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I am deeply ashamed to admit that I had this bag of plastic dessert (or Angel's delight as it actually is called) sitting around in my cupboard. But then, there it was, so it seemed kind of logical to use it.
To the delight of Scott. After all, it was ready in 5mins. Sometimes, immediate availabilty is more important than natural strawberry flavour.
There I was, standing in the kitchen with a bag of E-numbers in one hand and a whisk in the other. At last I wanted to get something healthy out of te whole exprience for myself by not using an electric handmixer, but the personal-trainer-improved strength of my arms.
As it happened, I really wasn't in the mood of coming up with something more elaborate than Angel's delight. But if I pretend to make something fab from scratch, then I do it big time: some Dutch hagelslag (liquorice covered with sugar) and a Koala bear from the Japanese sweet shop and hey, I could have almost sold it in my favourite place for pastry and other sweet stuff: Yauatcha.
The Peppermint Crisp chocolate bar you get in South Africa is one of it’s kind. I guess they don’t seell it in Europe since it could be considered a weapon. I am not kidding, the peppermint filling is not only crisp, it is razor sharp! When I little piece fell down on the floor I thought I stoppd on glass… and not chocolate!But then, its also dangerously yummy. On its own and as part of a South African recipe that clogs your arteries when only looking at it. It is a mix of caramel, cream, coconut biscuits and a grated bar of Peppermint Crisp. It tastes divine, there is no other way to describe it. But it doesn’t look very pretty. It is one of those: all in one pot dishes. They taste terrific, but look uninspiring. That’s why I came up with a posh and more handsome version of the Peppermint Crisp Tart: 
Peppermint Crisp Millefeuille
: 1 grated bar of peppermint Crisp (available in South African shops)
: 1 tin of Coronation Caramel (or boil Coronation/condensed milk for about 4hrs)
: 150ml whipping cream (or less, if you want the caramel cream to be more solid)
: 1 pack of all butter puff pastry
: 1 coconut
Break the shell of the coconut (screwdriver and hammer should do the trick), empty the liquid into a glass, then break the whole nut into pieces. Using a vegetable peeler, slice off thin shavings from the coconut flesh.
Roll out the puff pastry and cut it into the desired shape. Brush with egg wash and bake in the oven (180 degrees C) until nicely risen and slightly golden on top. Set aside to cool.Empty the caramel into a bowl, add a tablespoon or so of the coconut liquid. Now whip the cream and add as much whipped cream to the caramel as needed (until you get the desired consistency). I have tried both, a quite solid and more liquid caramel cream and they are equally nice. The more solid, the more caramel content and the heavier it will be. 
Assemble the dish by first placing a sheet of puff pastry on a plate. Cover with caramel and some of the grated Peppermint Crisp and top with another layer of puff pastry, caramel and chocolate. Finish it of with a few coconut shavings on top.
The caramel cream is also an excellent addition to banana/raisin pancakes.
Gooseberries are my favourite fruits, closely followed by currants: red and white. I will always remember the redcurrant cake my grandmother made whenever they were in season. Spongecake with redcurrant-meringue. I adored it, I loved it, I would have given away my Barbie for it. My mother didn't share my appreciation for this cake though. The pungent acidic flavour of the redcurrants and the slighlty uber-sweet meringue didn't tickle her tastebuds enough to ever bake it.
Redcurrants are not only tasty, but also very pretty little berries and great for decorating dessert. Especially when frosted with caster sugar. Simply dip the washed fruits in a little egg white, then cover with sugar. Leave them to dry for an hour or so. They add some texture and crunchiness to mousses and cream desserts, or even cakes (try it with my favourite chocolate cake)
I don't like ice cream. In fact, I do find it rather disturbing that every single dessert in some of London's top restaurants is served with ice cream.
When I grew up, our cakes did not come with a compulsory blob of ice cream on the side. We would have our cakes and Strudel on their own, at the very most with some whipped cream on the side. The concept of pouring cold liquid unwhipped cream over my cakes - like they do here in the UK - is one of the things that still seem very strange to me.
I try to accustom though and integrate cream or ice cream into my desserts. Preferrably ice cream on its own though. Like my frozen yoghurt and raspberry shots (inspired by La Tartine Gourmande's Rhubarb and raspberry yoghurt ice pops: they make my guest happy and although I wouldn't eat them myself I am happy to put them on the menu as they are no effort at all.
Frozen yoghurt shots, for 10 shots
: 1 egg
: 60g icing sugar
: 300g yoghurt
: 200g raspberries
: 1-2 tbsp caster sugar
Simmer 100g raspberries and some caster sugar over a low heat until the fruits start to liquidise. Drain off the fruits and set the liquid aside.
Beat the egg with the icing sugar until creamy, then mix in the yoghurt. Pour 1/3 of the yoghurt mixture into a separate bowl and mix with half of the cooked fruits. Roughly chop the remaining uncooked fruits and fold into the main yoghurt mix. Blend the other half of the cooked raspberries with the raspberry syrup.
Spoon the yoghurt mix containing the roughly copped fruits into the shot glasses (fill them up to 1/2 or 2/3 with the mixture). Place them in the freezer for 30 mins, then add 2-3 tablespoons of the syrup to each glass. Freeze again for 30 mins. Finally fill th glasses with the remaining yoghurt/cooked fruits mixture and place in the fridge for another 20-30mins beforte inserting wooden or plastic sticks to make the lollies. Keep in freezer until entirely frozen.
