Dark chocolate tartlets

Photo by Ed.

I served these tiny tarts at the wedding I catered for my friends Patrizia and Ed. (Full menu here). They were a real hit - rich and creamy and just the right size for a not-quite-guilt-free mouthful. 

Ingredients

320g dark chocolate, (at least 60% cocoa but I actually don't recommend more than 80%) 

500ml cream 

4 egg yolks 

2 whole eggs 

1/4 cup sugar 

gold leaf to decorate 

Method

 Combine chopped bittersweet chocolate and cream in a heavy saucepan. Whisk over low heat until chocolate is melted and smooth. Remove saucepan from heat and allow to cool a little.

In a separate bowl, whisk the egg yolks, egg & sugar. Very gradually whisk chocolate mixture into the egg mixture until smooth and blended.

Pour chocolate filling into crust, sprinkle with gold leaf, and bake at 180 degrees until set (about 15-20 minutes for a single large shell, or 5-10 for small shells).

Amuse-bouche: black and white bowties with haloumi, serrano ham & baby tomatoes

This charming amuse-bouche was a bit of a last minute inspiration, and went down a treat with the little dinner party I put together the other night.

My inspirations were multiple: a funky pasta I have in my cupboard just itching to be used, a visit to "goodies" (a local meditteranean shop) where I found haloumi, discovering a source of relatively inexpensive serrano ham, and the dinner party itself. The result was this simple, colourful and delectable medly, which I encourage you to try - I promise it is easy and scrummy.

Cooking time: I think it took me less than half an hour from start to finish.

Black and white bowties with haloumi, serrano ham and baby tomatoes

50 g Haloumi

2 slices Serrano Ham

17g of baby bow tie pasta or 3 pieces per person giant bow tie pasta (+3 pieces spare)

120g mixed baby tomatoes (red and yellow)

Finely cut the haloumi into 1/2cm cubes, and cut the baby tomatoes in quarters. Tear the serrano ham into pieces about 3 cm by 2cm (no need to be too careful, tear, not slice).

Brown the haloumi in a frypan with a tiny splash of olive oil - if you have a herbed oil so much the better. At the same time, bring a pot of water to the boil and cook the pasta until done (I won't give an exact time as it will depend on the style of pasta you choose) and then drain.

Once the haloumi has started to get a golden colour, put your chopped tomatoes into the pan. You don't want to cook them so much as warm them up. Add your cooked pasta and gently stir to combine in the pan.

Serve in small dishes garnished with the serrano ham.

The photos somehow don't really capture just how attractive this dish is... I need my friend Ed's photography skills!

Miniature chocolate chip cupcakes

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups sifted self-raising flour 

3/4 cup caster sugar

1/2 cup cocoa powder, sifted 

3/4 cup dark or milk choc bits 

1 tablespoon cocoa powder, extra, to serve 3/4 cup milk

125g butter, melted, cooled

2 lightly beaten eggs

Instructions 

Preheat oven to 200°C.

Prepare an oven tray with tiny paper lined foil cups.

Combine flour and caster sugar in a bowl. Stir in cocoa powder and choc bits. Make a well in the centre. Add milk, butter and eggs to flour mixture. Using a metal spoon, stir gently to combine.

Spoon mixture into the paper cups, till 3/4 full. 

Bake for 5 to 10 minutes until risen and set. Cool.

Morroccan lamb tartlets

This delicious canape is again quite simple (but then again, ultimately most cooking is!) and all of the parts can be prepared in the days before your event, allowing you to simply assemble on the night.

There are three parts to this recipe

1. Cases
2. Lamb
   
3. Hommous
   

1. Let's start with the cases. Buy a loaf of sliced white bread. Lay slices out on a board, and roll them with a rolling pin to flatten them. Using a cookie cutter (in this case I used a star), cut out shapes from the bread. A cookie cutter that will allow you to get four pieces out of one slice of bread will make bite sized canapes. Brush the shapes with melted butter, and push into the holes of mini muffin tins. Bake at 180 degrees until crisp and golden.

Cool and keep in an airtight container - these will easily keep for up to 4 days (and actually as I write I am munching on a few left over cases that are now a week old and still crisp and yummy).

2. Time for the Lamb.

I rubbed lamb fillets with Ras el Hanout (A north African spice mixture containing all sorts of things, but typically cardamon, cloves, cinnamon, chili, cumin, coriander, pepper and turmeric) and put them in a container in the fridge overnight in the fridge to marinate. The next day I pan fried the lamb fillet - you want the lamb to be nicely browned on the outside but still slightly pink and juicy on the inside. As you cook it, you can feel when you press on it, the meat getting firmer as it cooks.

Once cool, wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate. Leave as whole fillets until you are just about to assemble the canape.

