After a break over Christmas, Celeste, Penny and I are now back with our Meal to Share posts. This month’s theme is “Chinese New Year” and I’ve been allocated dessert. If you’re a newer reader, Meal to Share is our monthly collaboration where we each cook a course for a themed meal – so don’t forget to check out their posts for the rest of the meal!
Cookbook Challenge 2011: Fortnight 2
Theme: Citrus
Recipe: Lime chiffon pie
From: AWW Kitchen
Last year for the citrus theme I made a not entirely successfully rice and lemon rice soufflé. For this fortnight’s Cookbook Challenge, I’ve opted for a simple, no bake, lime chiffon pie. Yes, that’s right – no baking involved! Which makes it a perfect dessert to make on a hot summer’s day when you don’t want to turn the oven on.
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Unbelievably, we’re on to Week 41 of the Cookbook Challenge, and the theme this week is: celebration.
I don’t have a specific occasion to celebrate this weekend, but here are some things that I’d like to celebrate:
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Cookbook Challenge: Week 36
Theme: Comfort Food
Recipe: Lemon delicious puddings
From: AWW Bake
The theme for this week’s Cookbook Challenge is “comfort food”. After a rather busy week, this weekend has been incredibly lazy so something comforting and puddingish sounded good to me.
I have rather a lot of lemons (due to Maria giving me 5kgs from her tree) and I’ve been doing my best to cook and bake my way through them. So for this week’s theme, I decided to make lemon delicious in an effort to use up more lemons. If you don’t know what lemon delicious, it’s a classic – a baked pudding that ends up with two layers: a light sponge on top of a tangy sauce. (more…)
Hola! Welcome, welcome! Come in, take a seat, and get comfy. I would feed you all if I could, but unfortunately because technology hasn’t quite progressed to that point, you’ll just have to read all about the following lunch, and wish you had been there!
The theme for Week 35’s Cookbook Challenge is Spanish, and last Sunday a few bloggers came over for a Spanish themed potluck lunch. At first I really struggled with the Spanish theme and wasn’t sure what to make. I don’t own any Spanish cookbooks, and couldn’t find anything in any of my other cookbooks that wasn’t paella. I didn’t want to make paella, and interesting no one else made it either – we really needed Kat to come and cook it for us!
After a whinge on twitter, I received some good suggestions from @gastromaniac, which helped me decide on one dish – salted wrinkled potatoes with mojo verde. The following day, I went to the library and while I couldn’t find any Spanish cookbooks, I borrowed Saffron and Sunshine which contained assorted recipes from around the Mediterranean. When I flicked through it, I realised it was a goldmine and I came away with four additional recipes I wanted to make. So um, that would be five recipes altogether. Uh oh. I did consider culling my number of recipes but I really wanted to make them all.
So I did! (more…)
Mhmmmm cheesecake. I love cheesecake but it’s not something I have often because it’s so decadent. But any food consumed during Christmas has no calories (right??) so I took this cheesecake along on the day. There was tons of food already, so we only ate half of it, and the other half went home with me. I was super happy – because it meant I was able to plate up a piece to take photos. That’s right, I didn’t care about eating the leftovers, I just wanted to photograph it!
I have made baked cheesecakes tons of times before (see here or here), but have never made a gelatine based cheesecake. It’s actually much easier to make than a baked one, although I really do like a baked cheesecake.
If you’re like me, and don’t like your desserts sickly sweet, this cheesecake is perfect. I think I added double the amount of rind specified (I grated the rind of two lemons and just decided to add it all in) so it was tangy, but not too much so. The biscuit base did seem quite soft, although perhaps that was due to sitting in the fridge for a day. Next time I make it, I’m going to try baking the biscuit base in the oven to firm it up more.
I do still prefer a baked cheesecake over unbaked, but this is a good version and I’ll make it again. What about you – do you have a cheesecake preference? Do baked cheesecakes or unbaked cheesecakes have your heart?
