Petit fours at the InterContinental

I'd heard that petit fours on the InterContinental Hotel Lobby Lounge dessert menu are Wellington's best kept foodie secret. I'm already a big fan of high tea at the InterContinental. Yesterday, my team and I checked out petit fours.

For $18, you get a platter of sweet treats to share. It's enough for one between two if you want to sample everything or three people if you're being polite. The selection changes regularly. Yesterday's menu included macarons, chocolate truffles, candied orange wedges dipped in dark chocolate, biscotti, fruit jelly, coconut ice, marshmallow and new season strawberries. Delicious!

Petit fours

Petit fours are a great introduction to high tea if you have less time or are after a smaller treat. Ssh - pass it on!

Milse

Foodies, here's one for you. Milse is a tiny but exquisite dessert restaurant hiding away in Auckland's Britomart area. You enter through an ornately carved cocoon-like tunnel and pass the counters of freshly baked goodies before reaching a tiny atrium containing just four tables for two.

Tables can't be booked in advance but it's worth waiting for one to become available and savour the full Milse experience. While you're waiting, you can sit on one of the bar stools overlooking the kitchen, watch the patissiers at work and take in all the delicious aromas. They move about so calmly (unlike in my kitchen!) and make it all look so easy.

It was incredibly hard to decide what to order. The patisserie menu is extensive and describes the contents of the counters you walk past on your way into the restaurant. Get ready for some serious drooling.

After much deliberation, and because it was a hot sunny afternoon, we settled on the special sundae of the day along with espresso and iced chocolate to drink. Caramel gelato with caramelised orange and marmalade topped with chocolate biscuit pieces and crumbled toasted macadamia nuts, this sundae was more than enough for two to share. It was simply amazing, not too sweet and with each flavour complementing rather than overpowering the others.

Special sundae

The a la carte menu is available after 6 pm and the gelato sticks also looked good to take away. Dessert at Milse is everything you've heard and more.

Lemon desserts class

Crave Cooking School is a purpose built cooking school and production kitchen in Lyall Bay. We've attended several excellent classes at Crave (knife skills, fish filleting and bread making) but I don't seem have blogged about them. Clearly, they've coincided with some of my busiest writing times at work, meaning I'd used up my daily word quota by the time it came to blogging about them!

On Saturday, we went to a lemon dessert baking class hosted by Luke Crawford from Neo Cafe and Eatery. I love baking with lemons and we used beautiful Meyer lemons from Twisted Citrus in sunny Gisborne.

Meyer lemons

There were three dessert items on the menu for this hands-on class. We began by making sweet pastry and lemon custard filling for a lemon tart. Sour cream lemon tart is a family favourite of ours and these individual tarts followed a similar process. Now, I don't have much patience for blind baking using beans, ceramic balls or rice and have always pricked the pastry several times with a fork instead. It turns out I was on the right track, but brushing the pastry with an egg wash will seal any holes made by the fork. Bam!

Lemon tart

Next up was lemon syllabub. (To be honest, I had to google syllabub beforehand. I've decided it's similar to ambrosia in texture, calories and flavour profile.) Wow! If ever there was a decadent dessert that is deceptively simple, lemon syllabub is it. If you google the ingredients, you'll see that it's pretty much cream, sweet wine, sugar and lemon rinds. We had individual servings of syllabub for first afternoon tea.

Finally, it was onto something a little trickier: lemon soufflé. The process was very different to the chocolate soufflé I make. This is not a recipe that can be refrigerated prior and is best prepared immediately before cooking. There is something incredibly fun about watching a recipe rise and rise in the oven then delicately settle into its final form. After a few soufflé attempts, I've decided that this dessert is not as scary as I'd feared and the results are worth the careful attention the recipes require.

Second afternoon tea: lemon soufflé

Thanks to the team (Luke, Marco and Lucy) for an enjoyable afternoon of baking, learning and eating. We'll be back again soon.

Pudding

From time to time, I make a well loved dessert called pudding.

