Bakewell Tart

I have wanted to make a proper Bakewell tart for years ever since visiting Bakewell and tasting one from a bakery there.  Before this I had always believed them to be the sickly sweet confections from Mr Kipling which consist almost entirely of icing and I am sure that many others hold the same belief as I did.  I finally decided to make one this week because I discovered that, having made previous plans, I am going to miss out on my yearly trip to the Peak District where my family keeps a caravan and therefore miss out on a possibility of going to Bakewell again any time soon.  I thus decided that I would make my own tart just to ensure that I would at least not be missing out on the culinary delights of the trip.



 Ingredients:

• 500g pack of sweet shortcrust pastry
• 175g butter
• 175g caster sugar
• 4 medium eggs
• 175g ground almonds
• 3 tablespoons raspberry jam
• a sprinkling of flaked almonds
• icing sugar to dust

Method:

1.  Preheat the oven to 180 degrees C.
2. Roll out the pastry to about half a centimetre in thickness and place it into a 20cm tart tin (this can be quite difficult as sweet pastry likes to break into pieces, don't worry if this happens, just press it back together again in the tin)
3. Place a piece of baking parchment in the case and fill with baking beans - rice or dried beans work just as well if you don't have any.  Then blind bake the pastry case in the oven for about 15 minutes.
4. Take the parchment and beans out of the tin and bake for another 5-10 minutes or until golden brown
5. Cream the butter and sugar together in a mixing bowl then beat in the eggs.
6. Fold in the ground almonds
7. Spread the raspberry jam evenly over the cooled pastry case
8. Take the almond mixture and spoon it gently over the jam, if you tip it all out in one go it will squish out the jam so that it won't be evenly spread.
9. Dust the tart with icing sugar and sprinkle over the flaked almonds
10. Put back into the oven for about 30 minutes or until golden brown and an inserted skewer comes out clean.

I decided to use ready made pastry for this Bakewell tart just to make it easier for myself but if you are feeling enthusiastic and want to make it entirely from scratch then just look up a recipe for sweet shortcrust pastry and good on you.  If you have never had a real Bakewell tart before then the outcome may surprise you a little bit, it is incredibly moist, almondy and sweet - though not in the Mr Kipling way.  I was very happy with the outcome of my tart, as was everybody else who tried a piece and thought that it tasted exactly like the ones I have eaten in Bakewell. Success.

Tiramisu

The recipe for this tiramisu has come straight off the top of my head and, having never made it before using a recipe, I apologize for it being slightly unconventional.  I made a first attempt at it a couple of weeks ago for a friend who came to stay with me but was not totally happy with the result as, in my opinion, it was a bit too mild and needed more booze to make it taste nicer.  I'm sure that not everybody would agree with me on this but it is my recipe and I will make it the way I like it (and just imagine me sticking my tongue out at the screen as I wrote that because that is what I felt like doing).  I was not planning to make another attempt at the recipe as soon as this but my manager caught me looking miserable at work on Friday after I had been having quite a rough week and made me promise that I would do something fun this weekend.  Making my own recipe for tiramisu may not be exactly what she had in mind for me to do but cooking and then blogging about it really makes me feel better, if I have the time to do it.

This is a very simple recipe, it doesn't even require any cooking so I would recommend it for anyone who is not too confident in the kitchen but wants to make a tasty dessert.  Or for anyone who is confident in the kitchen but just wants to make something simple, after all, just because you are good at cooking, doesn't mean you have to make the most complicated things all the time.

Ingredients:

250g tub of mascarpone

300ml double cream

100g golden caster sugar (though normal caster sugar would be fine too)

100ml Baileys

1 packet of trifle sponges

1 cup strong black coffee (I brewed mine in a cafetiere but you could also use a coffee maker or instant coffee if you really have no other choice)

75ml coffee liqueur such as kahlua or tia maria

dark chocolate for decoration

Method:

• Layer the bottom of a square dish with the trifle sponges and pour the coffee and coffee liqueur over them so that they soak up the liquid
• Put the cream and mascarpone in a large mixing bowl with the sugar and Baileys and whisk with an electric whisk until it is thick, like the consistency of whipped cream.
• Spread the cream mixture evenly over the trifle sponges
• Grate the dark chocolate with the spiky side of the grater to make a sort of chocolate dust on the top of the tiramisu.  Then just stick it in the fridge to cool and it is ready to serve.  Told you it was easy.

