Elderflower fritters

Another brief glance of summer over the weekend past and with it the opportunity to cook something seasonal. I was in the west for the weekend where the elderflower was in full bloom and there's nothing more satisfying that getting your ingredients straight off the tree and for free. Elderflower has a wonderful heady fragrance of floral, fruity, vanilla honey that just makes you feel warm and rosy. You can make (or buy) elderflower cordial, which is a great thing to have in the storecupboard for perking up summer deserts and if I'm out of white wine when making a risotto, I'll make a glass of this up to use instead. 

If you're fussy about eating insects I guess you could wash the flowers first. The batter for these was made with 100g of flower, 175g fizzy water and a tablespoon of sugar mixed till smooth and left to rest for 30 mins. A beaten egg white is then folded through just before frying. They’re then doused with sugar and devoured while still warm.

These fritters were fragrant and light and sugary, although some of the blossoms were stronger than others. So next time I think it would be worth smelling each blossom before picking to make sure only the most scented flowers make it into the batter.    

And on the subject of smell - I attended the first ever Dublin Gastronomy Symposium this week where one of the speakers, a Jane Levi gave a fascinating paper on the subject of smell - read it here. Apparently the reason that our sense of smell is so closely linked to memory is that our oflactory bulb, the organ that receives whatever aromas float up our nostrils is in fact an inetgral part of our actual brain. 

A Desert for Europe

It’s Eurovision time of year again. I’m a big fan of Eurovision – its more exciting than the fiscal treaty anyway. And it just so happens that a couple of years back I got the opportunity to devise a desert especially for the occasion. So when the rest of Europe was watching Dima Bilan wowing the crowds in Serbia with his winning song ‘ Believe’, I was preparing meringue swans, blue sparkling jellies, profiteroles, peach trifles and the likes. I’d been invited to partake in an event at the Project Art Centre called ‘A Symposium A Banquet’ where people with a particular talent or passion for one thing or another demonstrated this to an audience. My offering was to demonstrate the making of a desert. This was my Desert for Europe inspired by the Eurovision, an extravaganza with fire and bells, bereft of subtlety where less is not more … its just less!