Chocolate passion fruit tart

This is a version of a Heston Blumenthal chocolate tart. It has a biscuit base laced with popping candy and is topped with a chocolate and passion fruit ganache and all covered in a crisp chocolate icing and dusted with cocoa. I opted to add some little balls of passion fruit jelly to snazz it up a bit, just in case anyone might have thought it looked a bit on the plain side.

The popping candy in the biscuit base really is an amazing feature, it's slow to kick in but when it does you don't quite know whats going on, and the passion fruit in the chocolate is divine. It's an intense fruitiness and just the right balance of sweetness and sharpness. If you treat yourself to a really good bar of chocolate such as Amedei or Valrhona (particularly any of their single estate ranges) then you'll find they will often have an intense fruitiness and aroma of berries that's comparable to a good wine. There's a similar depth of flavour to the chocolate ganache here which comes through from the passion fruit.

Here's the recipe. I made it double quantity in a bigger tin. I was a bit concerned that there wasn't actually much ganache but in fact when you tuck in you'll find it's plenty.

As is usually the case with Heston recipes there's a bit of fancy kit required to do the job properly, in this case, a compressor powered paint spray gun which you're supposed to fill with chocolate and oil and use to give a smooth finish coat to the whole thing. This requires you to fully freeze the cake first, the idea being that when the atomised chocolate spray hits the frozen cake that it sets instantly. I don't have an electric spray gun. In case you think that one of those hand pump garden spray things might work as an alternative....take it from me, don't bother, and they're a nightmare to wash out after a failed attempt as well.

But you do need a coating on this cake because where the biscuit base and ganache meet it looks a bit messy. As an alternative to the spray gun I ended up freezing the tart as directed in the recipe and then simply melting 200g of chocolate with 50g of butter and using it to coat the outside. I put about a third of this into a small shallow rimmed dish. With the cake frozen I was able to hold it up vertically on its side and rotate it round like a wheel through the chocolate in the dish to coat the sides of the cake. I then pored the remainder of the chocolate over to coat the top. You have to work very quick to spread it and smooth it out as it will set firm in no time. Check out I want to cook like Heston for another bloggers dilemma on how to finish this cake without a spray gun.

I had brought a cute little ice cube tray from Muji a while back that makes little ice marbles. I'd always figured it would make a great little mould for jellies and took the opportunity to try it out here for the first time. So the jellies are just passion fruit pulp (blended to separate from the seeds and then sieved) and a little sugar syrup and gelatin. I realised that I'd have to freeze these in order to be able to pop them out the moulds without destroying them. You can see the frost on them in the photo but as they thawed they took on a real translucent glow. To sit them into the cake I used the back of a melon baller dipped in hot water just to press down and create a divot into which the jelly balls would sit and not roll out. And for good measure I dusted the whole thing in cocoa powder before popping on the jellies to finish.

At the last hour I discovered that the outer coating of chocolate was prone to cracking unevenly as it was sliced so I had to be sure to cut it using a large knife dipped in bolling water and wiped clean after each cut.

 

I actually made this as my entry to my work place bake off. Despite stiff competition it won me first pize! Here it is on the way to the office.

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!

Italian

With the onset of summer something Italian seemed fitting. 
 
For starters - bruschetta with:
- tomato jelly and basil (it's just tomato, whizzed, with gelatin)
- anchovy and buffalo mozzarella
- aubergine and chili

 Mushroom ravioli with truffle oil. There’s not much more to say here really.
 

This is a pea puree with a scallop. 

The stuff sprinkled over the scallop is the orange roe from the scallop that’s been dried out in the oven and then ground up to a powder in a pestle and mortar. The green roll is langoustine rolled up in spinach (same technique as described in a previous blog post) and topped with some lumpfish roe. The sauce is made from boiling up the heads and shells of the langoustines in milk and frothing up with some butter and a hand blender. 

This is just a piece of beef, a simple red wine jus and horseradish. The beef is 21 day, dry aged fillet purchased form O’Toole's of Terenure.
 

Most meat is wet aged which means it’s vacuum packed in plastic. This makes the aging process quicker and also retains all the moisture (weight) in the meat both of which are a big plus for the retailer but which don’t benefit the taste or tenderness of the meat. By contrast dry aged beef is hung for much longer. Moisture is evaporated from the meat which concentrates its flavour and the natural enzymes break down the connective tissue in the muscle, which leads to more tender beef. Dry aged meat is more expensive to produce in that it needs to be hung for longer and at near freezing temperatures which results in about a third of the weight being lost. Add to this the fact that it is only those higher grades of meat which are suitable for the process `(such as fillet or sirloin which have a higher proportion of evenly distributed fat). All thing considered its understandable why it costs more to buy this but it’s well worth the extra for a special occasion.

The piece I cooked weighed about 0.8kg. Seasoned and the seared all over in a very hot pan and then straight into a hot oven for 15 mins and then removed from the pan and left to rest wrapped in foil. To make the sauce I just deglaze the pan with red wine and whisked in cold butter to add gloss. For the horseradish just grate the root into crème fraiche and add a little white wine vinegar and seasoning to taste.   
 

Salad and cheese to follow.
 

 

































And for desert  - apricot soufflé.

This was my first attempt at a soufflé. I had a kumquat soufflé recently in the Gordon Ramsey restaurant at Ritz Carlton which was pretty spectacular. It was the highlight of the meal and I've been looking for an excuse to have a crack at producing a soufflé ever since. My effort here was reasonably successful but a little overdone I think and not as light and risen as it might have been. I think my downfall was not sticking with one recipe. I'd started off with the intention of following Julia Child’s supposedly foolproof instructions including her detailed essay on whisking egg whites by hand with a pinch of cream of tartar - but at the last minute I decided to mix it up with another recipe I’d found online and another from Gordon Ramsey's Just Deserts. The base was a creme patisserie and the fruit puree came from dried apricots soaked overnight. For dusting the the buttered molds I made up a praline and blitzed it to a powder. Served up here with a scoop of sweetened mascarpone and a little more of the praline.