193: Nigel's delightful trifle, p234

The final recipe, and fit for a celebratory meal with friends, on New Year's Eve, to follow the goosehttp://mousemeals.blogspot.com/2011/01/192-roast-goose-juniper-sauce-and-apple.html! I still don't much like trifle, so wasn't looking forward to this one, but other people seem to love trifle, so I decided safety in numbers... and the Limoncello trifle from the book was amazing and the first trifle I've ever liked, so maybe, just maybe...

And it was a hit. Inspite of not being able to get blackcurrants (doh, it was December of course... I should have gotten some ages ago and popped them in the freezer if I wasn't going to do the trifle straight away), darling hubby whilst on his goose chase, found some mixed 'black forest fruits' in the frozen section - blackcurrants, blackberries, cherries, and black grapes. So we used them instead. Near enough :) How slapdash I have become!

The cream mixture on top, all though a faff (three bowls required - mix egg yolk and sugar in one, whip the cream in another, whip the egg white in another...), was divine - not too sweet, but light and fluffy, and picked out by several guests as being particularly noteworthy. And the cake below was a mixture of berry juice soaked and dry and fluffy. Very good indeed, and seconds all round.

Phew. So, it is done. Finished. The whole book, 193 recipes, in 365 days.

191: Poached pears with ice-cream and chocolate sauce, p337

Pudding for tonight's dinner party was an easy recipe to finish off the meal. Simple, quite nice but nothing particularly to write home about. The syrup was very thin and watery - not sure about using a whole litre of water to simmer the pears in, or not reducing it down considerably after the poaching, so it was more of a syrup. But it was quite nice to leave the pears quite plain and fresh, instead of using wine or cider. The chocolate sauce seemed wrong... to melt good chocolate by mixing in boiling water? Normally one tries to keep water/steam out of melting chocolate at all costs, or it seizes and goes grainy. This surprisingly worked as a thin (albeit watery...) chocolate sauce, but once it cooled down, the chocolate when grainy and the leftover sauce (of which there was lots, should have halved the chocolate/water combination) doesn't look/taste to be reusable. I used good fairtrade Divine chocolate, so a bit of a shame to waste so much of it. Ho hum. The Haagen Daz pralines and cream ice-cream was delicious (the only praline ice-cream I could find, it's a hard job, but someone's got to do it...).

Only two recipes to go!

188: Lemon ice-cream tart with gingernut crust, p375

A pudding was required to take to the inlaws for Christmas Eve and this fitted the bill nicely - after a rich dinner, the freshness of the icecream and the sharpness of the lemons made a welcome palate cleanser. The gingernut base was incredibly solid, maybe I didn't need to pack it in quite so tightly, but I was worried it would be too crumbly and wouldn't cut properly when sliced. Halving the recipe made a shallower tart, in one of my smaller springform tins, but it was plenty for five of us to each have a generous slice and there to still be nearly half left over for another day.

183: Warm soused mackerel, p68

Last mackerel recipe ticked off the list - but not our favourite, unfortunately. The fish was beautifully moist, being soused in the vinegar and wine, and lovely herby flavours came through, but we both decided we prefer the crispness given to mackerel when grilled or pan fried, rather that letting the skin end up a bit soggy. Plus T hated the smell of the vinegar, thought it smelt like old socks, bizarrely (I didn't think it did, but the smell was very vinegary, almost eye wateringly). Hey ho. Lovely served with the sauteed potatoes, but again, one fillet was enough for each of us, not two as suggested.

Only 10 recipes left to go!!

178: A stunning orange sorbet, p134

Another sorbet, and bizarrely another orange sorbet - after the orange yoghurt water ice made in November. Not wildly different - just missing the yoghurt out, but this time I used our icecream maker (a wedding present which lives at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, because there's hardly ever room for the bowl in the freezer - but there currently it, hurrah!). Normally whenever I've tried using the icecream maker it's ended in tears and tantrums - in spite of freezing the bowl for >24hrs - with the mixture refusing to freeze, but this time the churning worked and it was definitely sorbet after 40mins (not the 15-30mins on the icecream maker instructions and it was quite a soft sorbet, but just about there) - and firmed up properly once it was in the freezer. A much smoother texture than the previous handmade attempts, and super flavoursome, but, as with most of the other sorbets, a bit too sweet for my liking. Would definitely make this again - although probably the yoghurt version - but would reduce the amount of sugar made into the syrup at the start.