I only made this tiramisu with one layer of trifle sponges because I was using quite a wide and shallow dish.  Traditionally they have two layers, the recipe for this would be the same except that you would keep half of the soaked trifle sponges to one side, then put half of the cream mixture on the first layer, then the rest of the sponges, then the other cream layer.

Almond and Raspberry Roulade (gluten free)

This is the first post I have been able to write for a while and there are two main reasons for this; one of them is that I started my first full-time job a few months ago and have found myself either too tired or too busy to blog.  The other reason is a pretty bad illness which I had for most of March during which time I couldn't even eat food, let alone cook it.  Even now, several months on, I am still having effects from this illness and have started eating a wheat free diet.  It was not until I gave up eating wheat that I realised quite how wheat-focused my diet really was and how much of the British diet revolves around wheat.  I really admire people who keep a totally gluten free diet in this country, and especially parents of gluten intolerant children because I have found it so difficult to think of meals, particularly to take to work for lunch; when you have been raised entirely on sandwiches for lunch you really struggle to think of what you could eat other than sandwiches.  Even when I asked my mother, who is a dietitian, what I could eat she just said "Well I always just eat sandwiches".  Very helpful, thanks Mum.

Anyway, what with being busy and tired from work and not being able to eat wheat or very much food at all really since my illness, I lost some of my passion for baking for a while (very sad times).  It was an old friend of mine who inspired me again recently.  I bumped into him when I was visiting another friend and he told me that he had had an inspired idea to make pork and apple doughnuts and was going to be doing it later that day.  I thought this sounded like a strange and fairly horrible thing to cook but was intrigued enough to go round and watch him do it.  In the very first step of the recipe I fell into my accustomed role of kitchen control freak and completely took over the entire operation, I don't think he really minded though, at any rate it got me back into my love of cooking so thank you Ben for letting me cook your doughnuts.  They did actually turn out really well, slow cooked pork with apple sauce and a cider glaze, I tried a little bit and they were actually delicious so any time you are feeling bored and a little bit crazy, pork doughnuts may be the way to go.

So since I am not eating wheat I have decided that I will start baking wheat free cakes, makes sense doesn't it.  I made this Almond and Raspberry Roulade for my Dad on father's day on Sunday as a cake which is not meant to have wheat in it rather than one which is replacing wheat with something else, in an attempt to convince him that wheat is not necessary for a cake to be nice, something which he is finding difficult to accept.  I think I have started to persuade him though since this cake was absolutely delicious.  I got the recipe for it from the Waitrose website but I will summarise it below.

Cooking time: 12 minutes

Ingredients:
100g ground almonds
pinch of salt
5 medium eggs
100g caster sugar
3tbs icing sugar
300ml carton of double cream
250g raspberries
4tbs flaked almonds

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 degrees or gas mark 4.  Grease and line a swiss roll tin and oil slightly.
2. Separate the eggs into two large bowls.  Mix the ground almonds with the salt.  Take 2tbs from the caster sugar and put to one side, add the rest to the egg yolks and mix with an electric whisk until thick enough to leave a trail when you lift the whisk.
3. Wash the whisk, add the 2tbs of caster sugar to the egg whites and whisk until they are thick and glossy.  Quickly fold the almond mixture into the egg yolks and gently fold that into the egg whites.  Pour it all into the tin and smooth it so it is flat and reaches all the edges.  Bake it for 12 minutes in the oven or until it starts to shrink away from the edges.
4. Lay a clean tea towel on a flat surface with a sheet of greaseproof paper on top of it.  Sprinkle with caster sugar and turn out the roulade onto the paper once it is cool enough to handle.  Peel off the paper, trim the edges off the sponge and leave until it is completely cool.
5. Sift the icing sugar into the cream and whisk it until it forms soft peaks.  Stir in half of the raspberries into the cream and spread the mixture over the roulade.  Place some more of the raspberries on, especially along the edges to improve the appearance of the finished roulade, making sure to leave some for decoration at the end.  Finally toast the flaked almonds until they are brown and crisp and sprinkle on the top of the roulade, followed by a sprinkle of icing sugar.

