I can’t remember how it all started. I think I was browsing through some cookbooks . As it happens (a lot) I got interrupted after a few minutes and left the books on the coffee table. Fast forward a few hours, I can’t remember, my 8 y.o ., like a curious little possum, goes through the books and starts selecting pages. I am not even aware of that at the time. In the end, we got these chocolate crackle tops for lunch boxes and a beautiful chocolate cake for dessert. Yes, you guessed right, those cookbooks I was browsing were all chocolates books, this is how it ended up with chocolate!
Chocolate crackle tops
These chocolate crackle tops are quite interesting. By the way, the recipe is HERE. It is best not to use a strong chocolate (50% or so is fine) and to add, as per the recipe, a good cocoa. And yes, please make me a favour, use a good cocoa and even preferably a dutch cocoa! But if like me you only have 70% cocoa chocolate handy and couverture chocolate on top of that (that was for the first batch- we did two batches over the week), you need to adapt a little the recipe. I would recommend sticking to compound chocolate (i.e. your supermarket cooking chocolate) for this one.
We had a good time doing those, I think Ambrine has now mastered the centrifugal icing sugar coating force! Instead of pushing the ball in the icing sugar, we used a light plastic bowl with a handle which she could spin rapidly. It is a lot of fun to have several balls racing on the edges of the bowl (and not flying everywhere!).
Coating in icing sugar , ready, steady, roll!
And the chocolate cake?
mmmmm. I need to do it again! Just for the photo, of course! It is a recipe from Valli Little called the Yin Yang Chocolate cake. Coming soon…
This week is the story of a random discovery around fennel. A fennel is a great looking vegetable but apart from that quite puzzling ! I have always used it a little here and there in salad or as crudity.
I bought a batch of small fennels recently, obviously having no idea what to do with them, but they were saying “put me in your basket, please, please !”. So I did. And I did not give them another though until I realised it was about time to do something with them or I would just end up putting them in my compost bin. Which I hate doing.
So what did I have at hand?
Four beautiful small fennels
A batch of freshly made puff pastry (I wanted to do an apple tarte or tarte fine, I have run out of apples and still not tarte! )
A nice piece of fresh soft goat cheese.
An opened bottle of riesling.
No backup plan
And if you know about Scotland Island, you will know that popping up to the shop because you are missing an ingredient is not an option! I am taking that opportunity to provide you with a little slide show of this great place. 🙂
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Caramelised fennel and goat cheese tartlets
This is about something warm, yet light and fresh for autumn.
The concept:
The fennels are halved and placed in a thick bottom frypan with a generous amount of salted butter and allowed to slowly cook, covered. After 10 minutes, I added one glass of white wine, a good pinch of rock salt and further cooked for up to minutes. It should be almost cooked through, still a little firm on top. A caramelisation is made at the end by adding a splash of balsamic vinegar to the frypan and reducing it. When ready, all you have to do is place some goat cheese on a square of puff pastry, then one fennel on each tartlet, fresh herbs, red pepercorns and a dash of runny honey. use melted butter to brush the exposed pastry. Bake for 15-20 minutes. Serve with a garden salad. It was delicious! Quite melty wth this light sweetness and still the freshness of the fennel with the tasty butter puff pastry.
How to get that amazing pizza at home? The secrets of a good pizza are many but they are simple and accessible to anybody. I stumbled on them through trial and errors and input from different people, including my brother or a previous flatmate. Now I think we have nailed it! I say we, because my two daughters are now in charge of the topping and are getting pretty good at it.
We do pizzas regularly, maybe a few times per month. A pity I don’t take more photos or them, the ones last weekend were amazing! My children invariably ask for the Hawaiian pizza (ham, cheese, pineapple). Not my favourite! The “grown up” pizza is different depending what we have in the fridge: a salami pizza, a three cheese pizza, a vegetarian pizza and even a tahini based with spices mince pizza.
A variation of the traditional Hawaiian pizza, swapping ham for sausages
Here are my secrets, I expend on each further down:
The dough: keep it thin and simple
The order of the ingredient: cheese does not go on top but directly above the tomato sauce
The quality of the ingredients: good quality ingredients and please no tin food (exception of the pineapples pieces!), use fresh food!
Limit the amount of main ingredients: there should be up to 3 key ingredients above the cheese layer, no more. See the list below
The use of a hot oven and pizza tray or pizza stone: make sure your oven is super hot, same for the pizza tray. I use these large aluminium pizza tray (less than $10 each at hospitality stores, same as in pizza shops), they do a great job and are easy to handle. I prepare the pizza on baking paper which when ready I slide onto the hot tray.
Here we go in more details.
Secret No 1: the dough
Making your own dough at home is not hard nor does it require hard labour. Feel free to use a food mixer (dough hook) but if you are making just one pizza, your food mixer may be too big for the small amount of dough. For pizza, I don’t mind doing it by hand from the start.
Preparing the dough
A very large pizza (or 2 medium) will need 250 g plain flour (bakers flour if you have some), 150 g of warm water, 1/2 sachet of dry yeast (4 g), a good pinch of salt, 1/2 tsp of honey, a drop of olive oil.