167: Lemon trifle, p140

A triumph! This one will definitely be repeated. Many times. It's already been requested by several people who were at the party in the Cotswolds we went to this weekend, for future parties. 

And I don't like trifle! I really don't like soggy cake/biscuit bases/etc in desserts and have never 'got' trifle and have therefore always avoided it... but this really was something else. A relatively small amount of the sponge fingers, with the inspired addition of lemon curd, and then the lightest, most delicious lemon custard on top, and a thick covering of whipped cream. The custard was wonderful - creamy and light but the acidity and zestiness of the lemon cut through and stopped it being too sweet or fatty. I could eat bowls of just the custard. Yum.

Decorated with orange zest and some little yellow and white sugar flowers I found in our Aunt's pantry, it was the first pudding to be finished at the party, out of a dining table full of desserts, and the people at the end of the queue for desserts didn't even get to see it. Hurray!

164: Orange yoghurt water ice, p254

Another sorbet-y, granita-y, water ice from the book and this one, like the strawberry water ice which I made back in September, was a winner. Intensely fruity and sweet but not too sweet like the melon sorbet was. Easy to make, and like the strawberry water ice, it had a much better texture than the melon sorbet. Curious. I like the addition of yoghurt, giving a little creaminess to the ice, but without losing the tartness of the orange. Could try adding yoghurt to the strawberry recipe...

162: A lime tart, p32

Lots of limes! Lots of eggs! Lots of cream! And lots of sugar! Blimey... another low-cal pudding from Nige :)

I didn't even try to make the pastry. I feel no shame... However, I did miss the clues in the recipe, specifying that the pie tin should have 3.5cm high sides, so that even using my big pie tin and a large sheet of pastry the lime mixture was enough to have filled two pie tins. Which I don't have. So I baked the rest in small bowls to eat as little puddings, which seems to have worked :)

The tart was scrummy, although it looked worryingly like a cheese and chive quiche on serving - T prodded it suspiciously, thinking I was trying to con him into eating something from the banned list...  A custardy texture, with lots of zesty bits, but I have to say, I prefer my own lemon tart which is much simpler (2 lemons, 2 eggs, 150ml cream, 150g sugar), fits in one regular pastry case, and has a smooth, crisp filling. No bad at all, just not as good as mine :)

151: Blackberry and apple pie, p343

Rats. I can't make pastry. This is a well documented fact. Here. And here. And here. And many other places, no doubt. But I keep trying. This time it was all going well, until I retrieved the pastry from the fridge and found it had turned into a rock solid, dry lump. It was not going to become malleable in time to be able to bake the pie and leave to get to my parents' in time for lunch, so I cheated and used the emergency jus rol. The shame. No, I don't care. Pastry and me are not meant to be. It's a good thing really, if I could make the stuff, I'd eat it all the time...

Good pie though! Unusually for a Nigel pud, I didn't find this overly sweet, which was nice, even though some of the apples I used were quite sweet already. Of course my sister thought it wasn't quite sweet enough - but ho hum, I liked it. Not rocket science, no real deviations from the basics of such a pie, so an easy one to tick off, pastry-making excluded...

149: An almond and greengage crumble, p282

Where am I going to find greengages? Hmm, poss a farmers' market, but I always get up too late... or I don't get up too late because I'm off somewhere but by the time whatever I'm off to is done, it's too late. And sod's law, everytime I actually would make it, they wouldn't have greengages, and the once a year when they do, I'd definitely be fast asleep... Anyway, the recipe says 'or plums' - so plums it was. Plus I was at a friend's, after a long day trapsing around the enormity of the craft fair that is The Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace, and with serious headaches, and feet and credit cards burning, we needed some blood-sugar-raising asap, and only CostCutters was open. And it sold plums! No greengages though. Unsurprisingly.

Thus, this was made in someone else's kitchen, without the aid of a food processor - argh! Luckily there was a willing friend who inexplicably DIDN'T KNOW HOW TO RUB BUTTER INTO FLOUR. Madness. But she seemed keen to learn, and since I loathe rubbing butter into flour and have done since being forced to make scones at school week after week in the 80s (bizarrely in lovely lovely Mason and Cash mixing bowls - which I adore and have coveted ever since, which is why I now own four of them all in different sizes) I quickly showed her how and delegated the task to my new (temporary) kitchen slave. Hurrah!