I actually question the last step of the recipe because, when you just sprinkle flaked almonds on top of a roulade, as soon as you cut it into pieces or even just move the plate it is on, all of the almonds fall off.  There must be a way to make them stay on there, I am thinking a thin icing sugar glaze or something, if you have any ideas please do leave a comment.  Apart from that I think this is a great recipe and like the way it is gluten free but without really meaning to be.

Yule Log

The Winter Solstice, also known as Yule, is the shortest day of the year with only about 8 hours of light out of the 24.  I like to acknowledge Yule every year, partly because it is nice to think that after that day it will start being lighter for longer, but also because it has it's own special cake and I will celebrate just about anything if I can make a nice cake for it.  The cake for Winter Solstice is known as a Yule log and I'm sure most people will have heard of it.

Traditionally Yule logs were actual logs which you brought into the house and decorated, then saved until the following year to burn on the fire.  Not many people have log fires any more so it would not make much sense for people to bring real logs into the house.  At some point people started making a chocolate cake in the shape of a log instead of bringing in a real one and this practice has continued.  Chocolate Yule logs are commonly found in shops around Christmas time, though most people do not know their significance and don't even know that Yule is a day in it's own right.  I am the kind of person who does not like to just blindly follow traditions, I like to know the meanings behind the traditions first, otherwise how would I know what I am celebrating?

A Yule log is made in a similar way to a swiss roll, very apt for a representative log since it has the circles inside it which look like the rings in trees.  I don't have a recipe which I use every year, I probably should come up with one, so I just look up one on the internet each time.  This year I used a recipe from the Good Food website, though I did not follow their icing recipe.  Here is a summarised version of the recipe:

Ingredients:
5 eggs
140g light brown sugar
100g S.R. flour
25g cocoa

Equipment:
Swiss roll tin
Baking Parchment
Electric whisk (you can use a normal whisk but it will take much longer)
Chopping board covered in foil

Method:

1. Put the oven on at 190 degrees or gas mark 5 and line your swiss roll tin
2. Separate the eggs, add the sugar and 2tbs of water to the yolks and whisk with the electric whisk until thick and pale.  Then sift in the flour and cocoa and fold it in.
3. Clean the whisk and use it to whip up the egg whites until they are stiff, then fold them into the other mixture, making sure to beat a spoonful in first to loosen it up.
4. Pour the mixture into the tin, spreading it very carefully to the edges, lift the tin up and tilt it to each side so that the mixture is even.
5. Bake in the oven for 10-12 mins or until firm to the touch.
6. Lay out a large piece of baking parchment on the work surface and sprinkle with caster sugar - this will stop the cake from sticking.  When the cake is out of the oven tip it over onto this paper and peel off the lining, cover with a clean tea towel and leave to cool completely.
7. Trim a little cake from each edge and score along one of the long edges, then roll up the cake with the paper, don't take the paper off yet, this is just to keep the cake in shape while you make the icing.

Instead of making ganache which the recipe says to make, I made chocolate buttercream icing, I am not saying that it is better, I just didn't have the ingredients or time to make ganache so I did what was easier for me.  I'm afraid I also don't have a recipe for it since the way I make buttercream is to just add ingredients together until it tastes nice.  I used a few tablespoons of margarine then added icing sugar, cocoa powder and a bit of melted chocolate and just kept adding the icing sugar and cocoa until it was the right flavour, colour and consistency.  After making it I unrolled the cake, spread some icing on it, then rolled it up again, making sure to peel the paper off as I went.  Then I cut some of the cake off and placed the two pieces on a board in the shape I wanted, then spread the rest of the icing over it all.  After this I got a fork and scraped lines into the icing to give it a more log-like look, put a bit of holly on it for decoration and then sprinkled it all with icing sugar.