Pudding never starts out intending to be pudding; it always results from a baking failure crossed with a rescue mission of some description. Pudding is never much to look at but it always tastes good. Its ingredients are usually obscure and come together in surprise flavour combinations. Basically, pudding is my code word for "a spectacular baking fail that was rescued by {insert decadent ingredient/s here} and served up as a planned dessert".

Last week, I eagerly set about baking my aunt's famous sponge cake using the swan eggs I'd been given. The recipe looked simple enough. I had everything I needed and got busy baking. The sponge took much longer than expected to cook, then rose and rose (and rose) very high before collapsing spectacularly. As a final insult, the remnants stuck to the bottom of the tin.

After googling "what to bake with broken sponge pieces -trifle" (because I'd decided that it's still too early in the season for trifle), I moved on to search for a simple chocolate mousse recipe. I broke the collapsed sponge into pieces, arranged them in a dish, poured over layers of decadent mousse and refrigerated it all for a few hours. Voilà - pudding!

Fast forward to the family dinner the failed sponge was destined for.

"What's for dessert?" my seven-year-old nephew asks.
"Pudding," I say.
"What sort of pudding?" he checks.
"Special pudding," I clarify.
"Yum! This pudding is delicious!" my nephew declares. "Can we have special pudding another time?"
"Yes, but it will probably be a different type of pudding next time," I promise knowingly.

Another time, my failproof pavlova did just what it had never done before. Googling "what to make with broken meringue pieces" resulted in Eton mess, to the delight of British family members.

I can think of many more examples where pudding has been a surprise yet welcome addition to the menu. It confirms what I've always believed: there is nothing that whipped cream, ice cream or custard can't rescue.

Lemon delicious pudding

Winter is the perfect time of year to bake hearty puddings for dessert. In New Zealand, we traditionally eat Christmas pudding in summer but it makes much more sense to enjoy it as a winter warmer when then weather is cold.

This recipe for lemon delicious pudding originated from the Australian Women's Weekly Baking Recipes and Secrets from the Test Kitchen cookbook. I increased the quantities by one third to fit my 2 litre Pyrex dish. I also played around with some of the ingredients and steps. For example, I have a stand mixer but no electric hand beaters, so whisked the egg whites first and set them aside, then used the same mixing bowl for the next few steps. (As long as you don't contaminate the egg whites, you don't need to clean the bowl in between.)

The method is also different to how I'd usually make a self-saucing pudding, as my first attempt turned out extremely runny. Now, I like self-saucing puddings but the amount of liquid swimming in the bottom of the bowl was ridiculous, so I increased the amount of flour slightly and baked it in a roasting dish half-filled with boiling water. I also refrigerated the mixture in the dish for a few hours before baking and it turned out perfectly - really handy if you want to prepare the pudding in advance.

Lemon delicious pudding

Ingredients

• 105 g butter, softened
• 4 t lemon rind
• 145 g caster sugar
• 4 eggs, separated
• 50 g self-raising flour
• 500 ml milk
• 110 ml lemon juice
• 3 t icing sugar

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease a 2 litre (8 cup) oven proof dish and place inside a roasting dish.
2. Whisk egg whites until firm peaks form. Set aside.
3. Using a K-paddle attachment, beat butter, lemon rind and sugar until pale. Beat in egg yolks one at a time until thick, scraping down the side of the bowl with a spatula in between each addition.
4. Change back to the whisk attachment. Whisk in the flour, milk and juice until well combined.
5. Gently fold the egg whites into the lemon mixture, in two batches. Pour mixture into the dish. Pour boiling water into the roasting dish until it comes to about halfway up the baking dish.
6. Bake pudding for 35 minutes or until golden and just firm to the touch. (It will be still quite wobbly underneath.) Dust with icing sugar and serve immediately. Serves 8.

Lemon delicious pudding

Chocolate soufflé

As a baker, I've never been brave enough to tackle making a soufflé. These finicky savoury or sweet dishes are renown for puffing up and overflowing during cooking before spectacularly caving in on themselves. It turns out my fears were unfounded - well, at least for the recipe I eventually tried. Success on the first attempt is almost unheard of for me but this one was almost brag-worthy.

