Lemon Fairy Cakes and Chocolate & Fresh Mint Tart

It's time to catch up on a couple of things from last weekend. We had friends staying with us, and those friends like to eat (no judgement - so do we!) but as always, preparation time was short. Obviously I made proper meals with chicken and vegetables, all nutritionally balanced - I will post about the Moroccan Baked Chicken with Chickpeas and Brown Rice another time - but what was also required was snacks and sweet things. I decided that fairy cakes make a good snack as they cook so quickly and therefore don't occupy my oven for very long, which is important when it is 7pm on a Friday night and you need to get a whole dinner in there. I also really like these fairy cakes as they are like the ones my grandma used to make - I really remember picking the delicious lemon icing off and eating them in tiny bites.

Lemon Fairy Cakes
(makes about 20)

Cakes:
4oz butter/margarine
6oz caster sugar
6oz self raising flour
Grated zest of 1 lemon
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons cold water
Pinch of salt

Icing:
Juice of one lemon
Approx 6oz icing sugar, sifted

Beat all the cake ingredients together and spoon into fairy cake cases (I put my cases inside fairy cake tins, to help them hold their shape). Cook for about 15 minutes on 160 or your normal baking temperature. They are done when you can stick a fork into the centre cake and it comes out clean, and they should be spongy to the touch and lightly golden.

When they are cool, put the lemon juice in a bowl and rest a sieve on top of it. Push the icing sugar through it, stopping every now and then to stir the mixture, so that you can see when you are at the desired thickness (this is quite thick, nearly opaque, so that it is spoonable but not too liquidy) - it is impossible to be more precise because of course each lemon will yield a different amount of juice. Spoon this icing onto your cakes, leave to set.


For dessert on Saturday, I made a chocolate tart. As we were having meat for lunch (cf rules of keeping Kosher), the dessert needed to be non-dairy. I used a recipe I had from a chocolate tasting class at Maison du Chocolat for the chocolate ganache, but the quantities in that recipe were somewhat imprecise, so it was really improvisation.

Chocolate and Fresh Mint Tart
(in approx 20cm diameter pie dish)

Pastry:
2oz hard tomor/other hard fat
4oz plain flour
1 egg
0.5oz caster sugar
A dash of water

Filling:
500ml soy cream (I imagine it is the same amount of real cream (single cream) if you prefer the dairy version)
200g dark chocolate - I used Lindt 70% (I should probably take out shares in Lindt, I use it so much)
Handful of fresh mint leaves (easier if you use stalks with leaves, as you have to remove them later)

Begin by mixing all of the pastry ingredients together. If it is too soft, leave it to chill in the fridge first, and then roll it out. I like to put a piece of clingfilm down on the surface, sprinkle with a little flour and roll it on that. Then you can pick the pastry up all in one piece, fit it into the pie dish and peel off the clingfilm with no mess or breaking pastry. Put a piece of baking parchment on the surface of the pastry and use baking beads or something else to weigh it down for cooking. Bake the empty pie case at 160 or your normal baking temperature for 30-40 minutes or until it is golden and hard.

When it is cooled, prepare the filling. Break the chocolate into small pieces and put it in a large bowl. Then put the cream into a saucepan with the fresh mint and bring to the boil. When it is boiling, remove the mint leaves (you may need to sieve this, or just take them out with a spoon), and then pour it over the chocolate in the bowl. Leave to stand for 30 seconds, and then stir - the chocolate will melt into the cream this way. When you have a thick, smooth chocolate cream, simply pour it into the tart case and you're done.

Pesto Pasta Sunday

I had a lovely relaxing weekend - friends over for dinner on Friday night, more friends for lunch on Saturday, another one over on Saturday night, and then a really chilled Sunday - a bit of cooking, a friend's barbecue, watching a film.. and all to the sounds of Nigel Kennedy's violin practice coming from his house next door. It was lovely on Saturday but actually by Sunday we were a bit, "enough now, Nige" and wondering whether, if we complained, he would be given an asbo for disturbing the neighbours.

On Sunday we had one of our two traditional Sunday lunches - these are not very "traditional" in the British sense since one is egg and chips (I have scrambled eggs with fried onions, Blondini has an onion omelette or 2 fried eggs), and the other is pasta with pesto, but they are yum! We started this when we were watching the West Wing from start to finish - we liked to make our lunch and sit with it in front of as many episodes of the Wing as we could get through, and we've continued the tradition despite sadly finishing the whole thing a few weeks ago.

We had pasta this week because we wanted something really fast (no waiting for chips to cook) - I toasted a handful of pine nuts in a dry frying pan, together with a fat clove of garlic until they had turned brown, and then I added these to the food processor with a large handful of basil, some olive oil and some sea salt. I whizzed it up, put the fresh pasta in the saucepan and boiled it, and then, literally 3 minutes later, served our delicious lunch. We both hate cheese in almost all its forms but I imagine that if you like cheese you'd like some added to this dish.