Lemon cheesecake
From The Australian Women’s Weekly Food We Love
Serves 8
250g packet plain sweet biscuits
125g butter, melted
250g cream cheese, softened
395g sweetened condensed milk
2 teaspoons finely grated lemon rind
1/3 cup lemon juice
1 teaspoon gelatine
1 tablespoon water
In a food processor, pulse the biscuits until they resemble fine breadcrumbs. Add the melted butter and process until combined. In a 20cm springform tin, press the biscuit mixture evenly over the base and side, and refridgerate for about 30 minutes or until the biscuit mixture is firm.
Beat the cream cheese with an electric mixer until it is smooth. Add the condensed milk, rind and lemon jice and beat until smooth.
In a small heatproof bowl, sprinkle the gelatine over the water, and stand the bowl in a small pot of simmering water. Whisk until the gelatine dissolves and let it cool for 5 minutes.
Stir the gelatine mixture into the cream cheese mixture. Pour it into the biscuit crumb crust, cover and refrigerate for about 3 hours or overnight until set.
Cookbook Challenge: Week 1
Theme: Citrus
Recipe: Rice and lemon souffle
From Made in Italy by Giorgio Locatelli
Hooray! It’s my first Cookbook Challenge recipe. The theme for the first Challenge is citrus and I decided to make a rice and lemon souffle.
This is not a quick recipe to make and it uses rather a few bowls. I started with the lemons – large lemons are halved and hollowed out, before being brushed with a juice, sugar and butter syrup. The lemon “ramekins” are popped into the fridge while the rice is cooked in two parts. One part becomes like a “rice milk” and the second batch is to just cook the grains until they are al dente. After this, you’re supposed to drain and discard the milk the rice was cooked in. I missed this step, but it didn’t seem to affect the end result.
After the cooked grains have cooled, the rice milk and the grains are combined with cornflour and gelatine. Next, meringue is whipped up, and combined with the rice, before being spooned into the lemon halves and baked until they (hopefully!) rise and become golden.
I didn’t have any issues with making the souffles – mine rose well and they looked very pretty in the lemons. It did take me a while to get everything together though. And as soon as the souffles were out of the oven, the race was on to photograph them before they deflated!
But most importantly, how did they taste? Well, actually, I thought they were rather bland. The rice was only cooked with milk, so I didn’t think the souffle was sweet enough. Not only that, but cooking the souffle in the lemons only imparted a TINY amount of lemon flavour. It smelt fantastic while it was in the oven, but once out you could barely taste any lemon. It didn’t seem worth the fuss of making the lemon ramekins.
I think this would be better if these were cooked in normal ramekins, with a layer of rice pudding on the bottom, then some lemon curd, and finally the meringue on top. So it’s probably not something I would make again, at least, not without significant variations.
Finally, I halved the recipe below, but I had a ton of rice/meringue mixture left over. I filled 3 lemons, and still had enough for four LARGE ramekins. The souffle in the ramekins rose really well though – check it out below!
Update: for a round up of all Cookbook Challenge posts for week 1, see My Food Trail for details. Thanks Rilsta!
Rice and lemon souffle
From Made in Italy by Giorgio Locatelli
Serves 6 (I reckon more like 10, but whatever)
200g carnaroli rice
2 litres milk
1/2 vanilla pod, split lengthways
25g orange juice
50g caster sugar
50g unsalted butter
3 big similar sized lemons or oranges
65g cornflour
3 gelatine leaves, soaked in water and squeezed (the book doesn’t specific what strength gelatine leaves, I substituted with 3/4 tablespoon gelatine powder)
For the meringue:
250g egg whites
190g caster sugar
Place a tray into the fridge so that it gets cold. Preheat the oven to 200°C.
Prepare the lemons or oranges by trimming each end (so that it sits flat). Cut each fruit in half width ways and scoop out all the flesh with a spoon. Discard the flesh. Place the fruit “ramekins” into the fridge for 30-60 minutes.
In a small pan, place 80g of the rice with half of the milk. Bring it to the boil, then turn to a simmer and let it cook until the rice is really soft. Blend the rice and milk with a hand/stick blender until smooth and then put the mixture through a fine sieve. Set aside.
