guest opinions:

Very popular. In all forms used - for madeleines, for topping on ice cream, and for the making into ice cream.

Florentine Biscuits

Heston Blumenthal at Home
I'm very partial to Florentine biscuits. Chocolate+caramel+glace cherries = win in my book. But.. well, it was an interesting experience.

 

Process:

1. Heat creme fraiche, caster sugar, glucose syrup and honey in a saucepan until melted.
2. Mix the dried fruit and nuts
3. Pour the molten stuff over the fruit and nut mix. 
4. Refrigerate for an hour.
5. Pour the cold mix into a lined baking tray
6. Bake.
7. Take it out of the oven and cut out circles, allow to cool.
8. Melt the chocolate and use it to coat the backs of the biscuits.

So, a few steps we are well familiar with by now.

 

Assemble your ingredients

Lots of components too this one. Good thing its mostly melt and pour!

 

Heat creme fraiche, caster sugar, glucose syrup and honey in a saucepan until melted

Three kinds of sugar, one dairy. So that's a balanced meal right?

 So that's easy enough.

 

Mix the dried fruit and nuts

Gather all the dried fruit, nuts and a touch of plain flour.

 And mix it up.

 

Pour the molten stuff over the fruit and nut mix

So far, so good. Easy really.

 Mixed through, looking good.

 

Refrigerate for an hour

And now on to the apparently pointless. I don't get this bit. Pouring it onto the sheet and then cooling it would make more sense. But no, you leave it in a bowl and refrigerate it.

 

Pour the cold mix into a lined baking tray

Or rather, since it is now a cold solid mass, scoop it out and spread on the tray awkwardly. Why, oh why, did we not do this when it was warm and molten and easy to work??

 

Bake

Okay all spread out, now into the oven.

Urgh. Because it is one mass, it doesn't heat evenly, since it is caramel/sugar/fruit. So you lose a lot to the uneven heating. I know my oven may be partly at fault, but it just seems a foolish way to cook them. But this isn't even the most annoying difficult part.

 

Cut out biscuit circles from the warm biscuit mix.

Please excuse the bad photo, but... oh what a pain.

This is what it looked like as I attempted this. Molten-rapidly-cooling stuff, still attached and making dubiously lumpy shapes due to the nuts and fruit not cutting cleanly.

I like my food, particularly for a High Tea, to look pretty. This was the best I could do with cutting neat circles. I cannot express effectively just how annoyed I was at this point. They were taunting my with their lumpy ugliness.

And see that big lump of unusable stuff on the back left. Grrr. More waste.

Only solution? Wait until they are cold, and trim them to better shapes.

Better. But even more wasteful and time consuming.

 

Melt the chocolate and use it to coat the backs of the biscuits

I did half in milk and half in dark chocolate to cater to more tastes.

Serve.

And here they are, barely visible on the top row.

Verdict:

They tasted fine. A little thin for my tastes. But too much trouble.

Guest opinions:

Tasty, though not wildly popular.

Things I learned:

Urgh. Painful and so not worth the trouble (as written, anyway).
If I was to make them again, I would take the hot molten stuff, use a thin spatula to spread it into individual biscuit discs. Then refrigerate and bake - while turning the tray in the oven periodically and watching like a hawk.

Making a sheet of biscuit just gave such a terrible outcome, I would not do it again. Plus making individual discs would not waste so much mix! It didn't seem to spread at all during baking - which I suspect was a function of the refrigeration before baking - so no need for the mass lump and associated painful biscuit cutting after the fact.

At least the sauce made up for it.

Next time: I had another high tea, and this time there was Heston lemon tart!

Madeleines with lemon curd

ˈmadleɪn,ˈmad(ə)lɛn

noun

noun: madeleine; plural noun: madeleines

1. a small delicious cakes of French goodness and light..

So, I am recently back from a trip. While in Paris, I bought a madeleine tray as a souvenir. (Doesn’t everyone buy cooking toys as souvenirs? No? Why ever not?)

This has lead to a spate of madeleine recipe making. Number one: random recipe from online (okay, not perfect). Two: recipe from a French cookbook I already own (dreadful, so much so I am certain there is an error in the recipe). Then I remember to check if Heston has a recipe for madeleines.

I decided to make this with the lemon curd, rather than the chocolate sauce. I may try the chocolate version at a later point.