Otherwise, easy peasy, throw it all in, bung in the oven and then yummy crumble 40mins later. Very slightly blackened on top, because we kinda forgot about it whilst we were eating dinner and it prob got a bit longer than 40mins, and the oven may have been a bit hot still, but not overly cremated at all. Perhaps a little oversweet - less sugar for plums vs. greengages, maybe? But lovely crumbly powdery topping, and fabulous with friend K's amazing homemade custard - wow, who knew it was so easy to make amazing homemade custard?!

144: Strawberry mascarpone tart, p207

 

Om nom nom! Another  scrummy low-cal (ha!) pud from the book... and easy too, no pastry (hurray!) but a base made from crushed up oatmeal biscuits and butter. Wasn't sure it would set hard enough to hold together out of the tin, but it did after half an hour or so in the fridge. The mascarpone mixture was a bit of a faff, comprising a cheese and egg yolk mixture and whipped egg white - the egg white deflated quite a lot on folding into the cheese mixture but it didn't seem to affect the final result, which filled the biscuit case nicely. I made a bit of a mistake in not pushing the biscuit base up the sides of the tin a bit, and it was too late when I realised so I wasn't sure it would come out of my springform tin without splodging everywhere, but after another half an hour or so in the fridge it had firmed up enough that it was fine and I didn't have a biscuit base with a lake of squishy filling flooding out all over the place. Phew!

And the result was delicious - really light filling and not too sweet. Would make a very nice pud for a summer BBQ... even if the rain was lashing down on Saturday night after a gloomy grey day, when we had this :)

140: Lemon-frosted pistachio cake, p146

Om nom nom. Macmillan Cancer Support Coffee Morning at work this morning - so needed a cake to take to work, had the ingredients for this one, so another recipe to tick off the list!

The picture in the book looks fabulous, big thick cake, beautifully decorated, but unfortunately, even using the same sized cake tin specified in the recipe, the cake I produced was all of an inch/inch and a half thick. Ho hum, admittedly there are no raising agents in the ingredients - so there's no way it could have risen, but still, it looked rather flat... I'd recommend using a smaller cake tin, if making this! Perhaps that what was used in for the cake in the photo - either that, or twice the volume of ingredients!

Pistachio nuts turn out to be damned expensive too - £7 for 300g! Shelled, luckily, that's not including shells, but still. Who knew?

The cake ended up deliciously squidgy and moist though, with lots of flavours - the orange and lemon coming through particularly nicely. Lots of compliments - and it was one of the first cakes to vanish from the tea table - within 30 minutes!

(I skipped the (optional) crystallised rose petals to decorate... life is surely too short?)

136: Strawberry water ice, p217

Mmmmm, a slightly more successful sorbet this time - and soooo strawberry-y. Very easy to make and a good way to use up a punnet of very ripe strawberries you nearly forget about in the bottom of the fridge... :)

135: A warm summer fruit compote, p209

...so, after the pigeon disaster and having cleaned the hob once this evening, I decided this would be an easy pudding to tick off. I substituted blackberries, sorry... hey, they are one of the parents of loganberries (blackberries x raspberries = loganberries), and I added some more red currants to the mix to try to balance the acidity as per the recipe a bit more. In the fairly large saucepan I used, the volume of berries plus very small amount of creme de cassis looked like there was no chance it would bubble up too much. Hah. I left the kitchen for a couple of minutes and came back to see they'd boiled and frothed up so much that the hob was flooded again, this time with lurid blood red juice, streaked all down the sides of the pan. The berries were still all in the pan, luckily... But it resulted in a second round of cursing. Followed by cleaning. Nice compote though - I thought it would be a bit sharp but it wasn't, and the juices were glossy and rich. Delicious. Would be excellent with some nice vanilla icecream...

132: A wonderfully moist, fresh plum cake, p287

'Wonderfully moist' - ha - sticky messy slodge 'o' cake this was - perhaps not the best one to take into work... We ended up eating it with spoons :) But it was lovely, if a little gooey and more like a cakey crumble. The almonds, as ever, gave the cakey part a nutty, rich texture, and the walnuts worked better than I thought they would - I'm not a big fan of lumps of nut floating around in cake. The English plums I got at the weekend were just right - a little sweet, but also a little tart - but made it very gloopy on top. Definitely took longer than 45mins to cook, more like 1hr 10mins and because of the gooey plumminess on top had to have faith that it was cooked underneath. Phew...

131: Melon sorbet, p233

A confession. I made this over a month ago... just hadn't summoned up the desire to serve it. I don't like melon :( It's a secret shame, everyone always seems to rave about melon, but I find it quite a sickly overpowering soapy flavour. And don't like it on it's own. Mixed with other flavours, like in this salad, it's okay, but not on it's own.