Scrap the seeds out of the vanilla pod, and place with the rest of the milk into a pan. Add the vanilla pod and bring the milk to the boil. Add the rest of the rice, turn down to a simmer, and cook until the rice is al dente. Drain through a fine sieve, remove the vanilla pod and spread the rice out on the tray that you placed in the fridge. Set it aside to cool (but not in the fridge).
In a separate pan, warm the orange juice and sugar. When the sugar has dissolved, take if off the heat, and whisk in the butter until incorporated. Brush the inside and rims of your prepared fruit with the orange juice mixture. Make sure each bit is completely covered, this seals and smooths the insides so that the souffle doesn’t catch as it rises.
Lay the fruit upside down on a tray and place it back into the fridge for about 5 minutes to drain off any excess syrup.
With a knife, chop through the cooled rice grains to produce finer pieces. Place into a bowl.
Put the reserved rice “milk” back on the heat, keeping back 4 tablespoons. Add the cornflour to this milk.
When the rice milk comes up to the boil, add the cornflour mixture, stirring all the time. Cook for about a minute.
Remove from the heat and add the gelatine. When it has dissolved, pour the mixture over the ice grains, stirring all the time as it will be very thick.
Next, make the meringue. Whisk the egg whites in a mixer until soft peaks form. Add the sugar slowly, until the whites form stiff peaks.
Fold a third of the meringue into the rice mixture. Add the rest of the meringue to the rice mixture and fold in lightly. Don’t overwork it.
Spoon the mixture into your prepared fruit, to about 1/2cm below the rim. Bake them in the oven for about 8 minutes, or until puffed up and golden.
Oh, fig season! It never seems to last long enough. Last year I bookmarked a recipe in Gourmet Traveller for this fig, berry and pistachio burnt-butter tart but didn’t get around to making it before fig season ended. Well, I was determined to make it this year and finally had the opportunity to do so recently.
One of the important aspects of the recipe is the burnt butter. There was a nice tip in the magazine about listening to the butter as it cooks. As the butter becomes darker, the pitch of the bubbling becomes deeper, until it becomes almost silent. I was a bit dubious, but lo and behold, when the butter became dark nut brown it was almost completely quiet! Amazing.
The rest of the recipe was pretty easy – whisking eggwhites until firm and then folding in icing sugar, flour, ground pistachios, lemon rind and finally the burnt-butter.
Upon tasting the tart, I felt that it was just ho hum. Perhaps that was my fault though – I didn’t have any raspberries, so I substituted with blueberries. The tartness and colour of raspberries would most likely have worked better. I also didn’t feel that the figs had any presence in the tart, almost as if they could’ve been left out with no noticeable difference. Apart from those criticisms there wasn’t anything really wrong with it – it just didn’t live up to expectations after waiting a whole year to make it. Perhaps it could be improved with some tweaks, but I certainly don’t have the patience – it will most likely go into the “will probably never make again” pile! (Perhaps someone out there has more patience than me?)
It did look pretty though!
Fig, raspberry and pistachio burnt-butter tart
From Gourmet Traveller magazine – February 2008
Serves 6-8
120 grams cold butter, coarsely chopped
1 vanilla bean, spilt and seeds scraped
3 eggwhites
225 grams pure icing sugar, sieved
70grams plain flour
60grams pistachio kernels, ground
plus whole kernels to garnish
1 & 1/2 tablespoons finely grated lemon rind
125 grams raspberries (I used blueberries)
6 figs, quartered
165grams caster sugar
80ml dessert wine
Thick cream to serve
Cook butter and vanilla bean and seeds over a medium-high heat until dark nut brown (around 5 minutes). Cool and remove vanilla bean.
Preheat oven to 160°C. Whisk eggwhites and a pinch of salt until firm peaks form. Fold in icing sugar, them flour, pistachio and rind.
Fold in burnt butter and spoon into a greased base-lined and floured 11.5cm x 35cm fluted loose-bottomed tart pan. Scatter a quarter of the raspberries over, top with overlapping figs and bake for 30 minutes or until golden and firm to the touch. Stand in pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then remove from pan and cool completely on a wire rack.