I found this recipe for chocolate soufflé for two on the Crunchy Creamy Sweet dessert baking blog. I like how they are made in mini cocotte dishes but found that the recipe has a missing step, so I've revised it here and converted it into metric. I made the soufflés using Whittaker's 72% Dark Ghana chocolate and Heilala vanilla extract, which resulted in a full, rich flavour. It's an oven dessert so a good one to have pre-prepared, then put in to cook while you're serving dinner - a yummy 'sometimes treat' for winter nights.

Chocolate soufflé

Ingredients

• 1 T cocoa
• 90 g dark chocolate, chopped
• 30 g butter, melted
• 2 eggs, separated
• 1/2 t vanilla extract
• dash (1/8 t) of salt
• dash (1/8 t) of cream of tartar
• 2 T caster sugar

Method

1. Preheat oven to 190°C. Grease two mini cocotte dishes or 250 ml ramekins with additional butter. Sprinkle bottom and sides with cocoa powder, tapping off excess. Set aside.
2. Melt chocolate and butter together. Whisk until smooth. Set aside to cool to room temperature.
3. Add egg yolks to cooled chocolate mixture one at a time and whisk to combine. Add vanilla extract and whisk until smooth.
4. In a clean bowl of a stand mixer, with a clean whisk, beat egg whites with salt, cream of tartar and caster sugar on medium speed until frothy. Increase the speed to high and beat until stiff peaks form. Do not over beat. Keep checking the peaks. As soon as you see the stiff peaks form, stop.
5. Add 1/3 of meringue into the chocolate mixture. Gently fold until just combined. Repeat twice until the mixture is fully combined and no streaks remain. Do not over fold.
6. Spoon the mixture into prepared cocotte dishes. At this stage, you can cover the dishes and refrigerate until ready to bake.
7. Place cocottes on a baking tray and bake for 20 minutes.
8. Sprinkle with icing sugar and serve immediately.

Chocolate soufflé

Mug cakes

My mini cocotte fascination continues. I am slowly curating a collection of single-serve recipes that will fit in my cute little bakeware. A friend showed me a recipe book she had bought for mug cakes recently. They seemed the perfect size for mini cocotte desserts and the next thing I knew, I was ordering a couple of titles for myself online.

I have been 'testing' this book of Mug Cakes by Leslie Bilderback and can report success with a number of recipes so far. Inspiration usually starts with a craving for "a little bit of something sweet" after dinner, which leads to a quick perusal of the fridge and pantry for ingredients, then a browse of the index and voila! Dessert is ready a few minutes later.

The first recipe I tried was sour cream, apple and pecan mug cake. The other night it was plum thyme mug cake (I had lots of plums and no sage, hence the variation). Last night it was brown sugar mug cake with cinnamon and nutmeg. Gosh, this sounds like a regular occurrence ... but I swear it's all in the name of experimentation and quality assurance. ;-) Either way, I highly recommend this recipe book.

The other title I purchased is the one my friend showed me, Mug Cakes by Lene Knudsen. It's been touted as not too practical for making at the office. I'd have to agree that some of the ingredients are slightly more exotic and a few require substituting with local chocolate or sweet varieties. They also seem bigger and at more risk of overflowing in the microwave than Leslie Bilderback's recipes, which fit well in a 250 ml mug. Still, there are lots of good dessert ideas in there and they're quick and easy to make.

So, what's for dessert tonight?

Banoffee pie

This post is as much for my own reference as anything else. Another family gathering equals another excuse to bake. Yay! Banoffee pie makes a yummy dessert and is easy to make. I just wasn't sure where I'd kept my recipe ... I checked my blog, then googled myself + "banoffee pie" + Twitter and found a tweet from September last year where I said I'd used a recipe off the condensed milk can. Whew! Off to the supermarket I went ... only to find that the condensed milk can now features a different recipe. Lesson for today: keep copies of your recipes where you can easily find them. For many of mine, it's this blog.

There are lots of banoffee pie recipes out there and this one works well. All I really needed to find out was the quantity of melted butter, as the rest is pretty simple. Luckily, someone had posted it on a Foodlovers forum. It's less a recipe rather than an order of assembly for the ingredients. The main thing to remember is that it needs to be refrigerated twice, so allow plenty of time in between stages. Also, I used the amazing caramel condensed milk instead of making it from plain condensed milk. I figure it's better value paying 50c extra than risking a can exploding from boiling it for 3 hours. Just be careful you don't cut your tongue on the lid. (You'll know what that means once you buy a can of caramel condensed milk to bake with.)

