Bit of a tart... au chocolat

I've been asked to cater for my drama group's murder mystery night (a paltry hundred or so!), and this is one of the desserts i've chosen to do - pretty straightforward, can be prepped in advance and always goes down very well!  It's adapted from one I found on the BBC Good Food site, with a few additions... and to a friend of mine, this is what you missed the other night!

This can be served warm straight from the oven, but i actually quite like it as a chilled dessert - though i also like it with ginger and vanilla ice-cream which is a bit random i guess!  Hot or cold, the inside is nice and gooey and there's a few different textures in there.

Recipe (for about eight tarts)

About 500g sweet pastry - I use Richard Bertinet's recipe
1 bar of Green and Blacks 70% plain chocolate, of which about 2/3rds melted
50g plain flour

4 eggs
75g butter
100g caster sugar
4-5 pieces of crystallised ginger
Ginger and vanilla ice cream to serve
(you will also need fluted metal pastry cases and baking beans)

Roll out pastry til about 3mm thick and cut to make 12cm fluted pastry cases (leave extra overhanging as the pastry will shrink slightly as it cooks).  Bake these blind on about 170 degrees for about 10 mins until just golden.  Leave to cool for a few minutes, then trim the cases to fit the fluting of your cases so they're nice and neat (you can also east the of-cuts which are lovely!!).

Whisk the eggs, flour, sugar and butter together, then add about 2/3rds of the melted chocolate. Reserve the rest of the chocolate, keeping it melted.  Whisk the mixture together, then fill each case about 4/5ths full.  Bake these for 6-7 minutes until the top is slightly firm. Leave to cool slightly, then level each one off topping it up with rest of the melted chocolate (add more if you need to...).

Finely chop the ginger, into small square 1mm thick, then place decoratively on top and grate over some more chocolate.  You can either serve them now while still warm and the chocolate is largely melted, or chill for a couple of hours and serve it cold.  In either case, serve with a quenelle of the ice cream.

A wee bit o' culture... Burns Night

In an effort to relieve the long, dark, January days, I decided to liven things up by inviting some peeps round for a Burns Night.  Now, there was only one Scot in attendance (not me, despite the occasional accent drift when speaking to colleagues from glesca), and we totally failed read any Rabbie Burns, but that wasn't really the point.  It was a chance to introduce a few people to the Chieftain of the Pudding Race - the Haggis.

The thought of Haggis can be off-putting for many (one of the guests is still refusing to be told what's in it...) and some Haggis can be very bad...  but good haggis is fantastic - there's something visceral and rich about it, bloody goergeous.  So i took no chances and ordered it down from north of the border.   Found a great and really helpful online butchers - McLays of Glasgow - who shipped me down a couple of their finest.  It was served traditionally with neaps (usally turnip, but couldn't get any, so had to improv with parsnip and swede mashed together), tatties - creamy mashed potato - and an onion gravy helped along with some herbs and wee nip of Single Malt.

The main course was very simple to do - prepped in advance so i could be a bit more sociable when my guests arrived, and the Haggis simmered in it's 'cook-in bag' for an hour or so. Of the two i ordered, the general consensus, even among the Haggis virgins, was that the Warrior (apparently a more traditional, but smaller one) was the more flavoursome one - more highly peppered and richer, though the Sma' Chief was also rather good.

Aftermath...  note the mostly

empty bottle of Jura...

For starter i served a potato and smoked (scots) salmon on a slice of (scots) black pudding, with a white wine, dill and cream sauce. The rosti was baked slowly in the oven for about an hour, with some cheese grated over the top, then i cut rounds out to the same size as the black pudding and served it as a stack with the sauce over the top.  Wasn't a huge starter, but went down rather well - a prelude to the main event.

Dessert, was also relatively light.  At christmas I nabbed a Richard Corrigan Great British Menu recipe for an Irish Whisky vanilla ice cream (that time served with his Christmas Pud souffle). This time I Ben and Jerry-ised it, stirring in some crumbled up shortbread just before it went in the freezer.  This was served in a sandwich of two pancakes and topped with another nob of icecream, and a citrus and whisky syrup with some grated chocolate over the top.  Which took precisely two minutes for everyone to scoff down!

More cookies

Ah almost there now on the great biscuit adventure... this is the penultimate - I need to experiment slightly with the last one, so will have to wait til the weekend. Anyway, these are Larkhay Biscuits (aka custard biscuits, for reasons which will become apparent...).  It's very simple and takes about 30mins from start to finish.

If i remember rightly, this recipe was one that came from mum's time cooking school dinners, but don't let that put you off!  It is a classic, and the resulting biscuits are light, with a lovely creamy flavour. An optional extra is to dip or drizzle them in milk chocolate once they've cooled... but they are quite rich anyway.


Recipe
3oz icing sugar
6oz baking margarine
5oz plain flour
2oz (or one Bird's sachet, which is slightly more but not by much) custard powder

Method
Cream together the marg and sugar  - if you're doing it in a mixer, use the cover or drape a tea towel over it, cos the icing sugar will get very dusty and you'll like you're playing with dry ice!!  Add in the other ingredients and mix well, then turn out onto a floured surface, knead lightly into a firm dough and then form into a long sausage about 1.5" girth...

Slice the sausage into equal portions about 1.5cm thick, and spread out onto a couple of baking trays, leaving plenty of space around them - they will double in size. With a lightly floured fork, gently press the back of the fork twice on one side of each biscuit, then on the opposite (so the tines appear interlock like fingers), giving a nice pattern on the top.  Bake at 160 degrees for about 15 mins until golden, then remove and leave for about 10 mins before transferring on to a cool rack.

Rather remiss

Yet again, it appears to be over a month since i've posted anything... where does the time go!? New Years resolution... post more regularly... Anyway, thought it time to live up to my promise and post another one of mum's biscuit recipes.

Easter biscuits were a firm favourite when i was a kid, and given the presence of creme eggs everywhere already, I figured it was almost seasonal already! This is, again, a very simple recipe. The only amendment i've made is that the margarine must be baking marg... i made the schoolboy error of using clover for my last batch and had to dump in a load of extra flour as the dough was stupidly wet when i tried to work it. Anyway, aside from that...:

Recipe (again in imperial...) 
3oz baking margarine
4oz caster sugar
6oz self-raising flour
1 egg yolk
2.5oz dried fruit - raisins and sultanas, but also cranberries work well
1 tbsp milk
1 tsp mixed spices


Method
Cream the marge and sugar together until smooth, then beat in the egg yolk. Add the flour, and mix, then the dried fruit, and spice.

Lastly add the milk - not too much, just enough to make a pliable dough. Ideally, the dryer the better as the biscuits will keep for longer too.

 Roll the dough out to about 1/4" and cut into 2" rounds. Bake for about 20 mins at 160 degrees. Again, leave plenty of room on the tray between each biscuit, and don't move them off the tray for five mins after they've come out of the oven, as they'll break up.

Try not to eat too many...