Promised Profiteroles

So I haven't made these for a long while, but I did promise the recipe after showing profiteroles having a love-in in the oven!

One reason I haven't made them is that they're very much a birthday or other celebratory item - heaps of cream and piles of chocolate sauce mean it's almost the only time people will throw guilt to the wind and stuff their face with melty, forgiving profiteroles. In fact I often think the choux pastry is an incidental item in the whole setup, to dupe people into thinking they're eating some sort of socially acceptable dessert rather than just...err, chocolate and cream.

Choux pastry might indeed be acting as some sort of cover-up for glorious face-stuffing here, but it does add a certain je ne sais quoi in taste terms, as well as for presentation's sake - it's a lot easier to stack cream and chocolate when there's pastry involved.


To prove how much easier it is than it looks, I will reassure you that this recipe comes from year 8 Home Economics lessons. I don't remember any disasters either!

Ingredients:
Choux pastry
65g plain flour and a pinch of salt
150ml water
50g unsalted butter
2 eggs, lightly beaten

Sauce
175g dark chocolate (preferably at least 40% cocoa solids)
15g unsalted butter
3 tbsp golden syrup

Filling
150ml double cream
1 tbsp icing sugar, sifted

Method
1. Pre-heat the oven to 220C/425F/Gas7 (200C fan oven). Sift the flour and salt on to a sheet of greaseproof paper (or I sometimes sift it on to a baking tray or similar).

2. Heat the water and butter gently in a saucepan until the buttery melts, then bring to a rapid boil.

3. Quickly add all the flour in one go and beat with a wooden spoon until the mixture forms a ball and leaves the sides of the pan.

4. Remove from the heat and transfer the mixture into a clean bowl. Leave it to cool for 10mins (it helps to spread it around so it cools quicker), then very gradually beat or whisk in the eggs - it's best to use an electric whisk if you have one. Important: keep a close eye on your mixture, as you may not need to add all the egg. What you're looking for is a smooth, glossy mixture with a smooth piping consistency.

You'll probably know when it's ready - think of the consistency of....toothpaste! Maybe slightly firmer, but it'll really start to shine at this stage, which is a good indication.

5. Dampen two baking sheets with cold water - filling them and tipping out the water is a good way to do this.

6. Spoon the choux mixture on to baking sheets in about twenty even heaped-teaspoon sized blobs. If you divvy up the mixture as evenly as you can and assess the size, you'll have a frame of reference for next time.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until well risen, golden brown and super-crisp. Do not open the oven for the first ten minutes or so of cooking, otherwise the choux buns will sink.

7. Remove the buns from the oven and transfer to a wire cooling rack. At this stage pierce each bun with the tip of a small, sharp knife to allow steam to escape (stopping them from getting soggy).

Leave to cool completely.

8. For the filling, whip the cream and icing sugar until the mixture holds its shape - you can do all sorts at this stage. Put no icing sugar in at all, put more in, put vanilla extract in, even lemon extract and put lemon curd on top instead of chocolate (I just invented that right now - try it and let me know!).

9. Slice each bun in half, but without cutting right through. You can pipe in the cream filling if you like, but I prefer to use a teaspoon to pile it in. Yum.

10. Arrange the buns in a spectacular pyramid if you so wish, or leave them as individual ones, or however you wish!

11. To make the chocolate sauce, place all the ingredients in a heatproof bowl and microwave on 80% power, 1 minute at a time until more or less melted. Beat until smooth.

12. Cool for 15minutes and pour over buns. Of course at step 11 you could've used white chocolate, or milk chocolate, or made toffee sauce instead, or whatever you like! You can definitely be creative with the presentation. And let's not forget that chocolate eclairs also use choux pastry as their base...


A Profiterole is no Rocky Road, but I like that both items have a similar air of sharing about them and they always feel like a luxurious treat.

While I've been writing this post, I've been mainly listening to Laura Marling and Maximo Park. Music and baking are fine friends.

A nice big slab of rocky road

Well at least, that's how it started out, until it'd been cut into manageable chunks, piled up high, then steadily devoured. Shame to chunk it up, being as it's meant to be a rocky ROAD, but I think about an inch square is enough to enjoy without feeling guilty - so guilt-free that you could have several small chunks.

I used Nigella Lawson's basic recipe and my own assorted chunks - say what you like about the lady, but she certainly knows her rocky road. My adapted recipe is below.

Ingredients:

125 soft unsalted butter

200g milk chocolate, broken into pieces

100g good quality dark chocolate, broken into pieces

3tbsp golden syrup

200g rich tea biscuits

arbitrary amount of:

mini marshmallows

Mars Planets

Maltesers

50g white chocolate to decorate

Method

1. Heat the butter, chocolate and golden syrup in a microwaveable bowl, in said microwave. Keep microwave on 80% power and do 30seconds at a time to avoid burning/over heating chocolate. When melted, scoop out around 125ml of the mixture and set aside.

2. Put the biscuits into a plastic freezer bag and bash with a rolling pin until you have some crumbs and some, er, rocks. Give your other crunchy ingredients a bit of a bashing in the same manner.