Note here that honey and olive oil are not strictly necessary t the process. I find that the olive oil makes the process easier and smoother and gives the pizza base a little extra taste. The honey is not necessary to the rising of the dough, it does help accelerate it and more importantly for me, give a tiny sweet touch to the base.
It is important not to put the salt in direct contact with the yeast (it kills it).
Mix all together, if the dough is a little dry add additional water one spoon at the time (it can happen as some flours require more water). Once you have a ball, punch that ball on the counter back and forth. it is very easy if you alternate hands each time: push with the right hand to the back (and a bit left for ease), bring back, push with the left hand to the back (and right) and bring back. This move is effortless.
Last weekend, I had some friends of my young children wanting to help in the kitchen towards the end of their playdate, the 6 years old little girl did a great job while chatting away, just to show you how effortless it is.
After 5 minutes your dough will be quite soft and flexible. This is enough, let it to rest in a bowl covered with a cloth. If you don’t have much time, give it 1/2 h rest minimum, otherwise, wait until double, knock back gently, this is then ready to use.
A thin dough
Unless you train again and again to master extending the dough when suspended on the top of your fist, you need to find something that works for you. For me, I simply use a rolling pin with a little flour for dusting . I roll the dough quite thin over a baking paper. Make sure it does not stick to it, and rest for a few minutes while getting all the ingredients ready (or calling in the kids to do the topping). And don’t worry if the form tends to look like the map of Australia, even better!
Secret No 2: the order of the ingredients
The order should be:
Tomato sauce
Cheese
If I am using white mushrooms very thinly sliced, this is when I put them
Meat or vegetable
Additional item such as olives, capers, small quantities of blue or goat cheese
And finally some salt if necessary and a filet of olive oil
Secret No 3: the quality of the ingredients
If there is something I do not like it is to get tinned vegetables on my pizza, let it be artichokes, peppers or others, yuk! They taste of tin food, most of the time because they have not been rinsed.
For me, a pizza is a great opportunity to use these remaining mushrooms, or that lonely capsicum which otherwise may have to wait a little longer until I get an idea of finally chuck the all in a soup or casserole! Be creative! And if you are not the creative kind, don’t worry, planning for pizza in your shopping will at least mean no bad surprises!
Secret No 4: limit the amount and numbers of ingredients
Caution! You are not trying to replicate Mt Everest, nor are you trying to empty your fridge. If so, invite your friends and have a pizza party!
For me, a maximum of three core ingredients is like an unspoken practice. Then there are the small garnishes which can add a lot to a pizza. See the table below.
Base
Core ingredients
Additions
Tomato
red onions
fresh thyme, rosemary
salami, ham
little specks of goat cheese or blue cheese
pinapple
olives
mushrooms (white or the asian styles, which then go on top)
capers
capsicum cut in long strips
dash of olive oil
green asparagus
pressed garlic (small quantities here and there)
thinly sliced potatoes (the waxy style)
cherry tomatoes (cut in halves or full)
anchovies
fresh salmon, prawns, fish pieces, mussel and other seafood (all in raw form)
for a cheese pizza, the different cheese
bocconcini
Thinly sliced fresh tomatoes
Sour cream
Salmon (fresh), capers
olives, fresh dill (once cooked)
red onion cut in circles
Tahini
spiced mince (mix mince with 2 tbsp tomato paste and marocan spice mix)
pressed garlic
olives, rosemary, fresh herb (once cooked)
cherry tomatoes (cut in halves or full)
Asian mushrooms and asparagus. This one was a trial, it was actually quite beautiful!Hawaiian pizza
Secret No 5: the cooking of the pizza
Now, you need a super hot oven to start with and as importantly a hot base. Either you use a pizza stone or a pizza tray, up to you. The bricks of a wood fired pizza oven play a great role in getting that base cooked and crispy. If you base is too thick, you will most likely overcook the top. What temperature? I preheat my oven at 250 °C, and bring it down at 200 for the cooking.
Cooking time ? 10 minutes roughly. Just enough to prepare the side salad!
I hope you had a great Easter. The next question is what to do with all these Easter eggs? Here are some ideas on how to use Easter eggs. The outcome result will be directly proportional to the quality of the chocolate of your eggs. Because Easter eggs are often done with very sweet chocolate, I will advise you to reduce the sugar quantities in each recipe.
Three ideas to use your Easter eggs:
Use the easter eggs in choc chip cookies. You can use my great choc chip cookie recipe. You will need to reduce the sugar amount probably 50 g less for each type, simply because Easter eggs are usually very high in sugar.
Melt the chocolates and use them in a simple chocolate cake. One of the easier recipe, made so many times as a child and now if the Queen of Sheba Cake (Reine de Saba). Again here, reduce the sugar by a third. double the base recipe given and use a round cake tin for an afternoon tea cake.
Easter eggs go around cake! This is a plain cake in which we insert two circles of Easter eggs. The fun bit is that those eggs often fall in the cake and cannot be seen once the cake is cooked. This is the recipe I am sharing below.