3. Hommous

Do have a try at making your own hommous - Rosa at Rosa's Yummy Yums has a great recipe or you can buy some but make sure it is a good quality fresh hommous.

So now you have all three parts, its time to serve these up! Slice the lamb fillet very thinly on the diagonal. Pipe or spoon some hommous into the bread cup and arrange a slice of lamb on top, and perhaps garnish with a little fresh coriander. Simple, and totally delicious!

Quick and pretty canape

I was hired to cater a small reception for 40 people. A nice simple function of 5 different dishes.

Dish number one: Cherry tomato, basil and baby mozzarella skewers.

It doesn't get much simpler than this for a canape! I marinated the mozzarella in pesto and then skewered them. The hardest part was figuring out how to present them!

A little bit of silliness - deconstructed potato salad

I have canapes on my mind at the moment because next week I am catering a small cocktail reception for 40 people. Anyway, I had this thought about raclette potatoes. If you aren't familiar with raclette potatoes, they are golden, buttery and totally delicious. Boiled, they taste like they have been soaked in melted butter. They also keep their shape really well when cooked, which makes them lousy for irish stew but excellent for samosas and, I theorise, for cocktail food.

My thought was to do a sort of deconstructed potato salad... potatoes sliced skewered and layered with mustard mayonnaise. But this alone, while tasty, would be texturally dull as dishwater, and equally boring to the eye.

So what to do? How about a sliver of cucumber, to add some colour and texture... not bad, not bad at all.


Completely coincidentally, tonight's little invention fits into the Recipe Remix food challenge - to rethink a traditional summer "cookout" food. Now to be truthful I am not entirely sure what a cookout is (I am thinking it is what we Aussies call a "barbie") but potato salad is one of the dishes listed as a dish to be played with, so this becomes my little contribution to the fun!

Smoked Trout Pate

While I wanted to cook lots of things for my foodie colleagues' departures, I was a bit limited in time... so I added this simple pate to the menu to provide a savoury alternative to the cakes on offer.

Smoked trout pate is wonderfully easy to make, and is a guaranteed winner at any party (or in this case work function). Best made the night before, so that the lovely smokey flavour of the trout can permeate the pate.

200g cream cheese
250g smoked trout fillets
2 tablespoons lemon juice
50g melted butter

Put all the ingredients in a food processor and pulse till well combined - but don't over blend, as you want to keep some texture.

Put into your serving dishes and cover with plastic wrap and keep in the fridge overnight. Serve with a small serving knife with toasts or baguette.

Chicken, basil & prosciutto sausage rolls

I had a Tupperware party on the weekend; a good excuse to get together with the girls and drink champagne.... and a good excuse to cook party food!

So...

Chicken, Basil & Prosciutto Sausage Rolls (original recipe by Kiriel)

200g chicken breast fillet
150g prosciutto
1 onion
6-7 basil leaves
pinch of salt and pepper
1 egg yolk
2 tablespoons sesame seeds
1 sheet of puff pastry (around 30x40cm)

Put the oven on to warm up to 180 degrees.

Roughly chop the onion, chicken and proscuitto. Put into a food processor with the basil leaves and blend until combined.

Cut the sheet of puff pastry in half lengthways. Take half the filling and place in a sort of sausage along the long edge of one piece of the pastry. Brush the opposite edge with water and then fold the pastry over to make a roll. Place seam side down. Repeat with the other piece of pastry.

Cut the rolls in 3cm lengths. Brush the tops with egg yolk and sprinkle with sesame seeds. bake for about 15 minutes until golden brown. Serve warm. (These can happily be made the day before and reheated in the oven)

Lemon mousse tartlets

Another invention, these wee tartlets were something I whipped up (quite literally) to take as nibblies at the concert I sang in last weekend. They were a great success, and I caught one of my fellow singers polishing off 6 in a row!

So this one is definitely worth sharing as a super simple dessert dish. Its so much fun playing with food! Best of all, this recipe is pretty much a "from the cupboard" recipe, where the only fresh ingredient that is needed is cream so it can be made up at very little notice.

Lemon Mousse Tartlets (Original recipe by Kiriel)

400ml cream

200g lemon curd (also known as lemon butter)

3 tablespoons icing sugar

2 tablespoons lemon juice

yellow food colouring

Sweet tartlet shells (this quantity made 50 tiny tartlets)

Whip cream until it has firm peaks. In a bowl combine the lemon curd, lemon juice and icing sugar, then fold gently into the cream. Add yellow food colouring if you want, to give a stronger colour. Pipe into tartlet shells and serve - this can be done up to about an hour and a half before serving - much longer and the shells start to soften. This simple lemon mousse would also work well served in glasses as a dessert at a dinner party - the quantity above will do dessert for 8. I had some left over which I folded fresh strawberries into, which was divine!