Later on, while Blondini was working, I decided to make some brownies. This was really for two reasons: one, because I wanted to test out a recipe, since I have never made amazing brownies and I wanted to make some that were like the best brownies I have ever tasted, which are to be found at the Firehook Bakery in Washington DC. Two, because my grandma bought me a silicon baking tray/dish thing that wobbled a lot and I wanted to see how well it would work.
I made the recipe from the Green and Blacks chocolate cookery book, modified slightly to make a smaller quantity and decreasing the sugar content because I couldn't understand why it required so much. This excess of sugar thing is actually a common theme in many chocolate recipes - surely if the recipe contains a large amount of chocolate, it doesn't need very much sugar because chocolate is already sweetened to just the right level of sweetness and any more just makes it sickly.

My version of the recipe was -

180g dark chocolate (I used Lindt 70%)
180g unsalted butter
120g plain flour
1 teasp vanilla essence
3 eggs
100g sugar

Melt the chocolate and butter in a bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. Meanwhile, beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla, and when the chocolate and butter is melted and cooled slightly, add to the egg/sugar mix and beat together. Sift the flour and salt together into the mix, beat, and then pour into a baking tray (which for my recipe was about 20cm x 25cm and about 10cm deep). My tray didn't require lining or greasing (the beauty of silicon) but a traditional one should probably be lined with baking parchment.

Cook at 160 (or normal baking temperature for your oven) for around 20-25 minutes, until the top is forming a crust that flakes when touched. They should be gooey inside (but not uncooked) and it is fine to take them out too early and then put them back in again if not cooked enough. Leave to cool for about 15 minutes in the tin and then cut into squares and remove.

The Apprentice Final

Five of my best girls came over last night for the Apprentice final (that's wot i'm talkin' abou') so I made us a quick and delicious dinner: open-roasted sea bass, new potatoes and broccoli. Broccoli is something that I've tried for a long time to like - I've always thought it was vile and have long agreed with that Simpsons bit - Dr Hibbert pulls broccoli from Homer's corpse and says, "another broccoli-related death" and Marge says, "but I thought broccoli was healthy" and Dr Hibbert says, "one of the deadliest plants alive. It tries to warn you with its terrible taste." The Simpsons aside, I know that it is very healthy and also it is Blondini's favourite vegetable so I wanted to make more effort to like it. My mum suggested stir frying it with a tiny bit of olive oil (or olive oil spray), crushed garlic, chili and salt, using tenderstem broccoli (the long thin one, not the nasty one that looks like a revolting tree) and it's actually really good. As in, not just edible, but excellent.

For the seabass, I got the fish guy (he's really not a fishmonger - he just wears the fish hat and stands at the fish counter but he can't distinguish between plaice and salmon) to scale and gut the fish but leave the heads on, and then at home I just rinsed them, slashed their sides with 3 or 4 cuts, laid them out on a tray, stuffed their slashes with fresh rosemary and drizzled olive oil and sprinkled sea salt over them. They roast just like that for about 30 minutes, and meanwhile I had a big tray of baby new potatoes with olive oil, salt and Provencal herbs roasting beautifully in the bottom of the oven.



That was all very nice but since it wasn't really a very cooking-ish night I will also write about the Chocolate Nemesis I made on the weekend, since I am not likely to make it again for another year. It's delicious, but.. well, when you see the ingredients you'll see why. Quickly googling this recipe has revealed that this is apparently notoriously difficult to make. I have always had success with the following recipe - the original but with my own hints and tips! I think in this recipe more than any other you really need to follow all the instructions to the letter.


Chocolate Nemesis (from the River Cafe Cookbook - I have halved the recipe because I cannot think of any occasion when you would need the big one - it is so rich that you would only eat a tiny slice anyway. This halved version would probably serve about 20 people)

12oz dark chocolate (I used Lindt 70% - I recommend using the best chocolate you can find because that is what you taste)
5 eggs
1/2 lb unsalted butter
9 oz caster sugar (this is the one area of the recipe where I think you can deviate - I think this is too much sugar and I use less)
8fl oz water

Start by heating the water with 2/3 of the sugar in a saucepan, and simmer until it dissolves into a syrup (I recommend using a sugar thermometer to make sure you have this right - on a sugar thermometer the temperature needs to get to, I think, 110° C or 230° F.) When it reaches this point, take it off the heat and add the chocolate and butter cut up into small bits. Stir to melt and leave it to cool - it will be a thick glossy chocolatey sauce.

Then put all the eggs, not separated, into a bowl with 1/3 (or less) of the sugar and now you need to use electric beaters (the best would be if it was in a KitchenAid or Kenwood mixer) for 10 minutes. The eggs need to quadruple in volume - this will happen before 10 minutes are up but beat for precisely 10 minutes. Then pour the chocolate into the egg mix, scrape all the sides down with a spatula, and mix for 10 seconds. I expect this will not be quite enough, so mix for another 10 seconds, but really try not to mix any more than that. Use a round tin - mine is an ancient loose-bottomed tin, around 8 inches diameter - grease it, and if it is a loose-bottomed one like mine, wrap the bottom of it in foil, covering most of the outside of the tin. Pour the mixture into the tin, and then place the tin into a deep tray (like a roasting tin). Pour boiling water into this tin and put the whole thing into the oven, cooking for about 30 mins on whatever your normal baking temperature is (mine in my electric fan oven is 160°)

Take it out the oven and out of the bain marie, and leave to cool and set in the tin, and then refrigerate. Remove from the tin when you are ready to serve - I like to dust it with icing sugar.