Et voila, my very own chocolate Yule log.

Chocolate Brownies

I have been meaning to post this recipe for a long time as it is one of my favourite recipes and a friend of mine requested I put it up so that she can make them herself.  I discovered this recipe for chocolate brownies in my first year of university when I became friends with a girl who turned out to be a coeliac.  I am the kind of person who, if I am baking for a group of people, it has to suit everyone's needs/tastes so, even though she said she is used to missing out on cakes and it was fine for me to just make things for everyone else, I was not having any of that and I searched the internet to find a recipe which was both gluten free and delicious.  This is what I came up with;

Ingredients:

75g dark chocolate

100g butter

200g sugar

2 eggs

1tsp vanilla extract

75g ground almonds

1tsp baking powder

100g chopped walnuts

1. Grease and line a 20cm square cake tin and preheat the oven to 180 degrees
2. Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of simmering water then take off the heat
3. Cream the butter and sugar
4. Mix in the eggs, vanilla and chocolate (make sure the chocolate is not too hot because otherwise it will cook the eggs and that would not be nice)
5. Stir in the ground almonds, baking powder and walnuts making sure it is all incorporated
6. Spoon the mixture into the tin and spread out slightly
7. Put in the oven for 30-35 minutes
8. Leave to cool completely before taking out of the tin and cutting up into squares

This recipe makes about 16 brownies

These brownies are deliciously gooey and chocolatey with a crisp top and slight crunch of the walnuts, if you don't like walnuts feel free to not include them, I just think they add an extra something to the mix.  They may be gluten free but personally I think they are even better than glutenous ones which is a fairly unusual occurrence, since a lot of gluten free options are not exactly amazing.  I think these ones work well because they use ground almonds instead of a substitute flour - I find I can't get on with gluten free flour.

Swiss Roll

For the second of my Home made vs. Shop bought series I decided to make a swiss roll, for no reason other than that my mum said in passing that she really fancied one and I thought 'I have never made one of those before, it could be interesting.'  Well, I also thought that, since I have made a yule log and a chocolate roulade before, it would be similar and therefore not too hard, I should really decide on things which will test my skills and be a bit more challenging.  Maybe next time.  Saying that though, I had to make two swiss rolls this morning because the first one, following a recipe from the BBC Good Food website, was a total disaster, I could not even bring myself to taste a bit, it looked that horrible, I also didn't want to disgust you by putting up a photo of it so I will describe what happened instead.  The recipe was not very explanatory and did not explain how much whisking of the eggs was required and, seeing as the recipe had self-raising flour in it, I did not think that the eggs needed to be the main source of the volume of the cake, this is where it went wrong.  Cooking with no air already in it the cake did not rise and, when I took it out of the oven, was just a flat, rubbery oblong which smelled of eggs, it was a bit like a big, rectangular pancake but more eggy.

After this culinary disaster I decided to go back to my dear friend the Good Housekeeping cookery book  which has never led me astray.  I was slightly concerned about this recipe because it involved whisking the egg mixture over a pan of hot water but, when I had done it with no trouble, I realised that I was worried over nothing.  This is a summarized version of that recipe:

Ingredients:

125g caster sugar

125g plain flour

3 eggs

125g jam

1.  Grease and line a 33x23cm swiss roll tin, grease the paper and dust with flour and sugar
2. Put the eggs and sugar into a large heatproof bowl and whisk over a pan of hot water until thick enough to leave a trail when the whisk is lifted, then remove from the pan and whisk until cool and thick.
3. Sift in and fold in the flour with a metal spoon then fold in 1 tablespoon of hot water
4. Pour into the prepared tin and tilt it backwards and forwards to spread it evenly.  Bake at 200 degrees or gas mark 6 for 10-12 minutes or until cooked.
5. Place a sheet of greaseproof paper on a work surface and dredge with sugar.  When the cake is cooked tip it onto this, peel off the lining and trim off the edges of the cake.
6. Warm the jam in the microwave for about 20 seconds to make it easier to spread.  Spread it evenly onto the cake.
7. Roll up the cake, starting from a short end, using the greaseproof paper to help you

