Hazelnut Meringue with Apricot Filling

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Ah lovely background with mini - accordian and pack of fags!

Ingredients
6 egg white
12oz caster sugar
4 oz ground hazelnuts
6oz dried apricots soaked overnight in water
1 inch of cinnamon
Juice of two oranges
2 inch piece of orange rind
2 tablespoons of brown sugar
500 ml single or double cream
Extra hazelnuts for decorating - I used 18 - that was 1 oz!
3 cake tins - lightly oiled and lined with parchment on the bottom.

I started out by toasting the hazelnuts until golden - toast a few extra as you’ll eat a few. Pop them out of their skins and roughly blend them in a  blender, not forgetting to keep a few extra whole over to decorate the top of the dessert when done.

Separate out your eggs - being super careful not to allow any yolk in - otherwise your meringue will fail miserably. Also worth washing your utensils just before starting the meringue - as any dirt or grease could affect the fluffiness of your egg whites- leaving you with one flat meringue.

Put the 6 egg whites in a bowl / food processor with whisk attachment - and whisk until  they form soft peaks. Then slowly add in the caster sugar spoon by spoon. The whites should stay smooth and get a little glossy. Then fold in the ground hazelnuts gently with a metal spoon. 

Spoon the mixture into the tins and bake at the middle of the oven for 30 mins at Gas Mark 5.

Now make the apricot filling. Drain the apricots over a bowl. Add 4 tablespoons of the soaking liquid into the pan with the fruit cinnamon, brown sugar, orange peel and juice. Bring to a gentle simmer and let it bubble away for about 20 minutes until the apricots are breaking apart. Add more of the soaking liquid if it appears to be getting too dry..

Remove the meringues from the oven - they should have a light brown tinge. Leave to cool in the tins for 15 mins before turning them out onto a wrack to cool fully. Just before serving assemble the meringue - put one meringue with half of the apricot mixture and a third of the whipped cream. then another meringue followed by the rest of the apricot filling, more cream, meringue and then the rest of the cream and a few toasted hazelnuts. This dessert is pretty sweet - so if you prefer a less sugary dessert - I recommend you try something else - but for sugar junkies - this will be a tasty hit!

Pancake Dinner Extravaganza

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Course 1 - Potato Blinis with Smoked Salmon

So as pancake day approached we started to think of what we would make to mark this most singularly culinary celebration. If Christmas was changed to roast turkey day, and Halloween was barn brack day, when instead of going trick or treating/giving presents everyone would be at home making cakes/turkey. It will soon be national fish and chips day too - well in May! 

We thought we’d like to bring a random group of people together in our house, for a feast of pancakes. So we put an invite up on our own facebook, and within 15 minutes we’d reached our quota for the dinner.

We decided on a menu that encompassed a different type of pancake for each course
Starters were smoked salmon blinis
Main course was pancake cannelloni with bolognaise sauce
and ricotta and leek cannelloni with tomato sauce for the veggies
Dessert was Crepe Suzette - kaboom!

Smoked  Salmon and Potato Blinis

Ingredients

6 boiled potatoes
2 eggs
1/2 pint of milk 
about 2 tbsps four
creme fraiche (or cream cheese)
smoked salmon
chives 

The potato blinis were made by mashing about 6 boiled potatoes and combining this with 2 eggs, about 1/2 pint of milk and about 2 tbsps four. I just added things until I got the right consistency- very instinctive of me but not so good for blogging recipes! The batter should be thick in consistency, like whipped cream. I cooked them by getting a heavy frying pan really hot, smearing on some butter with a wadded up paper towel, and putting a tablespoon on the mixture at a time in the pan. I could do about 8 at a time. Cook on one side for about 3 or 4 mins, until golden brown and then flip. 

We served with creme fraiche and smoked salmon but you could top with anything- I was thinking cream cheese would be nice with roasted tomatoes. 

Recipes for pancake cannelloni and crepe suzette to follow before Easter I promise!

Steamed Treacle Pudding

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Quicker than your normal Christmas pudding

Lola and Me and our housemate Sarah decided to have an Christmas dinner before we all go our separate ways for the break. We took a course each and I got pudding - I'd been wanting to make this for a while now - so any excuse and a pudding is a pudding at Christmas time

Serves 10

6oz unsalted butter - room temperature
4 tablespoons of golden syrup
1 orange - zest and juice
6 oz soft brown sugar
3 eggs - beaten together
1 tsp black black treacle
6 oz self raising flour

Butter your pudding basin - I got a 3 litre one - but it would fit into a two litre one. Combine the golden syrup and orange juice and zest - add it to the greased basin.

In a bowl beat together sugar and butter. Then slowly add the beaten eggs and combine well together. Next add in the black treacle - and combine well. Sieve in your flour , mixing all the time. Spoon the mixture gently into the basin.

Cover the basin with the fitted lid - or cover with greaseproof paper and then cover with tin foil - with a crease down the centre - secure with some string. Place in a large saucepan - with boiling water halfway up the sides of the basin. Cover and simmer for two hours. Check regularly to make sure it doesn't boil dry.

When ready - remove lid - place a clean plate on top and then gently turnover - as there will be a nice amount of treacly orange syrup flying around - Lola's phone loved it - sorry honey! Serve with custard - or pouring/whipped cream - which ever you like. I quite like cold custard to contrast with the hot sweat steamy pudding. It looks pretty impressive on the plate too! Serve with custard or cream - enjoy!

This dessert really went down a treat.

Pie Off!!

