Valentines Day Chocolates

Valentines Day Chocolates

Making chocolate is tricky business. Technically you should be tempering the chocolate so that it resets with a healthy shine and cracks, just like when you buy it in the shops. I could write a whole separate post on just how to do that though and I'm guessing that most people making valentines chocs won't have time to do this ;-) So make these and bring them out "fresh" from the fridge, no more than 24 hours later. You should get away with it!

Just a short note: I know most things have already been done so I'm not going to say I invented these chocolates, but I did come up with the ideas myself. That's the best part about making chocolates, you can be really creative once you have some basic techniques down.

Ingredients

100ml double cream

1 tbsp Greek yoghurt

1 tbsp dark rum

lots of dark chocolate (75% cocoa solids

Some 85% cocoa solids chocolate

Some White chocolate

Cocoa powder for dusting a coating

The better quality chocolate you buy, the easier it will be to work with, the better the result and with less wastage. I'd steer clear of cheap supermarket brand stuff.

Firstly to make some truffle mix

Add the yoghurt to the cream, stir it in and heat it up a bit in the microwave so it's not chilled when you add it. Melt about 125g of your 75% chocolate in a double broiler. Always in a double broiler unless you want to waste whole bars of expensive chocolate and spend ages cleaning your pans.

Now, bit by bit add the cream and stir like crazy. The chocolate will want to separate into butter and solids and will probably start to look greasy. Just keep at it, adding a bit of cream and stirring fast to emulsify. You will get there! Half way through throw in the rum as well.

Pour your mixture into a container and put it in the fridge to cool and set.

After a couple of hours you have the perfect chocolate filler and building material.

To make a chocolate cup

Prep up your work area with a sheet of cling film, this really will make life so much easier at the end. You should be able to pick up some paper chocolate cases from a supermarket, like mini fairy cake ones. Somewhere I have a beautiful set of silicone ones in different shapes, but we're between houses at the moment and they're hidden away in a box somewhere.

Melt some white chocolate and pour it into the centre of the case, just to cover the bottom. Give each case a few little taps which will hopefully get rid of any air bubbles. White chocolate is harder to work with than dark, be very careful not to burn it.

Put these in the fridge until the White chocolate has set. Once it has take them out, melt some dark, pour a little bit on the side of the cup and rotate gently to give a very thin and even coating around the edge.

Back in the fridge, set and take out for the next bit. Scoop out about half a teaspoon of truffle mix and gently spoon into the cup.

Then top up with more dark chocolate.
Once that's set, peel away the outer case gently and turn the chocolate over, trying not to get your fingerprints on it.

Fold over some paper and cut half a heart out.

Position over the chocolate and dust some cocoa powder over the stencil. Job done!

To make a chocolate stuffed cherry

You need semi-ripe cherries for this. Too juicy and they turn to mush, not juicy enough and you'll never get the stones out.

Remove the stalk, slice around the widest part of the cherry and pop out the stone with a sharp knife.

Discard the stone, fill the cavity with melted chocolate and push the stalk back into one of the cavities to set into the chocolate.

Once the chocolate has set, pat the flesh dry with a paper towel, put a drop of melted chocolate in the middle and put the 2 halves back together.
Drop a little melted chocolate into a case, carefully lay the cherry on it's side so that the cut is facing up, and drizzle more chocolate over the top to seal it all together. Alternatively you could stuff it with a tiny ball of truffle mix and seal the edges with that too.

And finally, the easiest of all, how to make a truffle.

Roll some truffle mix into a ball, dust a plate or worktop in cocoa powder and roll the ball in the powder. Done. Do this just before you present them. Depending on how wet you've made your truffle mix the cocoa powder is likely to adsorb the wet and become an unattractive sticky dark mess. An alternative and way around this is to grate chocolate very fine and roll the truffle in that instead.

Put them all together and you'll have a nice little selection. I also made a dark chocolate only cup and cut a little chunk of stem ginger in syrup to sit on the top for that one.

As you can see the secret is to be rubbish at making boxes so it's obvious you did it yourself.

A good way to kick off Valentines Day celebrations.

Return to the Sauerkraut

I've been sort of poking and prodding and squeezing the sauerkraut everyday for a week now and it's frothing slightly signifying that the fermenting has been successful. So I recon it's time to try some.

It certainly smells the part, not unpleasant, but sort of spicy. I scooped some out onto a plate for a closer look.

Beautiful! It's preserved and fermented nicely. I tried some and it certainly tastes the part too. The peppercorns and juniper berries really transformed the flavour, the cinnamon carried throughout and the caraway seeds forced their way through and lingered afterwards. I was really pleased with the seasoning, but let's be clear, the predominant flavour is a briney one. The cabbage had kept it's crunch too, it tasted really fresh.