Meanwhile, combine caster sugar and 50ml of water over medium heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and cook, brunching down sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush, for 4-5 minutes or until caramel in colour, remove from heat and add wine, swirling to combine (be careful as mixture will spit). Add the remaining raspberries and stir to combine, then cool.
To serve, drizzle raspberry-caramel over tart, scatter over pistachios and raspberries and serve warm or at room temperature with extra raspberry-caramel and thick cream.
Recently I discovered that two of my colleagues were having birthdays in the same weekend. I discretely questioned one of those colleagues, trying to figure out his cake preferences and discovered that he didn’t really like cake! Shock horror! How can someone not like cake?! But after some further sly questioning, I found out that he liked cheesecake, and specifically, baked cheesecake.
I immediately thought of the recipe below from Australian Table, which has been my go to recipe for baked cheesecake for many years. Unfortunately, I mislaid it for a while and only rediscovered it recently when I did a clear out of most of my food magazines.
I’m very fond of this cheesecake. It’s not too large and doesn’t use a kilo of cream cheese unlike other recipes I have tried. And it’s delicious, with just the right balance of sweetness and richness. The other bonus is the sour cream topping – it doesn’t matter if the top of the cheesecake cracks or bubbles in the oven, because it all gets covered up!
The only change to the original recipe I make is to double the amount of biscuits and butter as I prefer a thicker base. Sometimes I top the cheesecake with fruit, but this time (as you can see) I drizzled it with dark chocolate.
The cheesecake was a hit at work and slices were very enthusiastically gobbled down! I was happy to see that the base and filling held up well, and slices were even able to be hand-held.
Along with the cheesecake, I also made mini coconut and berry friands. I have made and blogged about these before, but I love them so much I thought I’d rave about them again.
This time I used a mini patty pan to make tiny bite side friands. They were a pain in the arse to get out of the pan. I ended up breaking several, but Alastair happily “taste tested” those ones for me. They were little but fabulous!
Baked vanilla cheesecake
Serves 8
From Australian Table – December 2005
250g Nice biscuits, crushed
120g unsalted butter, melted
500g cream cheese
2 large eggs, plus 1 yolk
3/4 cup (180ml) cream
1/4 cup (55g) caster sugar, plus 1 tablespoon extra
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/2 cup (120g) sour cream
2 punnets raspberries (or other fruit of your choice)
icing sugar, to dust
Preheat oven to 190°C. Line and grease base and side of a springform (2cm) pan.
Combine biscuit crumbs and butter. Press firmly into base of prepared pan. Bake for 10 minutes.
Place cream cheese, eggs and egg yolk, cream, 1/4 cup caster sugar and vanilla into a food processor. Process until smooth. Pour over biscuit base. Bake for 25 minutes, until firm, but still slightly wobbly in centre. Cool.
Whisk together sour cream and extra sugar. Spread over cheesecake. Top with fruit and dust with icing sugar.
The other weekend, we invited Benisa, Dany and Dany’s father over for some food and a catch up.
We started with a twice baked cheese soufflé, taken from this month’s issue of Delicious. In the magazine, it’s a goat’s cheese soufflé and served as a main (with salad), but as I’m still unsure about goat’s cheese I substituted with a sharp cheddar. Also, as we were having it as a starter, I made smaller serves.
The recipe instructs you to turn out the soufflé after the first baking. When I turned one out though, it looked terribly unattractive, so I kept them in the ramekins to serve. By the way, you should’ve seen them in the oven! They rose very high but deflated quickly on cooling. It was a shame that they didn’t reach the glorious heights on the second baking, but they were still delicious. And so cheesy.
For the spinach stuffed chicken roulade, I had an idea about what I wanted to cook, so went searching for a recipe that was similar to what I had in my head. I ended up adapting this recipe from Inglewood Farms (see my recipe at the end of this post). And, am I allowed to say that it was rather good? Well, I won’t lie. It was! (Gee, the modesty.)