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Food blogging friends
We got invited by Aoife from I Can Has Cook to enter a pie into the first annual pie-off, so I gladly accepted. I have been reading Aoifes blog for a good while now, by entering this competition I would be meeting her face to face - ha ha! Then we realised we’d already met a few years ago anyway, but that’s another story.

Lola and I thought long and hard over our pie choices, many pies were discussed at length, so thanks guys for indulging our endless food talk. We weighed up our options carefully, considered some bad and good pie puns.

We did make a great Beef and Guinness pie back in July, but we thought we’d need to push the boat out and go a little extra special for this one.

As I undertook the shopping I imagined a master chef style judging -’now this is a big disappointment guys.... hmm awfully bland....’ The pressure was on.
We chose a classic game pie, which we named

Granny Speed on the Game Pie
Now the story behind this was I borrowed a ceramic blackbird from my mum - which you ‘ bake in the middle of the pie’ and it holds the pastry above the filling preventing sogginess and also housing the vent to let out the steam.


This little birdy belonged to my great grandmother whose surname was Speed - get it!
Anyways the ingredients for the pie were sourced from Moore Street and also from Fallon and Byrne. We decided to cook the filing the night before so that the flavours could rest over night and develop properly.


So I wobbled home on Friday after a few Friday pints of Guinness and Rayne prob did most of the work - but I assisted. She even filleted two saddles of rabbit - hats off!Less rambling - More recipe

Ingredients
1/2lb of rabbit - filleted and chopped into 2/3 cm cubes
1/2 lb of pheasant, chopped into 2/3 cm cubes
1/2 pound of venison flank cubed
4 oz of streaky bacon - de-rinded and diced
2 red onions
2 cloves of garlic crushed
1/2 pint of wine
1 oz of plain flour4oz of shitake mushrooms
4oz of button mushrooms
1 bay leaf
a tablespoon of red currant jelly
Seasoning
1/2 pint of chicken stock
Zest and juice of one orange
Puff pastry (bought not homemade - sorry!)

With a little oil - fry off the pheasant and rabbit in batches in your pan to brown on each side. Dont brown your venison as apparently this makes it very tough. Set aside.

Cook your onion for a minute then add in the garlic and bacon - after about 2/3 mins add in the mushrooms. Fry until the onion is transparent and the bacon getting nicely cooked - but not too brown. Stir in the flour and cook for a few seconds before adding in the browned meat, unbrowned venison, wine, stock, bay leaf, orange juice, zest and jelly.

Mix well, bring to the boil and then lower to a gentle simmer. Cover and cook for about an hour and twenty mins. Allow to cool, before refrigerating overnight.

Next day - pop your mixture into a high sided pie dish, around your little birdy. Then cut your pastry to be a lot wider than your dish, as it will puff and shrink. Drape t over your pie dish - and cut a hole for the steam to escape. Brush with some beaten egg. Cook at Gas Mark 6 for 2o mins and then turn down to gas mark 5 for a further 30 mins or so - till golden and delicious on top and bubbly underneath.

The mixture when heated in the oven gets a lot more liquidy so don’t worry if your cold mixture appears a little thick.

The pie-off was a great idea for a fun night. All pies were marked on taste - creativity and presentation. The total scores were added together to determine the winner. We cooked the pies in rotation and then everyone had a little taste then - then a little taste of the next pie - - so nobody got stuffed but everybody was well fed.

Aoife created a shepherds pie with minced venison and juniper berries, which was the tastiest shepherd pie I’ve ever eaten.Darragh created a sumptuous Moroccan lamb pie with toasted cumin seeds rolled into the pastry - a fantastic idea! Nice big lumps of carrot in there too. He added in some 'ras al-hanout' which I've never heard of, so I bet this was the secret ingredient.

Cheese Fondue

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Cheesy 80's Party

We haven’t thrown a party in a while now, so we combined it with our love of cheese and our love of the 80’s. Perfect.
Matthew's Cheese Cellar on Baggot Street is an amazing place for any cheese fan, highly recommended as the palace of cheese, with silver finishing, red carpet and the largest range of cheeses this side of the Brittany

½ block of Edam Cheese (about 500g)
500g of Raclette Cheese
1 box of white wine
1 clove of garlic - skinned cut in half
Juice of 1/2 a lemon Grate all the cheese. Rub the cut side of the garlic all over the inside of the pan and discard - or use for salad dressing. Fill with about two glasses of wine - and heat the wine. Try not to let it boil.

When it's close to boiling, add in a handful of cheese. Stir well until it's smooth and lump free. Repeat a handful at a time, until you've Incorporated all the cheeese. Mine grew a bit thick so I added in more wine as I went, small amounts so that they combine easily. Add the lemon juice to cut through all that richness. Allow to reach a simmer and leave for two minutes.Then serve, it's just that easy and far more decadent that I had expected. As dipping material we used small bite size pieces of ciabatta, cooked sausages, mortadella, other cooked sausages, steamed cauliflower and broccoli florets and then more French bread. I was expecting this to be wonderful as I am a huge fan of cheese, but it surpassed even my cheesiest dreams - oooooh baby! Just after we took this photo - another few people arrived and the whole pot was gone in less then 10 minutes, next time I'll make seconds I promise. We invited all our friends to bring some 80's food with them, Pam made some great little vol-o-vents, filled with creamy chicken, bacon & mushroom. Thanks Pam Also produced were in no particular order, Angel Delight, After 8's, Refreshers, Galtee Cheese, Ritz crackers, Ritz the 'perry', West Coast Cooler (mmmmm) Black Forest Gateaux, Cheese & Pineapple Hedgehogs, Tayto crisps, the richest chocolate cake ever - Thanks Guys


Then it just turned into a party-job done!