The juice came out a really dark and intense colour.

Again the flavour was, well, brine really. There were some other flavours in there though and I reckon mixing that with some other juice might make it quite drinkable. I definitely don't plan on wasting it.

So will I make it again? Yeah! It took virtually no effort and having read all the research I did on it's health benefits I'd almost feel guilty not to!

Classic American Ketchup

Everyone loves ketchup! This is a particularly addictive one though. We had this out at every meal time until it was finished and were dipping breadsticks in it in between as well.

Ingredients


500g Fresh Ripe Tomatoes


150g Onions


150g Cooking Apple


500ml Cider Vinegar


10g Mustard Seeds


1/2 tbsp Tomato Puree


1/2 tsp Ground Nutmeg


1/2 tsp Black Peppercorns


1/2 tsp Sea Salt


1/4 tsp Dried Chilli Flakes


1/4 stick Cinnamon


125g Brown Sugar

Roughly chop up the tomato and chop the onion. Core, peel and chop the apple, then throw it all in a saucepan with all the spices and half the vinegar. I loved taking this pic!

Bring that up to the boil, then reduce the heat and let it all simmer for about 2 hours until its all mushed down and reduced. Then strain it all through a sieve to remove the solids.

That leaves you with something that looks like tomato soup.

Add the sugar and remaining vinegar and again bring to the boil and reduce until its a nice sticky syrupy consistency.

This makes a pretty decent amount, probably between 350ml and half a litre. It's got a bit of heat from the mustard seeds and is pretty vinigary, I'd probably use it in place of BBQ sauce. Or you could do what I did and use it as an ingredient in other sauces.

I hope Henry John Heinz would approve.

Sauerkraut

Only a very quick one this evening, it is a school night after all.

I read about how easy and cheap it was to make sauerkraut and had to give it a try.

Ingredients

About 2kg of cabbage

About 3 tablespoons of kosher salt

Spices of your choice

I thought it might be fun to go for a mixture of white and red cabbage to hopefully turn out a pretty pink sauerkraut. As I'm a first timer I haven't been too adventurous with my spices. I opted for 25 juniper berries, some smoked black peppercorns, about a teaspoon and a half of caraway seeds, about a teaspoon of ground cinnamon and a bit of garlic. Had I had mustard seeds to hand I would have added them and reduced the pepper.

I lightly toasted the peppercorns, chopped up the garlic very fine and combined all the spices.

I shredded and mixed all the cabbage and sterilised the vessel I'm using to ferment in. I'm actually using a food grade plastic small brewing bucket.

Now the fun part...

Pack a layer of cabbage into the bottom of the bucket and ram it in tight with your fist. Now sprinkle some salt over the top and add a bit of the spice mix. Put in another layer of cabbage and ram it in again. Keep layering until you've used up all your salt and spice and cabbage.

The plan is the salt will draw the water out of the cabbage (through osmosis) to make it's own pickling brine, then the bacteria on the cabbage will ferment it.

I placed a sterilised plate on top and a jar of water to weigh it down. I want to keep all the cabbage under the surface of the brine. I stretched some cling film over the top just to stop any creepy crawlies finding their way in.

Now to just leave it in a quiet corner and let it do it's thing! The water should have been drawn out of the cabbage after about 24 hours so I'll check back then.

After 24 hours the Level of the brine still hasn't quite made it over the top of the level of the cabbage.

So I've topped it up with a rather strong brine solution and we'll see how that gets on.

To be returned to in about a month to see if my super healthy sauerkraut will be added to my list of epic successes or my list of heroic failures...

Haloumi

We're in the process of moving house and our new one is still pretty much in the gutting and rebuilding stage at the moment. However, I'm desperate to get on with making some cheese. The conditions in the kitchen where we're staying at the moment serve up enough challenges as it is, without the added difficulty of attempting to find a suitable and clean environment to age a hard cheese in. So, the plan is to make haloumi which matures in a brine and won't object to the humidity or temperature of wherever I leave it to age.

I'm also limited to the amount I can make. My largest cooking vessel is 1 1/2 gallons and my cheese press probably can't handle a particularly high yield. So I'm halving the recipe to a modest 1 gallon of whole milk and 2 ounces of prepared mesophilic starter culture.

In preparation, the night before I took the milk out of the fridge and sterilised all the equipment for the morning. This will be an all day effort and I don't want to delay the start by waiting for the milk to get up to temperature and the Milton tablets to do their business.