And for dessert, we had coconut panna cotta with fresh strawberries. The coconut panna cotta recipe was from taste.com.au and not only was it a cinch to make, but it was delicious – smooth, creamy and fragrant. I was tempted to do some caramelised banana instead of the strawberries, but decided that it would be too rich and sweet. (I tried unmoulding one a few hours before dinner to make sure that I could turn them out okay – and since it was already unmolded it would’ve been a waste not to eat it….).
Despite the expression on Mr Onion’s face, dinner was a success. Don’t mind him, he’s such a crybaby. After dinner, Mr Onion and Mr Cauliflower came to the table for an impromptu photo shoot. Remember our visit to Blenheim a couple of months ago? I saw these in the window of a souvenir shop when we stopped in Kaikoura for some food. I’m not really a knick knack person, but I was strangely taken by them. Why? I really have no idea. I admit that they are ridiculous and kitsch! But I liked them for some reason, so on our way back down to Christchurch, we stopped in Kaikoura just so I could buy them. There were other fruits and vegetables – strawberries, watermelon, broccoli, but Mr Cauliflower and Mr Onion were my favourites. They’re very silly but they make me laugh!
Twice-baked cheese soufflé
From Delicious magazine September 2008
Serves 6 (or 8 as a starter)
You can bake these in advance and reheat before serving.
60g unsalted butter
60g plain flour
350ml hot milk
100g cheese (I used cheddar, the original recipe had goat’s cheese)
1/2 tsp paprika
4 eggs, separated
1/2 cup (125ml) pure (thin( cream
1/2 cup (40g) freshly grated parmesan
Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease six 1 cup (250ml) ramekins or eight 1/2 cup ramekins (if serving as a starter). Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat for about a minute until foaming. Remove from the heat, then stir in the flour with a wooden spoon until well combined. Return pan to medium-low heat and stir constantly for 1 minute until it is a smooth paste.
Gradually add the hot milk, stirring constantly for two minutes, until smooth. Bring to the boil, then pour into a large bowl. Add the cheese and paprika, then season with salt and pepper and stir until smooth.
Using a balloon whisk, beat in the egg yolks, one at a time. In a separate bowl, whisk egg whites with an electric beater to soft peaks. Using a large metal spoon, gently fold one-third of the eggwhites into the cheese mixture (trying not to loose too much volume). Gently fold in another third of the eggwhites, then finally fold in the reminder.
Fill each ramekin with the mixture so that it is three-quarters full. Place in a roasting pan and fill the pan with enough boiling water to come halfway up the sides of the moulds. Bake on the middle shelf of the oven for 20 minutes or until golden and risen, then remove from the pan and cool.
When ready to serve, increase the oven to 220°C. If you don’t want to serve them in the ramekins, line a tray with baking paper. Run a knife around the edges of the soufflé and invert them on to the tray. Pour about 1tbs cream over the top of each one, scatter with parmesan, and bake for 8-10 minutes until the cheese is golden and the cream is bubbling.
Spinach stuffed chicken roulade
Adapted from this recipe here
Serves at least 8
1 bunch english spinach
1/2 cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
2 cloves garlic, peeled and crushed
30 grams melted butter
Small handful of basil, chopped
8 chicken breasts, skin on
6 slices prosciutto
Preheat oven to 220ºC.
Wash the fresh spinach well. Place the spinach in a large pan/pot and cook for about 4 minutes, until wilted. Squeeze the excess water from the cooked spinach and chop finely.
Place the spinach in a bowl with the pine nuts, garlic, butter, basil, and season with salt and pepper. Mix together well.
“Butterfly” cut each chicken breast. Lay a piece of plastic wrap over each chicken breast and pound it with a mallet or rolling pin until it is thin and flat.
Place a small amount of the spinach mixture on to the chicken, and roll up tightly. You should be able to roll it so the skin is on the outside. Lay a slice of prosciutto on the chicken where it is not covered by skin, and secure with cooking twine.
Heat some oil in a non-stick frying pan on a medium high heat. Sear each parcel on all sides, and then place in an oven-proof dish and finish cooking in the oven for 20-30 minutes or until cooked through.
When ready to serve, remove the cooking twine and slice into rounds. Serve with vegetables/salad.