Millionaires shortbread

Or as its sometimes known caramel shortbread squares.

Last year I ate at the fat duck in Bray, I got to eat many wonderful things and was given a copy of the big fat duck cookbook, the original giant 5.6Kg format. Now its a very very nice book, but it is full of recipes and they demand to be used. The shortbread (and accompanying chocolate wine) wasn't on the menu when I was there but I really wanted to taste it.

Some of the recipes in here are scary, the chocolate wine being a case in point, a centrifuge ? whey powder ? Gellan ? I know why these ingredients & techniques are used, but it can''t really happen in my kitchen. The millionaires shortbread didn't seem too scary. I couldn't get T45 flour, but knowing its a plain fine white flour allowed me to substitute.

 Those are the ingredients for the shortbread. The method and measures are precise (this is a feature of Heston Blumenthal (HB) recipes). I needed 45g of egg yolk (turns out that is almost 2 co-op large eggs) and actual vanilla seeds, also required was olive oil, which came as a bit of a shock since I'm used to butter being the only fat in short bread. Due to a cockup with the amount of olive oil I had in I had to add a little mandrine olive oil. The dough comes together remarkably well but feels a bit sticky. It goes in the fridge to rest for 24hrs (look at the treacle tart recipe for HB's take on pastry resting) When it comes out you've got a rich firm dough, which you roll out very thin & return to the fridge to rest for a couple more hours.

Whilst that's happening let's make a start on the caramel. The glucose is easy to get hold of, just go to your local pharmacy and they have it. You are going to end up with a pretty rich caramel. I had a little issue in that my thermometer only goes up to 130c & I needed a temperature of 147c so a bit of science got involved. unsurprisingly once the caramel is done (and stirring in the cream to the hot sugar mixture is one of those scary cookery procedures) that needs to go into the fridge too, this time its going to set.
That leaves the chocolate top. The recipe calls for 24hrs of sous-vide but a bit of reading suggested that this was to temper the chocolate, a bit of reading suggested some work with a digital thermometer would allow me to temper the chocolate reasonably well, so I got that all set up & ready.

The shortbread goes into a slow oven (gas 2) for 15 minutes, you've rolled it out pretty thin, so it doesn't take long. At this point I realized I had a lot more caramel & chocolate than shortbread, but never mind I had a plan.

The book calls for 1cm x 4cm slices, which I felt were a little small so we went with 4cm squares instead. The caramel is a bit of a bugger to work with, that could quite easily be me not getting it to the correct temperature or just my lack of skill with caramel.

That's the final assembled product. I had gold leaf, not powder so I scribbled gold onto the chocolate rather than gold coating the salt crystals. Once again hard work with a worthwhile outcome. 

The left over caramel got used with a more ordinary millionaires shortbread that we christened "public sector shortbread". I used a straight flour & butter shortbread & just spread the top with melted chocolate, which gives a very different mouth feel from the sharp snap of the tempered chocolate. We gave it a light gold scribble because as we all know the public sector isn't that rich

All jolly tasty and I''ll definitely give it another go when I've got a better thermometer and a smooth sided & bottomed pan for the caramel.

The Gilded Truffle

A bit of a tale here, Mum brought over some of her home grown blueberries and I didn't have time to get them into a recipe, so I chucked them in a kilner jar with some vodka. After sometime I'd got a nice blueberry vodka, it makes a great vesper, lightening the Lillet slightly. I also had a few vodka soaked blueberries, they might make a nice truffle I thought. What I really wanted was something similar to the Dutch Slagroom truffle (the best I've had are from michel in haarlem) which is pure whipped cream in a thing bitter chocolate shell. I was unable to find a recipe, so made do with a white chocolate ganache, using a 2:1 chocolate: cream ratio (hotel chocolat make a nice organic white).

The ganache came together with no trouble at all, unfortunately though it set far too solid to be workable, so I gave it 10s in the microwave, that turned out to be 5s too long and I now had a bowl that was far too liquid. I let it reset and then scooped out the truffle and melted it in my hands (hey cocoa butter is good for the skin right ?) until I could roll the blueberries in it. As you can see I wasn't completely successful,but I did have some mostly spherical, mostly covered blueberry balls, ready for coating.

I'd been given some very strong dark Ecuadorian chocolate, that looked just the job. I shaved some off and melted it. Realizing the ganache was quite temprature sensitive I stuck my thermometer in to the molten chocolate and let it cool down to 28c. Hoping that would be liquid enough to work with, but cool enough not to instantly melt the truffles.

As you can see it appeared to be working quite well, though sometimes we didn't have the best hold on the cocktail sticks, so some of the shapes we ended up with weren't going to win any beauty contests.

I had some pure gold leaf left over from a DIY project (involving neither food nor drink !) so I thought I'd put a dab on each truffle. If you are going to do this the truffles need to be set first, other wise you just end up with chocolate smeared gold leaf.

 

They taste really nice, the shell is rich & bitter, then the truffle is creamy with a fair hit of vanilla and then the tartness of the blueberry, with a solid hit of vodka.

So if you have a recipe for Dutch whipped cream truffles, let me know, otherwise I'll be using this one again once soft fruit season is upon us