This is a picture of how my swiss roll turned out, using this recipe:

The swiss roll I bought to compare to my homemade one was a tesco own brand one.  I would have bought a slightly better quality one but I wanted one with only jam inside and, at short notice, this is the only one I could find:

As you can see from the photo, the texture of the two cakes is very different; the home made one has a much lighter, airier texture while the shop bought one was quite dense and dry.  There is a very noticeable difference in quality between the two.  As well as the texture being much nicer in the home made cake, the taste was also better; though the strongest flavour in both of them was from the jam, you could actually taste the sponge in the home made one, whereas with the shop bought one you could not taste the sponge at all.  The one thing that I can say that the shop bought swiss roll has over the home made one is that it is easier to cut and looks a bit tidier, but is that really what you want from a cake?

In terms of cost, the shop bought cake was 39p and, roughly estimating prices, the home made one was about £1.  Though it seems like the home made one is much more expensive, it was also much bigger.  I weighed out 1/6 of each cake, which is what the back of the packet on the shop bought one said was the size of an average portion.  The shop bought piece weighed 25g whereas the home made one weighed 70g which makes it 2.8 times bigger than the shop bought one.  If we multiply the cost of the shop bought cake by 2.8 it is £1.09, making it actually more expensive in terms of weight than the home made one.  This means that, not only is the shop bought swiss roll of a worse quality and less nice than the home made one, it is also more expensive which I think is frankly shocking.  I only just worked out the numbers for it and I am very surprised the the shop bought did not turn out to be the cheapest.

Anyway, I am sorry if my little bit of maths at the end bored you, it would just not feel like a proper comparison if I did not work out the cost of each.  Until next time.

Carrot Cake

This is the first in my series of Shop bought vs. Home made.  I feel it necessary to have a running theme to keep my mind focused and to have a bit more of a purpose in my writing.  It was difficult to think of what I was going to make for this post but when I was at a friends house last week she was making a carrot cake and that made me want to make one too since I have never made one before, it is something you can readily buy in a supermarket and because to me it seems like an autumnal cake, being made with carrots and mixed spice.

I found the carrot cake quite strange to make at first because it uses oil as the fat rather than butter or margarine but as I got over this novelty the cake mixture was actually pretty easy and quick to do, the most time consuming process being the grating of the carrots.  The recipe I used is from my mum's Good Housekeeping cookbook, I looked up lots of recipes online but they all seemed to add strange and unnecessary ingredients whereas the Good Housekeeping recipe was the traditional, plain and simple recipe that I was looking for.  I could not find the recipe online so here is a simplified version of it.

Ingredients:
250ml Sunflower oil
225g Soft light brown sugar
3 eggs
225g S.R. flour
pinch of salt
1/2 tsp ground mixed spice
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
250g grated carrots
Frosting:
50g unsalted butter
225g cream cheese
25g icing sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1. Line 2 18cm sandwich tins and preheat the oven to 180 degrees or gas mark 4
2. Whisk the oil and sugar together and add the eggs one at a time, whisking them in
3. Sift the flour, salt and spices together over the mixture and fold in
4. Tip in the grated carrots and fold in
5. Divide the mixture between the two tins and bake in the oven for 30-40 mins
6. For the frosting beat the butter and cheese together, add the icing sugar and vanilla and stir until smooth
7. Spread some of the frosting on top of one cooled cake, place the other on top and spread the rest of the frosting over the top

I managed the cake part perfectly well, though my carrot could have been grated a bit more finely perhaps.  For some reason though my cream cheese frosting went a bit lumpy, I think maybe it is because I used mascarpone instead of philadelphia for it, but I'm not sure.  This is what my cake looked like after I finished it.

As you can see the frosting is a bit lumpy, but the cake looks nice.  Here is a photo of the carrot cake which I bought, it is an ASDA extra special cake.

I'm afraid to say that for me at this point the shop bought one looks more tempting but this is before I cut into them and before I tasted either of them, so there is still hope.  This is a photo of a piece of my cake.

And here is a photo of a piece of the shop bought cake.

