Macaroons V1.0

In my world Macaroon means coconut, yes the French, almond kind are lovely, but really they need a better name. Oh yes they need rice paper too.

A coconut macaroon is a simple beast, where you mix egg white, sugar & dessicated (or flaked or shredded) coconut together & bake till golden. The end result should have a bit of bite surrounding some chewy moistness. There will probably be chocolate too, because well why wouldn't there be ?

  This has an extra embellishment, lime.

So mulch together 100g of sugar, 2 egg whites, 160g of coconut the zest & juice of a lime. Once its all come together roll out bite sized balls. Line a baking tray with parchment (or greaseproof) and put rice paper on top of that (if you can't find plain get edible/funny money from your local sweetie shop). Put the coconut balls onto the rice paper allowing for spreading whilst they cook & slip the whole lot into an oven at gas 4 for 20 minutes or so (once they are golden brown they are done).

Whilst they cool melt some dark chocolate (about 25g will do) and drizzle it over the macaroons. Cut or tear them from the rice paper (and stuff yourself with the chocolate spattered trimmings). Enjoy (keep them in an airtight container, but honestly they won't last long .

Millionaire's shortbread part II

The first attempt went quite well but I wasn't entirely happy with the biscuit. Whilst the olive oil biscuit base might work very well in the context of one of Heston's menus it's not quite right for just scoffing. The quick shortbread I used for the Public sector version didn't really cut it either.

I found another HB recipe, that the Times published (which I found by a bunch of people complaining that the Dulce de leche step took  3 hours) for a simplified version. I used the short bread from that which worked out quite well (that's it to the left) and had much more of the texture that I associate with Millionaire's shortbread/caramel squares.

The salted butter caramel from the FatDuck cookbook was really good, I'd had a couple of issues with it, that I was hoping to resolve with the purchase of a sugar thermometer and an untextured pan. Whilst it worked better than before (and seems to have created a very rich sticky caramel) I still had issues with it sticking & singeing.
Once again rolling it out & cutting to size was very tricky, hopefully The big fat undertaking will be making the full recipe before too long (though I think the chocolate wine may require a centrifuge) and I'll have another source of reference. The tempered chocolate though is definitely a step not to miss out, there are several easy ways to do this at home, that don't involve water baths or marble slabs and the end product is glossy chocolate with a real snap.

Assembling the squares isn't to bad. This time round I'd decided to make one giant piece & then cut it to size, which makes working with the sticky slab of caramel easier, but means you have to have a bowl of hot water handy to slice the chocolate layer.

I've tasted the trimmings and its pretty much close to my ideal of Millionaire's shortbread, a crumbly base, sticky caramel and an intense chocolate hit. Given the richness of the caramel (it uses both butter & double cream) you have to be a bit careful with the base (I crossed off one recipe that used 500g of butter) and its best to use a high cocoa dark chocolate for the top (otherwise I think it could get too cloying).

I might have a go at the Dulce version in the future, but to be honest I'm quite happy to go to the trouble of making the caramel & tempering the chocolate.

Treacle tart a la hairy

Yup the hairy bikers do treacle tart to. Its as lot less forbidding than Heston's recipe, taking up  a mere half page of text. The pastry is a lot less rich too. As you can see.

I'm only going to use half that butter, so its a much more standard pastry making procedure, cold hands cubed butter, 15 mins rubbing in. We also get to skip the fridge hokey-cokey that the tart bases required in the perfection recipe. In fact its even suggested you make the filling first to give it time to soak into the breadcrumbs properly.

The pastry came together ok, but didn't fill the house with the wonderful scents from the perfection pastry, but then it didn't cramp my hands & lurk in the fridge either. Also when the hairies say enough for a treacle tart to serve 6, they are much closer than Heston's mass catering effort. My friends & neighbours won't be pleased though. I was planning on leaving the golden syrup unaged, till I found the tin on the back of the shelf which had aged quite nicely on its own, in fact it had aged enough to separate. That's an easy thing to take care of, just heat the syrup & stir. Heating the syrup is usually wise anyway coaxing a full tin of cold syrup out into a bowl is a real chore. Remember to loosen the lid though or you'll have to duck.

The internet solved the breadcrumb problem quite neatly. Behold the mini-chop. Whilst my kitchen is in need of the TLC only a partial rebuild can supply this is very useful, taking up very little space and being on hand for choppy jobs at a moments notice. I expect as we head toward the warmer time of the year it'll be pressed in to making curry  pastes and the like.
The filling was really simple, using a bit of lemon zest, rather than buerre nuisette from last time. The whole lot went into one blind baked case and into a slow oven for half an hour.
Onward to the bit you've been waiting for.

As you can see the filling is denser & deeper than the perfection tart. The pastry is probably a little better made than the perfection pastry, but that might just be the fact its a more standard short crust. What you can't tell is that it's no where near as fragrant as the perfection tart. It tastes like treacle tart, good treacle tart. Unfortunately it can't really measure up to the gold standard that Heston sets. That said this is pretty easy to make, and not much more than 2-3 pounds worth of ingredients. The perfection tart costs more to make and requires a much larger time investment, but the results are worth while. Keep this one for quick entertaining (or cynically guests you are less fond of) and break out the perfection tart when you have prep time and really want to impress

Fudge 2

I grabbed the internet and had a search for peanut butter fudge. Most of the recipes seemed to use marshmallow or the microwave, neither of which were solutions I was interested in.

Time for Harold McGee. As suspected he had a whole chapter about sweets and in it was a nice bit of theory about fudges & fondants. This made me think a straight forward substitution of peanut butter for butter would work, a little more thinking led me to the conclusion a mixture of the 2 would be better, so half & half it was.

Next time it'll be 75% butter 25% peanut butter. There was one big problem, peanut butter doesn't lubricate as well as actual butter & one small problem, the end product is very rich indeed.Still people are enjoying it so not a complete disaster.

Fudge

  I guess most reasonable people are fond of fudge. Its been my culinary bête noir for some time. Every attempt I've made has resulted in some semi-inedible beige sludge. However I saw a cheap digital cooking thermometer the other day, and instantly bought it (C'mon "meat probe" who'd pass that up ?). I've used the soft/hard ball/crack system succesful for treacle toffee (though my gran taught me how to make that) and cinder toffee (Again, pouring soda into boiling sugar what's not to like ?).

The recipe I found was for a butter & milk fudge, with a half carton of double cream getting ever closer to the end of its life I went for the richer option of 1/3rd cream 2/3rds milk. Also because of my previous fudge failings I refused to use a real vanila pod and went with essance.

It turned out as fudge, in colour and in texture which is apretty good start.You'll notice I'm not mentioning flavour in that list, because that's the weakpoint of this fudge. The fudge tastes more custardy than fudgey, not in an unpleasant way but not the rich fudge flavour I like.

Anyway its been a hit with various friends and volunteers, so they've asked about more (Especially with christmas looming). So I'm looking at richer recipes (maple syrup & real vanilla next time)