Miniature pavlovas

Mini Pavlovas

4 egg whites
250g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract

Whisk the egg whites until they reach soft peak. Gradually add the sugar and continue beating until the mixture becomes stiff and glossy. Fold in the vanilla. Place teaspoonsfull on to baking sheets, making an indent in the centre of each meringue - dont worry if they are imperfect - they will smooth out in the baking. Bake for 5 minutes at 180 degrees, then turn the oven down to 120. Continue to bake for 20 minutes. Cool on the tray.

Top with stiffly whipped cream and fresh fruit just before serving.

(the meringues can be kept for a few days in an airtight container)

Sweetcorn & Chilli fritters with guacamole

Sweetcorn & chilli fritters (original recipe by Kiriel)

4 tins of sweetcorn (340g)
3 eggs
1 cup self raising flour
3 small chillis
100ml milk
salt and pepper

Mix flour, eggs, milk and salt and pepper to make a batter.
Add three tins of sweetcorn, and finely chopped chillis. Blend the last tin of sweetcorn and add. Heat a fry pan (I tend to use a non-stick pan & no oil myself). Drop heaped teaspoons of mix into the hot pan, flipping once the bubbles have risen to the surface and burst.
Allow to cool. These can be frozen in ziplock bags and thawed on the day of use. Crisp up in the oven for 3 minutes before use. Top the fritters with the topping within an hour of serving.

Guacamole

3 avocadoes
1 red onion finely chopped
tabasco to taste
lime juice to taste
Salt and Pepper
Coriander leaves to garnish

Combine ingredients. Can be made up to 2 hours in advance - refrigerate, covering surface completely with plastic wrap to prevent discolouration.

Top the sweetcorn fritters with the guacamole, garnish with coriander leaves and serve.

Parmesan and herb shortbreads

Parmesan and oregano shortbreads
(makes 40)
120g plain flour
salt
2 tsp oregano
90g cold butter diced
120g parmesan cheese, grated

Place ingredients in a food processor and pulse to form a smooth dough. Roll out to .5cm thickness, and stamp out 3cm rounds. Bake in a moderate oven for 10 minutes until golden brown. Cool on a wire rack. Keep in a an airtight container for up to two weeks, or can be frozen for up to a month (defrost and crisp up in the oven).

Catering fun

The chef at work has gone on holidays for a month, just as my work decided to hold a reception for 60 people. Knowing that I love to cook, my colleague in charge of the function asked if I would be interested in catering it. I leapt at the chance.

So what to cook? Well, here is the final menu:

• Sweetcorn & chilli fritters topped with guacamole
• Peking duck tartlets
• Parmesan shortbreads topped with chevre & olives
• Smoked chicken and asparagus quichettes
• Gruyere gougers
• Ratatouille panniers
  
• Brie & Fennel chutney spoons
• Miniature pavlovas
• Zabaglione tartlets

Details to come....

Chai tea creams with sesame praline

These delicate tea scented creams looked lovely and tasted even better. I was going to call them English tea custards, but upon eating decided that they should be renamed chai creams because of the spicy flavour from the anise.

Chai Tea Creams (original recipe by Kiriel)

1 cup cream
1 cup milk
1 star anise
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
2 english breakfast tea bags
1 & 1/2 tablespoon brown sugar
3 egg yolks

Put all the ingredients except for the egg yolks in a pot and heat gently, allowing the spices to steep and brown sugar to dissolve.

Whisk the egg yolks until smooth, and then whisk into the cream. Pour into ramekins. Place the ramekins in a deepish baking tray, and fill the dish with water till it reaches 3/4 of the height of the ramekins. Bake at a medium temperature for 45 minutes until creams are just set. Decorate with sesame praline and serve at room temperature. (how to make the sesame praline is in my post of 23 September)

Tea noodles

As regular readers (the vast numbers of you that there are... ha ha) will know that I bought some elegant spoons and have been hanging out for the opportunity to use them. The tea theme dinner party finally gave me the opportunity! Amuse Bouche: Sesame tea noodles (Original recipe by Kiriel) 100g chinese rice noodles 2 tsp sweet chilli sauce 2 tsp rice wine vinegar 2 tsp soy sauce 2 tsp sesame oil 3 tsp sunflower oil 2 bags of a good strong tea 1 carrot cut into super fine strips 2 tbsp sesame seeds Put 3 cm of water in a saucepan and bring to the boil. Add the tea bags and allow to steep then remove them and add the noodles. Cook the noodles, adding the carrot just before they are done, and drain off the liquid (reserve 3tablespoons of the liquid) and allow to cool. Mix together the other liquids with the reserved tea and use to dress the noodles. Toast the sesame seeds. Twirl a few noodles around a fork to make a nest and put on a spoon. Sprinkle with the toasted sesame seeds. You can prepare and dress the noodles the day before and keep in the fridge. Allow to come to room temperature before serving.