BSFIC - Amaretto Nougat Glacé

I'm not feeling very Christmassy yet. It's certainly frosty enough, and all the neighbours have their lights up, but somehow I'm just not there yet. I've even managed to make some plans and more or less organise the menu so I am not under-prepared, I am just not feeling it. I haven't even had a mince pie yet, although I had my first glass of mulled wine for the season about a month ago.

I am sure I will get there at some point. Preferably before the 25th.
Even without feeling full of the joys of the season, I think I have managed to come up with a very Christmassy dessert for this month's Bloggers Scream For Ice Cream challenge. The challenge Kavey set was a nice, flexible, seasonal one - frozen treats containing booze.

Well, I like booze. And the selection of alcohol in my kitchen at the moment is unusually large (Ocado keeps having special offers). I decided to make something that we could have as our dessert on Christmas Day, rather than making something extra that I would then be tempted to eat.

While I'd been intending to repeat the whisky marmalade ice cream I made last year for Christmas, I really felt that this challenge deserved a new recipe.

I opened the cupboard for a bit of a poke about and found quite a lot of Spanish nougat - turrón. It was a gift from a friend who stayed last month; she had said that her family feels deprived if they don't get turrón at Christmas.

There are many kinds of turrón - this is the hard one.

With crunchy almond nougat as a starting point, my choice of booze was clear. I don't particularly like sweet cocktails, particularly not the creamy ones *shudder* but I do have a fondness for an amaretto sour. I wanted to make an ice cream reminiscent of an amaretto sour, interspersed with crunchy bits.

Something else to punctuate the sweetness was also called for. Now, apparently Disaronno actually contains no almonds. The almond flavour in it is the result of apricot kernals, making apricots the natural fruity partner for it.

Dried apricots marinated in amaretto

For the ice cream base, I decided to try something different. I wanted something reminiscent of nougat, so I tried a Swiss meringue with whipped cream folded through. More of a fiddle than my recent condensed milk ice creams, but certainly achievable (it is a two day process, but not a labour-intensive two days). Although I think the motor on my hand beater is on its last legs.

 

Amaretto Nougat Glacé

3tbs amaretto
100g dried apricots, finely chopped
3 egg whites (100ml-ish)
150g caster sugar
200ml cream
finely grated zest of a lemon & juice of half
200g turrón de Alicante (hard almond nougat), finely chopped

Combine the apricots with 2tbs of the amaretto in a small bowl or plastic box, cover and leave to soak over night.

The following day, combine the eggwhites, sugar and lemon juice in a large glass bowl and place over a pot of simmering water. Beat slowly for a couple of minutes until the sugar dissolves completely, then remove from heat and whisk on high speed until firm peaks form (up to 10 minutes).

In another bowl, whisk the cream with the remaining tablespoonful of amaretto to soft peaks. Fold together the cream and meringue, then fold in the boozy apricots with any unabsorbed liquid, the chopped turrón and the grated lemon zest.

Spread into a loaf tin lined with cling film. Cover with more cling film and freeze over night. It doesn't freeze hard, and can either be scooped or sliced straight from the tin.

Sampled for photographic purposes, the rest can wait for Christmas day

Happy Birthday Hurricane!

Chocolate cake, as per the Be-Ro recipe (half quantity, using vanilla yoghurt instead of evaporated milk, baked in a 6" tin). Chocolate buttercream icing. Pink & yellow sugar pearls. I think it looks rather good.

Venison Pie

For Christmas you could put a cranberry in the little air-vent...

The main thing about this venison pie is not the filling, which was a basic but delicious mirepoix/venison/beef stock stew with copious amounts of gravy. And it wasn't my adorable antler decoration. No. The really important thing about this pie is that it was my first attempt at rough puff pastry. Look at that lamination!

Beef fillet - pho and salad

When Paul and I eat steak, it isn't generally fillet. Fillet is tender, of course, but that tenderness comes at the expense of good flavour. We'll choose something a little chewier, but with a beefier flavour, like onglet, rump or ribeye every time.

But Paul is working away from home again, so I am back to making the most special and delicious meals I can come up with on the weekends to make up for the fast-food dross he is mostly consuming during the week. Last week, I decided to welcome him home with a big bowl of pho, that fragrant, warming Vietnamese soup that I was quite sure he hadn't been able to get in Aberdeen.

In Sydney, we used to be able to buy very thinly sliced beef for making pho bo. You can probably get it here too, but I've never seen it. I decided that buying some beef fillet and slicing it myself was the way forward.

Of course, the other reason why we wouldn't buy fillet very often even if it was our favourite is that it is bloody expensive. That meat was going to have to work really hard for me.

Two beautiful 250g fillet steaks.

I equipped myself with two 250g fillet steaks. Because the beef for pho is cut so thinly I knew that one steak would feed both of us generously. I decided to cure the other steak and serve it like carpaccio, making it stretch for two people as well.

In the cure

Cured Beef

250g fillet steak
2 tbs coarse sea salt
1/2 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 knife-tip ground cloves
1/2 tbsp freshly ground black peppercorns
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp brown sugar

Mix the spices together and press into all sides of the beef. Place in a non-reactive container, and refrigerate for 3-4 days, pouring off the liquid that collects daily. To serve, wipe off the spices and slice thinly. Serve with salad - will serve 2-4 people.

Sliced beef piled on top of the other ingredients, waiting for the hot broth

The most important thing about pho is starting with a good broth. I had a rich beef stock left from braising some short ribs, which I then reduced further with chunks of ginger, spring onions, star anise and cinnamon.

I put the piece of beef in the freezer for an hour to make it easier to slice thinly.

