Lemon & Lime Syllabub

Well now doesn't that look tasty! And the best thing about it is how satisfyingly easy it is to concoct. Not strictly speaking baking, but it falls in the dessert category for sure.

Serves 4 greedy people or 6-7 people that've just had a rather large meal (and aren't greedy).

Ingredients:
500ml double cream
1 lemon
1 lime
75g icing sugar
handful of gingernut biscuits

Method
1. Pour the cream into a deep bowl. Grate in the zest of the lemon and lime, being careful not to grate in the pith. Juice your lemon and lime and strain out any pips. Pour the juice into the bowl.

2. Sieve in your icing sugar. Whisk until the syllabub is just forming stiff peaks. Taste it at this stage - you want enough acidity to cut through the richness of the cream. Adjust with more juice or more icing sugar as necessary.

3. Roughly crush one gingernut biscuit (or two if, like my housemate, you like the extra crunch) into the bottom of a wine glass, or a dessert glass or similar. Whatever you've got that looks good!

4. Spoon your mixture into the serving glasses, on top of the crushed biscuit - take care not to get too much down the sides.

5. Using the finest side of your grater, grate some gingernut biscuit over the top. Serve!

I've tinkered with the photo below so you can get an idea of how much of a dusting of biscuit you're aiming for. Scroll down to see my tips and variations - do let me know if you try any of them out for yourselves.


Tips and variations
- Turn your fruit after two firm grates on one spot - this should help you to avoid grating in any pith.
- If you don't have a reamer or other juicing device, push a fork into your fruit after cutting in half and squeeze the fruit around it to help you get all the juice out.
- I don't recommend getting "extra thick" double cream - it's usually full of unnecessary stabilisers and you're whipping this up anyway.
- Invest in an electric whisk - unless you are using this as your workout.
- Do experiment with a variety of citrus fruits and other suitably crunchy biscuits - in this recipe quantities are far more lenient than in traditional baking.
- Possible variations: orange syllabub and chocolate biscuits could work quite well. You could even try a lime syllabub with passion fruit swirled through and coconut macaroons for the crunch factor.
- Stick some alcohol in it.

rocky road - concocted by my good friend Katie!

Katie's made stunning Rocky Road (recipe here) - it looks so awesomely yum that I wanted to post the pic here - more encouragement for you! She managed to take pictures before eating it - that in itself guarantees extra brownie points...or extra rocky road points?

I'll check on exact nature of rocks and get back to you, but in the meantime let's make your mouth water...


Update: rocks were maltesers, marshmallows and glace cherries

The Gingerbread Men

This one is a quick one, and a bit of a cheat (but not really). My lovely manager at my last job got me a Gingerbread Man making kit for my 'secret' Santa, and making Gingerbread Men suddenly seemed a congruous indoor activity to the outdoor making of snowmen. Does that sentence make any sense?? The snow's gone to my head via my ears.

So anyhoo, here are my little lot.

I wish I'd had some different colours of icing, and maybe some brightly coloured, mini Smarties rather than these 'natural' 'normous ones. Yes, several of them have too many buttons, but this was the best way to cram chocolate bits on top.

Inside the cute box, in the image of a Gingerbread Man, was a packet of dry ingredients (flour, dried egg, bicarb, ground ginger...something else I can't remember), a sachet of golden syrup, a tube of black icing and those slightly odd non-Smarties.

All I had to do was tip out the dry ingredients, rub in 30g of butter 'til it resembled breadcrumbs, squeeze in the syrup, add 2tsps of cold water, squidge together, roll out, and voila: Gingerbread men!

Although this gave satisfying results in the form of baked goods, this didn't feel quite like baking for me - I quite enjoy all the measuring out and a certain amount of judging and concocting. But it was therapeutic nonetheless.

Regrettably, after my Menu For A Snowy Day, I couldn't possibly have fit a Gingerbread Man in my gob for dessert, so I'm going to munch one for breakfast and let you know how it tastes....

Report: hmm, quite tasty actually. Maybe could be a tiny bit more gingery, and perhaps have a little more chew. But it's not a bad biscuit!