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*

Entree: Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard icecream

I'll admit that for this dish, I was definitely drawn in by the wow factor - bright purple soup, tiny pale green cubes and pale yellow ball of ice cream. Also, since it was a December lunch, a better reason for this soup I could not imagine.

It was fairly straightforward, with a few steps, but nothing complicated.

To recap, this is the entree dish from my mother's special birthday lunch.
There were six courses...

1. Beetroot lollies (*)
2. Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream (*)
3. Goat cheese tarts
4. Salmon with Bois Boudran Sauce (*), green salad
5. Tiramisu (*)
6. Chocolate biscuits (*), tea and coffee

Red cabbage gazpacho with mustard ice cream

Process

1. Make mustard ice cream
2. Make mayonaise
3. Prepare soup
4. Assemble & serve

Step one: Make mustard ice cream

Yes, this would definitely be my first time making and eating a savoury ice cream. 

Assemble your ingredients. I was quite surprised that it has sugar in it, and no eggs. It also has powdered milk - this was tough to find. Heston recommends semi-skinned powdered milk, but I could only get full cream, so that's what I used. It supposed to allow you to add extra protein while managing the fat levels (which may not have been ideal since I was using full cream, but I work with what I have!

Okay, normal ice cream process, milk & cream components get heated. That lumpy stuff is the powdered milk pre whisking and heating.

 

 Then you chill it.

 Then in goes the huge quantity of mustard.

Based on the instructions, clearly Heston is assuming you have a refrigerated unit. Sadly, I don't. (Though it is on my wish list.)

So the ice cream goes into the ice cream maker for churning. what you might notice at this point is... it makes at least twice as much ice cream as you could possibly want. Firstly, I don't think mustard ice cream is something you sit down and eat bowls of - unlike vanilla or whatever. And you only need one scoop per person for the dish so I'd say the quantity given would feed more than 20 people. It make 2 litres or so. Double what I can fit in my ice cream maker, meaning I had to do it in batches. Grrr.

So it goes in to freeze. Except... it didn't freeze properly. It was still really sloppy and not frozen enough.

So, I resorted to my last ditch attempt... put the whole unit in the freezer.

That worked better!

Then, you take it out and blitz it with a stab blender and then re-freeze. This is supposed to break up the bigger ice crystals into smaller ones, but frankly I don't think this did anything.

Except make it slushy again.

Okay back to the freezer for about an hour, and now it's looking like normal ice cream, pre final freezing stage.

Then it comes out looking quite nice. I tried some. This blew my mind a bit - I really couldn't decide if I liked it or not. I could tell on first taste it didn't take bad, but couldn't get my head around it.  I eventually decided it was nice - quite like eating frozen home made coleslaw dressing. But definitely unusual.

Step two: Make mayonnaise

So, at it's heart, the gazpacho is mostly red cabbage juice thickened with mayonnaise. Luckily, it doesn't taste the way that reads. I've not made a lot of mayonnaisese, having had a bad experience previously. This one worked fine, and tasted good, but not amazing.

Mustard and egg yolk are whisked...

 Then drip in a little grape seed oil at a time and whisk it in. (Incidentally, I now suspect that my previous bad experience may have come from using a too strongly tasting olive oil, which just swamped all the flavour).

Okay, nice and thick looking.

 Whisk in the red wine and the red wine vinegar.

Well done, you've made pink mayonnaise! It's pretty tasty, but not too overpowering for the red wine. The photo doesn't show it well, but it was a kind of pale baby pink colour.

Step three: Prepare the soup

This step was so easy I kept feeling like I was missing something.
Take big amazing purple red cabbage.

Juice it.

Be surprised just how much juice there is in a cabbage. This was another case of Heston's quantities being out of whack - twice as much cabbage as needed to get the quantity of juice required. Maybe we just have superior cabbages here in Aus.. :)

Weight out the appropriate quantity of juice. As you can see the juice is this amazing royal purple colour. Also, having tasted some I was surprise the flavour was much lighter and not as strongly cabbage-y as I thought it would be.

Put in a piece of white bread. This is supposed to thicken the juice using the proteins in the bread.

My bread and cabbage juice, ready for straining. I have to say i could tell absolutely no difference in the thickness of the soup from the bread. So much so, I think you could skip that step entirely.

Strain your soup through muslin, squishing out all the liquid from the bread. (Two hand job and a tad messy, thus no photo.)

Whisk in your mayonnaise to taste, thereby making the most garish naturally coloured thing you may ever make. Possible reason enough in itself to make it!

This is the big jug ready for serving.

Step four: Assemble

I finely diced the cucumber, being very anal detail oriented about getting perfect equal sized tiny cubes.

Place one scoop of mustard ice cream on top of each pile of cubes. Serve these to guests, and bring in the giant jug of purple to the table. (It's epic!) Pour out some soup for each guest.

Done!

 

Things I learned.

• Watch those ice cream volumes for future recipes, as they likely will need to be halved to fit in my 1L ice cream maker. I really wonder about who recipe tested this book sometimes. Flavours etc are all fine, but the quantities are all over the place, typically with way more than you need.
• Cabbage juice is much nicer than I would have thought. 
• The at the table theatre of the serving is definitely part of the fun.

Verdict:

This was nice, but not amazing. Kind of a refreshing salady-thing in flavour. It was easy to make and was very dramatic in a food theatre kind of way. I wish the flavour was equal to the presentation. (Again, flavour was nice, but I wasn't floored, the way I have been with some dishes).

Guest opinions

Guests were hard to gauge (they are my mother's friends, and all had their "being polite" hats on). Generally though, most enjoyed it. All I think were fascinated by it. I know at least one person really loved it (as she's mentioned so several times to mum since).

I did take another batch of soup (partly to use up the leftover mass of ice cream) to a BBQ. There, most who tried it weren't fans. I'm not sure whether that was just the wrong forum, the wrong crowd (they mostly just thought it was odd) or just a general dislike. It certainly lost something in translation to a casual dish!

Next time-  the star of the show : Salmon with Bois Boudran Sauce

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!