In each bowl I piled rice noodles, bean shoots, mint, coriander and basil, topping it off with slices of chilli, spring onions, the sliced beef and wedges of lime.

Just before serving I corrected the seasoning of the broth with fish sauce, lime juice and a bit of sugar and brought it back to a rapid boil, then divided it between the bowls. Then, as we swished the pieces of meat in the broth, we added chilli sauce and hoisin to our bowls to taste.

Delicious, fresh and comforting.

The meat starting to cook in the broth

On Monday (i.e when the meat had been in the cure for 3 days) I decided to serve it. Only problem being that it was very, very cold on Monday and I didn't want an entirely cold salad for lunch. So, after wiping the curing spices off the meat I seared it in a very hot frying pan (with the windows open, the extractor fan on and the kitchen door shut) for about a minute on each side, then sliced it and piled it onto dressed leaves. Absolutely divine. The cure did its work, so the meat didn't taste raw (I prefer my steak cooked medium, so believe me when I say this!) and it was insanely tender. I don't like the phrase "melt in the mouth" but this really was. With some bread and butter or some boiled potatoes this could have served four of us instead of just two. Although it was too delicious to share.

Beautiful beef. You can see how the curing intensified the colour

Cherry ripe rum balls

Not as good as it looked

A month or so ago Paul asked me to make him a chocolate cake. This is a pretty unusual request for him, but when he does ask for a dessert he is quite specific about what he wants. He didn't want a layer cake. He didn't want a light chocolate sponge. He wanted a dense, moist, thin chocolate cake with a layer of chocolate glaze. This Martha Stewart recipe seemed like just the thing. Only, it wasn't.

It wasn't particularly moist and it just wasn't the cake he was after. It was fine but not wow, and if we are going to eat a cake it really should be wow.

So we weren't going to eat it as it was, but there was no way I was going to waste it, either. Years ago I made a brilliant trifle with a disappointing chocolate cake and I thought this might meet the same destiny, so I tucked it away in the freezer for an opportune moment. As the glaze was just a ganache, and I wasn't planning to serve the cake in its original form I wasn't too worried about it thawing strangely.

There it sat.

Then last weekend our sister in law came to lunch. I decided not to make a full-on dessert, but instead to turn some of my frozen cake into rum balls.

Chocolate dipped rum balls

A lot of recipes I found were American, using crushed wafers and marshmallow fluff and weird processed things, but I wanted an old-school Australian-style rum ball. I followed this recipe, substituting some of my birthday boozy cherries and their preserving liquid for the rum and raisins, in a tribute to the chocolate, cherries and coconut of the classic Cherry Ripe. Then, instead of rolling them in chocolate sprinkles, I dipped them in tempered dark chocolate. It wasn't my most successful attempt at tempering; it was so cold in the kitchen that I think the temperature fell too quickly, so while they had a good texture, they weren't quite as glossy as I would have liked.

I still have enough cake in the freezer to make another batch, so I might make some more for Christmas. With even more booze this time.

Meat Free Monday: Truffled twice baked potato

Bake a potato, cut off a little lid, scoop out the flesh and mash with a knob of butter and a spoonful of truffle paste. Pack back into the skin, make a hollow with the back of a spoon and crack in an egg. Put the lid back on and bake until the egg is cooked.

Heartburn and Coconut Cake - Cook the Books Club

This month's Cook the Books Club feels like a turning point. After four years, we've had our first change in host personnel, as Joanna has stepped out and Simona and Heather have stepped in. After four years, the site has moved to a new blogspot home. And after four years of sourcing second hand copies of our books on Amazon, this is the first time I have used an e-reader. We live in interesting times.

Heartburn was announced as our book for this month back in April, a couple of months before author Nora Ephron passed away. The flood of obituaries that followed her death took Heartburn from a book that I had vaguely heard of, but was a little more familiar with as a movie, to a sort of cultural icon. There were articles on how it changed the dialogue about divorce and the background of her own marriage and divorce. Even more of the obituaries talked about Ephron's love of food. It made me very, very interested to finally read the book!

It's honestly not like anything I have read before. Very funny, even when describing heartbreak: for a story about the end of a marriage it was a very easy read. I didn't find any of the characters particularly sympathetic. Ephron managed to write a character based on herself without making herself particularly heroic or endearing.

One element I did like was the occasional line that Ephron used in later work. A rival is described as "Your basic nightmare", which is also how one of Sally's rivals is described in When Harry Met Sally, and there were other familiar turns of phrase.

Food runs throughout Heartburn, as Rachel is a cookery writer, but I didn't feel particularly inspired by any of those recipes. I decided to look into Ephron's work to a more ultimately optimistic view of relationships. At the end of When Harry Met Sally when they are describing how they fell in love, they talk about their wedding cake. An enormous coconut cake with a very rich chocolate sauce on the side. 

So I decided to make a coconut cake with very rich chocolate icing. Not on the side, because picky eaters annoy me.

I used Dan Lepard's coconut milk layer cake recipe - making 2/3 of the quantity and baking it in a single 9" cake tin. I omitted the lime juice but sprinkled it liberally with rum. I frosted it generously with buttercream.

Bounty Buttercream

125g soft butter
2 tbs good cocoa
3 tbs rum or malibu
3 tbs coconut cream
Small slosh coconut essence (if not using malibu)
Up to 500g icing sugar

Beat together the butter and cocoa until fluffy and the cocoa is evenly mixed. Add the rum, coconut cream and coconut essence if using. Then gradually beat in sifted icing sugar until it is the consistency you want - I was just piling it on so I left it quite soft, would have added more if I'd intended to pipe it.

It's moist, it's rich and uses plenty of butter. Nora Ephron would have loved it.

Rich, moist coconut cake topped with chocolate rum buttercream