Raspberry cream filled wafer cones with fennel crisps

You are being told by every cookery program on TV, read it in every cook book and hear it from every chef: get yourself a decent (and expensive) knife. I spent most of my cooking days using the cheapest, crappiest knives and survived quite well. So I thought!
Recently I stocked up on good WMF and Zwilling knives for up to £60 each and now I wonder how I ever survived in the kitchen using old, broken and almost poundshop worthy knives.

Now that I know the difference between good and bad knives I might also stock up on good pans. I did have difficulties last time when boiling my sugar syrup up to hard ball temperature. My little Berndes pot had to endure a biggest-flames-ever-in-my-kitchen treatment in order to bring the syrup up to temperature. It took forever, we almost didn’t make it and just when I was about to give up it reached the desired degrees. It was like driving an overcrowded London bus up a hill. But Berndes cookware is not even the worst you can get though. It is not heavy bottomed enough though.
When I went to Selfridges last weekend I fell in love with a £150 Fissler stock pot. Still a bargain when you compare it to the gold pot with diamonds by Fissler which sells for a mere £100.000.

Anyway, coming back to the knife: go out and get a good knife before even trying your luck with fennel or indeed any other kind of non-potato crisps (lime crisps for example).
The fennel crisps were initially not intended to go in the raspberry cream, but then, I made them (just for fun; I do the strangest things for fun it seems), so I needed to use them. And although fennel and raspberries do not seem like the happiest of all marriages: it did work rather well.
Raspberry cream filled wafer cones with fennel crisps, for 4
: 1 egg
: 40-50g icing sugar
: 150ml whipping cream
: 100g raspberries
: 4 ice cream cones
: 1 fennel bulb
: Suze

To make the crisps, cut the fennel into very thin slices. Prepare a light caramel: first lightly borwn the sugar in a pan, then add a splash of Suze or any other herbal alcohol and a splash of water. Add the fennel and let it soak for about a minute. When removing the fennel from the pan, try to shake off as much of the sugar liquid as possible.

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Line a baking tray with lightly oiled parchment paper. Lay the fennel flat on the tray, cover with another sheet of parchment paper and place a second baking tray on top. Leave in oven for around 10 minutes, then remove the second baking tray and parchment paper. Cool down the oven to approx 100 degree Celsius and leave the fennel in it to dry for about 30 minutes.

In the meantime, whisk the egg together with the sugar until creamy using an electric hand mixer. In a separate bowl, whip the cream. Still using the hand mixer, whisk together the cream and the egg mixture and finally add the raspberries, whisk for another 20 seconds or until the raspberries are blended in well with the cream (still keeping their texture).
Using a piping bag or small spoon, fill the cones with the raspberry cream and top with a fennel crisp.