In my own personal opinion, judging from the look of them, though the shop bought one looks a bit neater, it also looks pale and dry in comparison to the home made one.  And in tasting them, when I ate them together, all I could taste in the shop bought one was sugar, it was very sweet and the cake was quite dry though the home made one could perhaps have done with being a little sweeter, at least in terms of the frosting.

I can't just go on my own opinion though, I also gave my mum some to take into work with her and she gave it to the dietitians she works with as a blind taste test.  Their main comments were that the shop bought one was easier to cut though it was too sweet and that the home made one was moister but the icing was not sweet enough.

The taste is not all I was comparing though, I also wanted to compare the price.  I bought the ASDA cake for £2.25 and after careful calculation worked out that it cost around £3.60 to make mine although my cake was much bigger than the shop bought one.  Therefore I weighed out pieces and 1/4 of the shop bought cake weighed the same as 1/12 of the home made one which means that if the shop bought cake were the same weight as the home made one (and the price went up in relation to the weight) it would have cost £6.75, making my cake much more cost effective.

I hope I haven't gone on too long and made people lose interest in this experiment.  I thoroughly enjoyed it and now have a lot of carrot cake to eat, which I am not unhappy about.

Apple and Blackberry Crumble

To me nothing signals that autumn is near more than the start of blackberry season.  I had seen a few days ago, while walking the dog, that they had already started to be ready to pick.  I thought that it was a little early but I was excited about it nonetheless and the next time I took the dog for a walk I persuaded my sister to come and pick berries with me.  We had intended to just pick blackberries but came back with a rather a lot of sloes too which I'm sure I will talk about another time.  When I pick blackberries I always use them to make a blackberry and apple crumble and, since the apples on the tree in our garden were also ready to pick, I used only fruit which I had picked myself which made me feel very good about myself.

I never really use a recipe to make crumble, I just put things together until they look right, so it will be difficult to give an exact recipe for the crumble which I made but I can give a rough guide.

Ingredients:
2 Handfuls of freshly picked blackberries
2 Small apples
2 Tablespoons of brown sugar
Plain flour, enough to cover the fruit with
Butter, enough that when you rub it into the flour it makes breadcrumbs
Granulated sugar, a few tablespoons

Method:

• Heat the oven to gas mark 4 or 180 degrees celsius
• Wash the blackberries then peel and chop the apples
• Place the sliced apple on the bottom of a small, oven proof bowl and sprinkle with the brown sugar
• Put the blackberries on top of the slices of apple
• Pour the flour into a mixing bowl with the butter
• Rub together until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs and then add the white sugar
• Sprinkle the crumble mixture over the fruit and shake the bowl so that it lays flat, do not press it down
• Put in the oven for about 40 minutes
• Serve hot with either cream or custard

I may have made slightly too much crumble mixture for the amount of fruit this time because I was using a smaller dish than I am used to but I still thought it was pretty good.

Strawberry Sorbet

I decided to make sorbet to be a refreshing, cool snack in the somewhat (though not entirely) hot days of August, also just because I like sorbet and preferred to make it than buy it.  The sorbet was incredibly easy to make, not requiring much effort or very many ingredients.  The main point of this post is the photographic experimentation.  My mother is a dietitian and has, as such, done some work with food photographers; she told me that they often like to take photos of food outside in the garden in order that it looks more appealing.  I thought that I would give this a try today since it is a very sunny day.  Unfortunately, since our garden is not planned so that it flowers year-round, pretty much every plant in the garden had gone to seed and was therefore not an extremely attractive backdrop for my sorbet.  Therefore I decided to place it in front of the only remaining flowers in the garden, in a planter by the shed.  I think though that, given the circumstances, the photo is not that unattractive and I did get to eat the glass of sorbet so there was at least one good outcome.

If you would like to make strawberry sorbet yourself here is the recipe.