Banoffee pie

Ingredients

• 150 g butter, melted
• 250 g packet plain (wine) biscuits, crushed
• 395 g can caramel condensed milk
• 2 bananas
• 3/4 cup whipped cream
• 2-3 teaspoons grated chocolate or ground nutmeg to garnish

Method

1. Combine crushed biscuits and melted butter. Firmly press mixture into the base and sides of a 20 cm loose based flan tin. Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes. (I usually refrigerate for longer to keep the base firmer.)
2. Spread condensed milk over crumb base and refrigerate for 1 hour until caramel is firm.
3. To serve, slice bananas and arrange half of the over the set caramel. Top with whipped cream and decorate with the remaining bananas. Sprinkle chocolate or nutmeg to garnish.

Banoffee pie

Fudgy chocolate pudding

Despite my determination to not necessarily equate family dinners with baking and dessert, my sister-in-law twisted my arm when she came up for dinner last night. "What, no dessert?" she asked. I didn't take much convincing. I dived into my book of 500 chocolate recipes and selected this dessert based on the ingredients I had on hand.

Fudgy chocolate pudding

Ingredients

• 340g brown sugar
• 85g self-raising flour
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 85g cocoa
• 4 eggs, beaten
• 225g butter, melted
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 115g roasted chopped hazelnuts (optional)

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 160 degrees Celsius.
2. Grease a deep 1.5 ovenproof pie dish.
3. Put all ingredients in a large bowl and beat with a wooden spoon until well combined and evenly coloured.
4. Tip the mixture into the dish and stand in the centre of a large roasting bin. Half-fill the tin with boiling water and bake for one hour or until well risen and firm.
5. Serve warm with cream or ice cream. Can be served cold cut into squares.
   

Here is the finished product, still in the tray of boiling water. We ate it warm with cookies and cream ice cream. The centre was, indeed, very fudgy and the overall pudding resembled the chocolate brownies I sometimes make. Despite cooking for an extra 10 minutes, it hadn't set quite as much as I imagined it would, but the edges would have been overcooked if I'd left it in the oven any longer. It still tasted delicious, though!

Chocolate mug cake

I saw a recipe for chocolate mug cake a couple of weeks ago. It was enough to raise my curiosity, but also my skeptical streak. I wasn't entirely convinced it would work. I saw another recipe for 5 minute chocolate mug cake on All Recipes today. When my sweetie was cheeky enough to ask "what's for dessert?" after I'd already cooked him dinner, I figured I'd may as well give it a go.

The original recipe came with a few 'tweaks', some of which I followed. One thing's for certain: use a really large mug. Next time, I might even try a soup mug, as the mixture overflowed slightly in the microwave. So here's my take on all the recipes I came across. It seemed to work and went well with ice cream. Next time, I might even pause long enough to take a photo of the finished product!

Café Chick's chocolate mug cake

Ingredients

• 4 tablespoons plain flour
• 4 tablespoons sugar
• 2 tablespoons cocoa
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 egg
• 3 tablespoons milk
• 3 tablespoons melted butter
  
• 1/4 teaspoon vanilla essence
• 1 tablespoon choc chips
• 1 large mug

Method

1. Add dry ingredients to the mug and mix well.
2. Crack an egg and add it to your mug. Be sure to mix it well to avoid any pockets of flour in the corners. Pour in the milk and melted butter and mix well. Add the vanilla essence.
3. Pop your mug into the microwave and zap for 3 minutes on maximum power (1000watt). Wait until the cake stops rising and sets in the mug.
4. If necessary, run a knife around the sides of the mug, and tip the still warm cake out of the mug and into a bowl.

Serves 2

Your choice

At the end of last year, my team was working in Tauranga for a couple of days and I introduced you to William (well, that's what I called him). William is a delightful colleague of mine, whose culinary tastes are rather specific in that bland + unadventurous = best.