Loosen the frozen yoghurt from the shot glasses by placing the glasses in a bowl of hot water for around 30 sec. Serve in shot glasses.
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.
Ever since I read in a newspaper about James Martin having a can of diet coke and a chocolate bar for brekkie, I have fallen big time for this guy. My ideal and regularly consumed breakfast is diet coke with a slice of - as I call it - “black forest toast”: lightly toasted bread with a generous helping of Nutella and a dollop of cherry jam on top. I could however easily swap my black forest toast for a Mars bar if James Martin wanted me to ;-)
What I like about him is his down-to-earth approach to food. 90% of chefs would never admit that they eat or god forbid like any other chocolate than Valrhona chocolate. We all know that high quality dark chocolate is a good thing, but let’s be honest: a Mars bar, Bounty or Milky Way now and then can have its charm too. A sticky, gooey, high calorific charm… Yummy.
I had my last Mars bar 3 years ago. I love the stuff, but hardly ever eat any other choc bar other than a Milky Way Crispy Roll or Duplo when I am back in Austria: Not quite as satisfying, but less calorific.
Nevertheless, I love James Martin’s unpretentiousness. Which is reflected in most of his food as well. Simple, easy to recreate and very, very delicious. Like his raspberry marshmallows.
Damn, they are good! And as long as you have a sugar thermometer at home and manage to get hold of some liquid glucose, they are fairly simple to make as well. But don’t try to improvise and do stick to what the good man has to say: the sugar syrup’s temperature has to reach 127 degrees Celsius and you do have to beat the egg white/sugar mixture for about 10 mins. When you do that, success is guaranteed. I promise! And once you have tasted a homemade marshmallow, you will never go out and buy another pack of food colouring and E-numbers again.
When I was a child, there were no fruits I loved more than the gooseberries from my grandmother’s garden. While my sister would go and pick the sweet raspberries, I would eat myself sick on the not-so-sweet gooseberries. Don’t forget, I wasn’t mad keen in sweet stuff when I was younger. Apart from granny’s garden, there weren’t many places where you could get gooseberries. You would occasionally be lucky enough to find them on some farmer’s markets, but not in huge amounts.
So when I first visited the UK I was all excited about finding tinned gooseberries on the supermarket shelves. I am even more excited now to see that they've started selling fresh gooseberries.
I decided the give the classic gooseberry crumble a shot. My crumbles are usually just ok, but either the crumble gets to soggy or to hard… not much crumbliness going on. So no more sticking to a recipe but just following my intuition. I just mixed and crumbled the ingredients together until it looked ok. And it was. It was more than ok, it was the best crumble I have ever made. Actually, the best crumble I have ever had! 
Gooseberry crumble, for 2
: 350-400g fresh gooseberries
: 40g butter
: caster sugar
: Demerara sugar
: flour
: ground almonds
Simmer the gooseberries with 2-3 tbsp caster sugar until soft. In the meantime, mix together the butter, Demerara sugar and flour and almonds (ratio 2:1) until you get a crumbly texture.
Start off adding 2 tbsp Demerara sugar, 2 tbsp flour and 1 tbsp ground almonds. Taste the mixture and add more sugar until sweet enough. Finally add more flour and almonds until you get the right, crumbly texture. Make sure the crumble is rather fine and you don’t have lumps of dough in your mixture.
Spoon the gooseberry compote into a small, ovenproof dish. Top with the crumble and finally sprinkle with one tbsp Demerara sugar. Bake at 180 degrees for around 30 minutes.
Pour over some cold single or double cream and serve immediately.
I am one of those people who cannot throw away food. So everything that doesn’t get used before its “Best before” date ends up in my freezer. Like last Christmas’ panettone. It was about time – after all, we are now in July – to finally use it.
I sliced it before freezing which turned out to be a great idea. It defrosts in literally minutes that way.
Pain perdu with glazed cherries, for 1
For the pain perdu
: 2 slices of panettone
: 150 ml milk
: 1 egg
: 1 tsp vanilla extract
: butter for frying
: caster sugar for sprinkling
For the glazed cherries
: 1-2 handful od stoned and halved fresh cherries
: 2 tbsp caster sugar
: 2-3 tbsp water
Heat the butter in a pan. Mix the milk, the egg and vanilla essence. Lightly soak the panettone in the milk/egg mixture and fry in the butter until golden brown. In the meantime, pit cherries in a pan and sprinkle with sugar. Once the sugar has dissolved, add the water and simmer for a few minutes.
Place the pain perdu on a plate and sprinkle with sugar. Pour over the hot cherries and finish off with a few drops if cream.
One of those days: it would be nice to prepare something impressive for dessert. After all, you have guests round and don't want to present them with something out of the sumermarket's deepfreezer. But then, you cannot really be bothered with making a Michelin-star worthy dessert either.
So how to creating something easy and quick which still looks like hours and hours of hard work?
Well, the inital idea was to recreate 
the Pink Peppercorn Encrusted Flourless Chocolate Cake. But slowly the cannot-be-bothered mood built up... Followed by a strike of genius: why not just have the cake topping with pink peppercorns! Or in nicer words: Silky Chocolate Pots with Crushed Pink Peppercorns. It worked out beautifully and looked beautiful.
The ganache will sit on my hips forever, but so what?! These pots are worth the extra hour in the gym!