The milk is heated to a delicate 30degC, this should not be done over direct heat. As I obviously don't have a vessel large enough to hold my largest vessel I've opted to do this in the sink, which presents me with the first problem of this kitchen in that the plug leaks and has to be packed around with cling film to keep the water in. Also doing this will mean you need to pay constant attention to the temperature and occasionally drain and replace the water in the sink which could lead to an infection issue as the thermometer will be constantly in and out of the milk.

Once at 30degC pitch in the starter culture and a few drops (1\4 a teaspoon) of liquid rennet. This needs to be stirred in an up and down motion (to evenly distribute the rennet) and left to set for 30-45 minutes until the milk gives a clean break with the thermometer. This should look something like this:

It took an extra hour for mine to get to this stage, and really I should probably have left it a little longer ideally, but I'm getting seriously behind on schedule so I moved on to the next stage. Cut the curds into half inch cubes with a sharp knife. That means cut across one way, turn 90 degrees and cut across the other way, then cut diagonals to slice across the curds below the surface.

Now bring the temperature up to 40degC over the course of 45 minutes. About 1 degree every 5 minutes. This involves constant attention, you have to gently stir the curds from time to time to keep them from matting. Mine are particularly fragile as I didn't leave them to set for very long. After 45 minutes they are very clearly visible against the whey.

Leave at this temperature for another 20 minutes and carefully ladle the curds into a colinder lined with cheese cloth.

The whey I'm retaining for a bit later so this goes back into the milk containers from this morning. On a side note, never throw whey away. You can make the best ricotta just by heating it on a stove and adding some lemon juice. But that's for another day...

Press the curds into moulds and press at 30lb of pressure for an hour, then re-bandage, turn over and press at 50lb of pressure for 30 minutes.

As you can see it's risky business, a bit like playing Buckaroo but with slightly more dire consequences as 22kg of weight goes crashing about in the kitchen. It's a relief to free the 2 moulds of curds and admire how well they turned out.

Cut them into 3 inch cubes, or in my case cut them in half as they're already quite small.

In a bit I'm going to need some cooled brine so I'd better get on with that. Add 500g of kosher salt to 1 gallon of nearly boiling water and leave to cool to make a saturated brine solution.

Bring that reserved whey up to between 80 and 90degC and cook the curds in the whey for 1 hour.

After an hour they should be firm with a texture a bit like chicken meat. Place them in a colinder and salt them with 25g of kosher salt. Now just leave them for 2-4 hours in the colinder.

Earlier I had prepared a saturated brine solution and this is what the cheese will age in. Leave it for 60 days to develop a true flavour.

I'll come back to these in March! :-)

If you like halloumi, consider holidays in Cyprus.

Polish Rye Bread

Here's an easy one to get started with, or at least it should be. I seem to have more difficulty in guessing the wetness of the dough and how much to work it, it always leaves me slighty worried as to whether it's going to be too stodgy.

Great bread though, the honey and milk make it, and the salt and the caraway cut through beautifully.

Ingredients

225g Rye Flour

225g White Bread Flour

2 tsp Salt

1 Sachet (7g or 15g if using fresh) Yeast

2 tsp Caraway Seeds

1 tsp Runny Honey

140ml Luke Warm Milk

140ml Luke Warm Water

Sieve the flours and the salt into a bowl and make a well in the centre to pour your liquids into. Combine the milk, honey and yeast and mix well until the honey is fully dissolved into the milk and the yeast is creamed in. Pour the mixture into the well in the flour and flick some of the flour from around the edge over the top. Leave this to "sponge" for about 15 minutes to activate the yeast and wake it up. It should be a bit bubbly and frothy.

Pour in the water and incorporate all the flour to make a dough. It should be smooth and slightly elastic. Work it for about 10 minutes on the worktop and transfer to a lightly oiled bowl.

Cover the bowl in cling film and leave in a cool place to prove for about 3 hours. It should double in bulk.

Prepare a baking tray with some lightly oiled baking paper. Tip the dough out onto the worktop and knock it back (literally, punch it). Shape it into a sort of oval cushion shape and place it on the baking tray. Cover this lightly in cling film and leave for an hour to second prove.

Pre-heat the oven to 220degC. Lightly dust the loaf with flour and with a very sharp knife make 2 slashes along the length of the loaf.

Bake it for 30-35 minutes. It's done when tapping it on the base makes a hollow noise. Cool it on a wire rack.

It's a perfect loaf to make the day after a roast post joint because it goes brilliantly with the cold meat, so good for using up leftovers at lunchtime.

A suitable bread for eating just before lent.