Last night, while at the Southern Cross for the music quiz, I was reminded of William as I looked through their dessert menu and came across this:

Classic Ice Cream Sundae 7.00 With all the extras. Your choice of sauce, with chopped nuts, 100's and 1000's and a pink wafer.

Once again, those words your choice jumped out at me and I wondered just how much choice there actually was? I didn't find out ... but I'm sure William would have. ;-)

Ambrosia

Speaking of food, here is the most indulgent dessert which can be eaten either on its own, or with fruit, pavlova, trifle ... almost anything else. It can be made either as a really sweet dish (with marshmallows) or with a more tart flavour. It's always a hit at dinners and parties, and incredibly simple to make, but I always make sure I only ever share the recipe after it has been enjoyed, as the raw ingredients often shock people! Here is the recipe for boysenberry ambrosia.

Boysenberry ambrosia

Ingredients

• 500 ml cream
• 1 punnet (150 ml) of boysenberry/fruit of the forest/blackberry yoghurt
• 410g can of boysenberries
  

Methods

1. Whip cream until very thick (almost overbeaten).
2. Fold in yoghurt.
3. Drain boysenberries well, leaving small amount of juice aside. Fold boysenberries into cream and yoghurt mixture.
4. Add small amounts of juice to colour, if required.
5. Refrigerate for at least 2-3 hours to set before serving.
   

Pavlova

Pavlova is one of the ultimate Kiwiana icons. But we're not talking about one of those oversweet, fluffy store-bought meringue thingies with no decent crust, oh no! With the summer bbq season in full-swing, I've had to suffer my way through far too many of these in recent times, so decided to end 2007 with my ultimate home-made pavlova.

Pavlova

Ingredients

• 4 large egg whites (preferably at room temperature)
• pinch of cream of tartar
• 200g of caster sugar, split into two quantities
• 1 tsp vanilla essence
• 1 tsp vinegar
• 1 tsp water
  
• 1 heaped dessertspoon of cornflour

Method

1. Beat egg whites with pinch of cream of tartar until very stiff.
2. Gradually stir in 100g of caster sugar.
   
3. Gently fold in second 100g of caster sugar. Mix well.
4. Stir vanilla essence, vinegar and water. Add to mixture.
5. Fold in cornflour.
6. Pour mixture onto a plate or flat dish and shape into a circle.
   
7. Cook in a preheated oven at at 140 degrees Celsius for 10 mins.
8. Cook at 100 degrees Celsius for 45 mins.
9. Cook at 80 degrees Celsius for 15 mins.
10. When finished cooking, turn off heat and leave in oven until cool. This will dry up the meringue mixture and prevent it from going all runny and sticky on the bottom.
    
11. Cover with unsweetened cream and fresh fruit when cool.
    

Make sure the oven door is firmly closed throughout the whole cooking process, including the temperature changes. Opening the door even a tiny crack will result in a flat pavlova! Enjoy. :-)

Making choices

I’ve been at a team meeting in Tauranga these past two days. Last night, 10 of us went out to dinner at the Harbourside Brasserie and Bar at the south end of The Strand. Dinner was incredibly delicious, but the entertainment started as we ordered dessert.

One of our team members (I’ll call him William) had been hanging out for dessert. Now, William is not exactly an adventurous sort when it comes to food. A couple of months ago, I managed to drag him into a Thai restaurant, with anecdotes worthy of another blog posting sometime in the future. As he says, “I don’t like surprises with my food” ... and he means it.

William perused the menu and settled on the ice cream sundae “with your choice of topping”. He chose strawberry topping. The waitress informed him there were only three choices of topping: chocolate, caramel and wild berry. A very confused William consulted the menu again to see if he was right, because he thought it said a topping of your choice, not a topping from someone else’s limited selection.

We pointed out that wild berry was actually better than strawberry, as it contained more berries, of which one was possibly strawberry anyway. No, argued William. It wasn’t better, and that was entirely missing the point; he wanted his choice of topping, and his choice was being compromised. After much laughter and hysterics from the rest of our group, William made his final choice: he chose not to have ice cream at all if he couldn’t have his own choice of strawberry topping. Men!