3. Fold it all into the mixture, along with any squishy ingredients you might've chosen to use (raisins, glacé cherries, dates etc.)

4. Line a baking tin (approx. 24cm/9in square) with foil and tip in the mixture. Pour over the reserved non-chunky mixture and smooth the top with a spatula.

5. Refrigerate for around two hours, or overnight.

6. To serve, melt your small amount of white chocolate and drizzle over the top however you please. It might need a little re-chilling after this, but the cold rocky road should set it fairly quickly. Cut into squares or fingers or rhombuses or whatever you choose, stack up on a plate, and feed housewarming guests.

Other variations include Nigella's Christmas rocky road, using gingernut biscuits and a higher proportion of dark chocolate for a more 'grown up' feel, adding nuts, only using marshmallows...as you will see if you Google "rocky road recipe", one of the joys of rocky road is that nearly anything goes and proportions are flexible. What could be easier?

The picture above and pictures of empty plates is all I have, so this will have to do, but I can guarantee yours will look tempting, no matter what you bung in.

The getting of job

The getting of job is somewhat problematic, because it requires readjusting to what it's like not having acres of time to yourself.

So, I need to get back to blogging! I've got two weeks off now for the catch-up period, but I must keep up when I go back to work...maybe I should take my laptop and write on the train to work. Plan!

So what you've missed - as well as baking/making of desserts (lemon and lime syllabub, chocolate and banana muffins, blueberry and lemon friands, OTHER), I have also been concocting Christmas gifts with the help of my Marguerite Patten book, The Basic Basics - Jams, Preserves and Chutneys

They call her the "doyenne of British cookery" on that there page, but I believe she was once The Face of the WI.

Anyway, so I also made spiced pickling vinegar for my pickled onions (NB - if you ever make pickled onions, your fingers will smell and look like onion for several days)...and of course the pickled onions, apple and pear chutney, and piccalilli. The latter is the one I'm most looking forward to tasting, because is smelt SO good. My mouth is watering now, but then I do love a pickle.

I've made oodles of rocky road too, though I'm yet to make my housemate's preferred version containing glacé cherries and raisins. Lucky for her it's her birthday this week, so when she's back in London she can have some of that. I'll be interested to see if it tastes as good. My first batch was the best.

So, on to updating...

Honey fudge/ toffee

Another recipe from the River Cottage Family Cookbook but this time, not so foolproof.

This seemed so easy, but despite having my sugar thermometer carefully in hand, I made two batches - one that turned out as fudge-ish, one that turned out as toffee, neither of which were the same colour as in the book...

In fact, I think I nearly burnt the stufff that turned out fudgy. But I don't understand how I did that, and indeed how I got tofee, when according to my thermometer I hadn't even reached 116 degrees Celsius. According to the recipe, that's what I was aiming for and I'd have to get to 200 or so to hit toffee levels, but that's not what happened so...

My reliable fudge-making friend tells me that I overcooked the milk. I suspect I could've done with a deeper pan (so as to be able to do it all in one batch), with a heavier bottom and on a lower, less impatient temperature.

This one definitely requires further experimentation.

I haven't taken pictures of it chopped proper because...well, let's just say it wasn't pretty.

But here it is in a tray.

Delia's iced lemon curd layer cake

Ah cake! This particular one I've made once or twice before, and I recently recreated it as a house-warming gift for two of my lovely friends who have just moved in together for the first time.

It's a great house-warming cake - gooey and filling, yet light and lemony. I can't put my finger on what specifically makes it a cake capable of warming houses and cockles, but ah it does. Maybe it's Delia's magic touch! Except it was my magic touch, because I made it. So there.

I have to say, I never thought it'd be so easy to make lemon curd. I seem to remember that when I made it once before, I accidentally got lumps of egg white in it because the water below the bowl was too hot. So I had to sieve them out and it was a bit of an eggy palaver.

However, it all went smoothly this time...apart from the fact that my all-in-one cakes never seem to rise particularly well. I don't know if it's because of my particular electric whisk or what, but for this cake it doesn't matter too much.

Oh, and in cutting the top layer horizontally in two, I daydreamed a little bit and one side of one layer was very thin, hence the crack across the top (it was too wonky a layer to go precariously in the middle).

This cake is super tasty with the lemon curd freshly spread between the layers, but the next day (or the day after!) the curd will start to absorb into the cake - which is fine. It's still moist, lemony, forgiving cake!

You can find Delia's recipe here - maybe try a lime or lemon and lime version and let me know how it goes!

Profiteroles!

Having a snog in the oven.
A deceptively easy-to-make dessert! And universally taste-bud pleasing.

Perhaps I will make some more of these soon and take you through in a more step-by-step fashion. My trusty recipe is from the days of Home Ec. lessons at secondary school.

Christmassy cupcakes

I made these for a lovely Christmassy gathering last year - along with the sparkly brownies below.

They weren't my best cake ever, but they did look suitably festive!

Beer and cake. What more do you need for Christmas?