Anyway, this had been lurking in the freezer... partly because it took ages to set, and then set like concrete... The texture is more like a granita than a sorbet - I stirred it a lot whilst freezing it (partly because it took so long to freeze - everytime I checked over the course of a day it hadn't frozen and I stirred it again) so I'm not sure why. I should dig out our icecream maker, there are lots of icecream recipes still to go in the book. It's just a pain finding enough room in the freezer to freeze the bowl of the icecream maker for +24hrs, and whenever I've tried using it, it's not frozen properly and has made a complete mess. Ho hum. Time to try again soon...

So, the melon sorbet. T liked it. Said it was very melony. Wasn't sure about the texture. Whereas I quite liked the texture, but wasn't sure about the melony-ness :) He's got about a litre of the stuff to get through...

125: Orange and lemon cheesecake, p129

Marathon weekend of cooking is at an end! This was the finale to Sunday lunch, and nearly finished us all off... I was worried it wouldn't set properly, and it was awfully soft, but held it's shape when cut, hurray! Extremely creamy, and not as lemony or orangey as I though it might be, but Dad managed to polish off a good quarter of the whole thing. Not sure it's the best baked cheesecake recipe around as Nigel describes it (my friend Kirsty wins that prize), but it was jolly good nonetheless :)

118: Peach and blueberry soured cream cobbler, p230

Mmm, yummy! I suddenly had a craving for a bit of comfort food of the pudding variety and spur of the moment made this, having all the ingredients in stock. Wasn't sure what made it a cobbler and not a crumble until I started making it - and I think the distinction is that you make a dough and pile little rounds of dough on top of the fruit. What a faff! The dough was quite sticky and difficult to make into flat enough rounds to possibly cover the top of the fruit so I ended up with quite a 'rustic' mishmash of odd shapes stretched out across the surface, and covered in the stuff. It took longer to cook than 25mins too, more like 40mins, after 25mins I cut into it and found the cobblers (??) were still raw and sticky inside, so had to pop it back in. The result was good though, not too sweet, not too sour, and I quite liked the topping... Hmm. But would probably stick with regular crumble topping normally... Less messy... and quicker...

117: Bramley apple shortcake, p124

Yummy! I made pastry!! Hot paws are not conducive to pastry making, which is a terrible shame as I love love love pastry. Actually it's probably a good thing I can't make it very well... or I'd eat it all the time...

This was a very short shortcrust pastry, and I tried really hard... but it still ended up being placed in the bottom of the pie tin and over the top of the filling in multiple pieces. Added a very homemade 'rustic' look, I like to think... Only a pic (to follow) of the outside for this one as I took it to a family party and we had to leave early as hubby had an opera to get to, at Glyndebourne, so had to leave it there and in the rush, although I tried a bit of it quickly, completely forgot to take a picture of it cut. Ho hum. But I can report that it was really rather good - not too sweet, not too sour, not too sloppy. Hate it when the filling makes the pastry too soggy and thought that might happen with this as I made the pie last night - but no, it didn't, success! And even grumpy uncle, who doesn't do complements, said it wasn't bad at all. And then had a second piece :)

110: Chocolate almond cake, p99

An emergency pudding required for a picnic at Glyndebourne... and this leapt out of the book at me. Even though we were out of dark chocolate... It's hubbie's fault that we need an emergency pudding, so he went out to get dark chocolate with the instructions to get 200g fine quality, c.70%+ dark chocolate. He came back with dark cooking chocolate (54% cocoa), which was at least better than the galaxy dark he came back with at some point in the past... Poor hub. He slunk off embarrassed when I pointed out the difference. But he got everything else on the shopping list spot on!

The egg white whisking fest continues - 5 eggs this time, separated, whites whisked to stiff peaks (I'm getting good at this!). I must have used over a dozen eggs so far this week...

Difficult to fold the heavy gloopy choc/butter/egg yolk/flour/coffee mix into the light, fluffy egg whites but managed without knocking all of the air out...

Took c.10-15mins longer than the cooking time in the book, before the knife stopped coming out covered in cake mix, and on removal the top of the cake broke slightly, showing that the top had risen slightly above the rest of the cake, and had formed a little crisp layer. Yummy.

Cake survived the car journey to Glyndebourne, and with the leftover mascarpone cream from yesterday, slightly flatter now the egg whites had lost a lot of their froth, went down very well. A very rich, fudgy chocolate cake, with only a couple of embarrassingly albino bits where I clearly hadn't mixed the egg whites in well enough...