Steps

Lemon curd:

1. Prep lemon zest and juice
2. Melt everything together
3. Heat to 70 degrees
4. Cool and sieve

Madeleines

1. Grind the ground almonds
2. Prep the tin(s)
3. Prep the brown nut butter
4. Mix the dry stuff.
5. Whisk the egg whites, mix into the dry stuff
6.  Add the honey, then add the butter
7. Rest (for a really long time)
8. Bake

Lemon curd

I like lemon curd. It’s delicious and good for lots of things. And, it turns out, very easy to make. 

Gather your ingredients. 

Peel off some lemon zest. Juice your lemons. Heston recommends rolling them on the bench to soften them for juicing. I have an alternate version – cut them in half and microwave for 20 seconds or so. It warms them up a bit, but you get a lot more juice out of them. 

Prep your eggs.

Whisk them.

Heat up a lot of butter with the juice, eggs and lemon zest scrolls.

Keep stirring until the sugar is melted and whisk until  it gets to 70 degree.  (This happened surprisingly quickly once the sugar was melted – almost immediately for me.)

Sieve out the zest and any lumps and done!

The flavour was good, not too sweet, not too tart. It was nicely unctuous too. Pop it in the fridge while you go to make the madeleines. Or do what I did, read the madeleine recipe all the way through, realise it is too late to make them now and resolve to make them the next night. Or.. on the weekend, when you feel up to it. Whatever works for you.

Madeleines

Gather your ingredients. (You might note I'm a fan of doing this before starting, as it prevents getting half way through a recipe and then realising you are out of flour/butter/ground madeupicone and need to go out to the all-nigh-very-expensive-supermarket or give up. No prizes for guessing how I gained this wisdom.)

Despite the fact that almonds come ground, you need to grind them anyway.

This makes them rather more wet, as the oils are released. It also obviously makes them a finer grind.

Make your nut brown butter.

Heston cooks may well have done this before, thus know the tricks – warm it while whisking until the butter solids make the butter turn brown, smell toasty good and foam slightly.

Strain the butter through a disposable coffee filter to get the lovely butter, and not the gritty solids left behind.

 

Prep your moulds. I only have an 8 madeleine mould, so used an extra muffin tin for the extra mix I was expecting.

Put the dry stuff – flour, almonds, icing sugar ...

in the mixer and whisk it up.

Put all that in a different bowl so you can whisk the eggs slightly. This was kind of a waste – given the instruction is to whisk until “just combined” next time I’d whisk them manually in a bowl, then add them to the dry ingredients, since this is what you’re going to do anyway.

Mix the eggs into the dry stuff. Yup, looks like batter.

Heston notes a trick for measuring honey  - you oil the spoon very slightly with a neutral tasting oil – I used grape seed.

This worked very well!

Add the brown butter, whisk. You now have runnier batter.

Pour it into the moulds. This makes a lot more than you’d think. I had to use two extra tray muffin trays. Maybe Heston has giant madeleine trays, but mine are standard size.

You think you can now bake them. Nope! You can’t bake them yet. These now need to be refrigerated for three hours. This seems excessive. (And felt a bit pointless. Perhaps it is resting the gluten from the almonds, I don’t know but… it is a long time, thereby preventing any chance of whipping these up for company dropping in).

Bake them until golden brown.

Following the instructions exactly, “turn the madeleines over on to a cooling rack”. Become alarmed at what a mess this creates as several break, crumble and otherwise make a mess. (The muffin tin ones were even worse).

Pick the most aesthetically pleasing one to serve artistically with a dollop of lemon curd and a cup of tea or coffee. Sit down to wonder why on earth they took so long,  while enjoying your madeleine and lemon curd.

Lessons learned

• Whisk the egg white in its own bowl to prevent unnecessary bowl switching and cleaning
• Make a half batch, or buy a second madeleines tray
• Turn them out very carefully and gently. (i.e. make sure you put the rack down on the tray and then flip the two over gently).

Guest opinions

 Smaller person is not difficult to please, though she did note they were not as good as the ones from Paris. (That would be the ones from Benoit, the Michelin starred restaurant. Ahem.)

Husband was non plussed. Nice, but he’d rather have the chocolate chip biscuits please.

I thought… Nice, but nothing special really. And, in my opinion, these were friands masquerading as madeleines. Tasty, but not actually madeleines. And, with the excessively long wait time, a bit of a pain to make, and not great enough to make them worth the hassle.

Verdict

While not a bad dish, and tasty enough, I wouldn’t bother making them again.

The lemon curd on the other hand was easy and tasty and will probably be made again.

Next attempt: Nigella Lawson’s rosebud madeleines from How to be a domestic goddess.  And something Heston. I want to try that 18 hour pork belly, preferably before winter is over.