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!

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...

68: My very good chocolate brownie recipe, p325

Oooooh, these were, and still are, very good indeed. Incredibly rich, dense, fudgey brownies, without any interloping ingredients like chopped nuts, just chocolatey cocoay goodness. This is supposed to serve 12, but I cut it into 24, and having tried a half a piece, this is definitely the sort of brownie one can only eat one small piece of at a time...And then need a bit of a lie-down...

Wasn't the easiest of instructions, to fold the flour and cocoa in to the butter/egg/sugar/chocolate mix in the bowl of the food processor, but managed, nonetheless, and soon the flat was full of chocolatey baking smells, making for happy hubby.

Only real problem was that for some reason, inspite of greasing the tin and lining the base with baking parchment, it was a bugger to turn out and I ended up cutting it in the tin and prising out the first few pieces. A few bits crumbled in the process, so it's not a neat brownie, but it was worth it...

Apart from a few pieces, sequestered for T, these are destined to accompany me to work on Monday as it's my birthday, and one must bring cake for morning tea if it's one's birthday.

**Aha, and I've done more recipes in the last week than I did in the whole of April - oh dear!!**

28: Toasted chocolate brioche, p137

This isn't a recipe!! Definitely an excuse for a decadent breakfast though... Actually, toasting the brioche in a ridged pan, melting the chocolate inside, did create something greater than the sum of it's parts... I'm used to having brioche warm and soft, but not toasted, and I think it was actually better! I cheated a little - used brioche rolls instead of slices, and chocolate chips as I just realised I used up all the dark chocolate in the chocolate puddings on Friday - they used a LOT of chocolate... Yum...

21: Chicken stew and mash, p80, and 22: Hot chocolate puddings, p52

Oh my... the pudding, the pudding!! But before that... the main...

I was going to make this yesterday, thinking it would be a nice warming tummy-pleaser to pop in the oven before going to the gym, but when I went to put the chicken in the marinade early afternoon, I realised the recipe said to leave it for 4-5 hours minimum, preferably overnight, before browning the meat and softening the leeks etc etc, and then two hours in the oven. Not really enought time, oops. So I popped the meat in the marinade and then left it in the fridge until this evening - and boy, did the orange infuse into the meat!!

I didn't use a whole jointed chicken in this, as per the recipe, since it's only the two of us and I'm rather enjoying cooking more recipes rather than having lots of leftovers... this may change once my new job starts on the 1st February :)

I always buy a whole chicken instead of chicken pieces/fillets and joint it - saves a lot of money, can buy better quality chicken in the first place instead of nasty water-filled pieces, and get the carcass at the end to make stock with. Yum! It's a bit of a faff but when I'm at work all week, it makes me feel productive on a Sunday afternoon, to joint a chicken, pop some in the fridge to use in the next couple of days and the rest in the freezer, and brew up a litre or two of good stock and then make soup for lunches during the week...

This recipe made a very tasty stew indeed, with the meat falling off the bone, with soft leeks and melting garlic, and cannellini beans breaking up the richness. It's always a good sign when T eats the pulses/lentils in a dish! There's a good amount of gubbins* left in the pot, which I will probably eat as a soup, I think, but not as much as in the lamb shanks dish the other night.

And then on to the pud... Which was a bit of an afterthought actually. I decided T needed a treat after a busy week, along with the bottle of Cab Sav to go with dindins. I've had some upsetting failures with whipping egg whites in the past - teeniest bit of grease/yolk in the bowl with the whites and they won't whip up... so didn't tell T that I was making a pud until it was definitely looking like it might work... But it did, and a lot of top notch dark chocolate, butter, and a blob of chocolate spread later, mmmmmm!!! Perfect gooey melty chocolate fondants out of the oven for afters! They were incredibly rich though, so maybe a dollop of fruit on the side, raspberries or something, perhaps gently stewed up, would be rather nice...

Update: The next day, the chocolate fondants are actually even better cold! They've sunk in the middle, but have taken on the consistency of dense chocolate fudge cake... mmmmm!!!! 

* gubbins - another family technical term, referring to the bits and bobs, veggies, oniony pieces, sauce, and juices, left in the dish after a casserole/pot roast.