Ingredients:
80ml Water
65g Granulated sugar (or fill it up to the same level in the jug as you did with water)
500g Punnet of Stawberries
Juice from half a lemon

Method:

• Heat the water and sugar in a small saucepan until the sugar dissolves
• Boil the syrup for one minute and then take off the heat
• Place the syrup in a heat-proof container and put in the fridge to chill
• Take the leaves off the strawberries and wash them, then blend into a puree and squeeze in the lemon juice
• When the syrup is cold stir it into the strawberry puree
• Put the mixture back into the small saucepan and put in the freezer
• When the mixture is frozen take out and blend again to give it that typical sorbet texture, then return to the freezer
• The sorbet should be ready to eat at any stage after the final blending but should be left out for a few minutes to soften before eating

Individual Amaretto Banoffee pies

This is a luxury take on the traditional banoffee recipe which I created because I love both banoffee and amaretto and thought that they would probably go well together.  It should be eaten in small amounts however since it is very rich.

Serves 4

Ingredients:
16 amaretti biscuits
50g butter
1 can carnation caramel
1 large banana
300ml double cream
1/2 shot amaretto
1 dessert spoon icing sugar
flaked almonds to decorate

Method:

• Crush the amaretti biscuits
• Melt the butter and mix with the biscuit crumbs
• Press into the bottom of four glasses
• Place in the fridge to cool
• Spoon the carnation caramel on top of the biscuit base in each glass
• Slice the banana thinly and divide between the glasses
• Whip the double cream with the icing sugar until stiff then stir in the amaretto
• Spoon the cream on top of the bananas
• Sprinkle the almonds on the top of each one
• Place in the fridge until chilled and then they are ready to eat

Chocolate and Amaretto Mousse

I have tried many times to make chocolate mousse and most have been a success but this is by far the best recipe that I have used.  It gives a delicious moussey, creamy texture and is delightfully sweet but not sickly.  Definitely give it a try, if you do not like amaretto then another spirit such as Cointreau or rum could be used, or you could just make it without and do a plain chocolate mousse which is very good too.

Ingredients Serves 6:
6 eggs
200ml double cream
100g caster sugar
3 shots amaretto
200g dark chocolate

Method:

• Melt the chocolate in a bowl over slightly simmering water
• Separate the eggs with the yolks in one bowl and the whites in another
• Whip up the egg whites into stiff peaks
• Mix the yolks with the caster sugar and amaretto
• Whip the cream until it is thick
• Mix the cream with the egg yolk mixture and the melted chocolate
• Fold the egg whites into the chocolate mixture very gently but making sure that it is properly mixed
• Spoon into ramekins or a large dish
• Put in the fridge for at least an hour to set

This is a fairly easy recipe although it uses a lot of bowls and there is a fair amount of whisking involved, I recommend an electric whisk.  The main difficulty in this recipe is the melting of the chocolate, you must make sure that you do not overheat it but at the same time, it must be warm enough so that when mixed with the eggs and cream it does not start to solidify.  Other than that, it is perfectly easy.

Key Lime Pie

Key lime pie is really delicious and refreshing, a great dessert to enjoy in the summer.  It is also incredibly easy and not very expensive to make.

Ingredients:
19 digestive biscuits
100g butter
300ml double cream
405g can of light condensed milk
4 limes

Method:

• Crush up the digestive biscuits into crumbs (I did it with a rolling pin which is very therapeutic)
• Melt the butter and mix it up with the biscuit crumbs
• Grease a loose bottomed cake tin and put a circle of grease-proof paper on the bottom
• Press the biscuit crumb mix into the bottom of the tin and about an inch up the sides, making sure to press them down firmly.
• Place the tin in the fridge for the base to harden while making the filling
• Finely grate the zest of the four limes into a mixing bowl, then squeeze their juice into the bowl too
• Pour the cream and the condensed milk into the bowl with the lime juice and zest and whisk until thick and creamy
• Pour the mixture onto the biscuit base and put back into the fridge for at least a few hours, until solid.

This recipe is dead easy but really delicious, it would be a good way to impress friends or guests without too much effort.  Having a loose-bottomed cake tin is important since it would prove very difficult to get the pie out of a tin without a loose bottom.  This recipe is for quite a sweet key lime pie, if you like it more tart then add an extra lime or two.