Easter eggs go around cake:
I made this one this weekend for a bunch of children who were spending the afternoon with us. One of the child helped me making the cake. She loved placing the eggs around. There was no left overs!
Ingredients:
4 large eggs
240 g of butter, melted
180 g of caster sugar
240 g of flour
1.5 tspn of baking powder
Easter eggs (about 20)
Method:
Preheat the oven at 180°C.
Butter the bottom and sides of a large round tin, line the bottom with baking paper.
Place the eggs and sugar together and beat (using a large whisk or a food mixer) until light and fluffy.
Add the butter slowly mixing. Then add the flour and baking powder together and mix with a wooden spoon.
Transfer the batter to the tin, unwrap the chocolate eggs and place in two circles or in a pattern of your choice.
Spare time this weekend? What about homemade Easter eggs?
I tried this last weekend with my daughters. This is a lot of fun, and yes, the children do tend to eat a fair bit of the chocolate in the process. I used couverture dark chocolate, couverture milk chocolate and couverture white chocolate. Now if you do not have the couverture chocolate, use a good quality one from the supermarket. For white chocolate, it will not change anything because white chocolate is purely cocoa butter (and sugar). What is important to ensure the little eggs and bigger eggs too come off the moulds in one piece and all shiny, is to temper the chocolate. You do need a special thermometer with a range at least between 25 and 55°C. Those are easy to find in any cooking shop. And since you are going to that shop, get a few moulds for chocolates! For small pieces, silicone or plastic moulds are fine, for larger pieces, I prefer the plastic ones, they are easier to use when comes the time to pop out the piece from the mould.
Tempering the chocolate is a three stages process, the chocolate needs to be melted slowly (ideally on a bain marie), then cooled down to about 26-27°C. For that stage, there are a few approaches. Finally, the chocolate is slightly warmed up to 31-32°C which makes it easier to work with (a little more runny).
The cooling down of the chocolate (step 2) can be done by:
Waiting until the chocolate cools down mixing from time to time. Pretty straight forward but the longest in term of time.
Adding to the melted chocolate some finely cut pieces of the same chocolate. This exchange of energy will make your mix cool down much quicker. Keep mixing until the added pieces are fully melted.
pouring the chocolate on a marble top, spreading and gathering it with a flat spatula. You may have seen that method on TV cooking shows. Go for it if you want to try it, I can’t tell you much about it.
Measuring the temperature during the tempering process
Now is the time to use your little moulds, if you want to have them hollow for filling latter, pour tempered chocolate over the mould, distribute to each print, it must be full. Then place yourself over the bowl of chocolate and pour back the excess. Use a large knive to clean the top surface and place to cool down in the fridge. Once they are hard, you can do the filling.
If you want full eggs (or other shape), keep the print full, clean the top surface and let to cool down and harden (again quicker in the fridge). You can choose to mix up colours or to have a little of another chocolate for a feature part of the item, as is the case on the flowers we made.
To attach two halves together, heat up a baking sheet (not too hot). Place each half on it to melt the edges a little. If you are filling the eggs with a truffle, fill them ensuring they do not overflow. Then stick the two halves together!
Tips: try to keep clean hands to avoid leaving traces on the tempered chocolate
Tips: White chocolate, then milk chocolate will harden much quicker than dark chocolate. Tis is directly related to the proportion of cocoa butter in the chocolate.
Making larger pieces
This can get a little tricky. The key is to make sure the thickness of the chocolate is sufficient in the fragile parts: the edges, the collars of the bunny, ears of the bunny , etc.
Pour the chocolate, remove the excess after 2 minutes. Cool down (quicker in the fridge). When solidified repeat and place face down on a baking paper sheet. If you judge that the edges are too thin, use a kitchen brush to add chocolate along the edges. Cool down completely. The shapes will actually come undone from the mould on their own, this can take overnight. Alternatively, when you see it has solidified, you can pull out opposite sides of the moulds to check if the form is ready to come out. Then you just need to assemble by melting the edges of both pieces on a warm baking sheet and joining together.
This is the perfect season for the sugar tarte or maybe just an excuse to do it as really it can be done and remains delicious all year round.
I think I promised this recipe a long while ago, and I spoke about it in my rhubarb post. It is a specialty from the northern part of France and from Belgium. For me, this tarte au sucre, as I know it, means the smell of the fresh yeast which had to be mixed up with a little milk, then the touch of the soft dough when spread in the tin and of course the final taste of it!
If you are wondering who are the biggest fan of it, no hesitation: kids! That said grownups also love it.
La tarte au sucre, the concept:
A simple yeasted dough with a topping of soft brown sugar and cream.
Want to make it? Yes!
Ingredients:
For the dough
200 g of plain flour
100 g of butter
1 egg
2 tbsp of milk
1 tbsp of caster sugar
10 g of fresh yeast (or 4 of dry yeast)
1 pinch of salt (omit if using salted butter)
For the toping:
125 g of soft brown sugar
1 dL (100 mL) of cream
Method:
In a large bowl, place the flour in the bowl and with a spoon, make a well (a hole in the middle of the flour in which you will place all the other ingredients).
Dissolve the yeast in the warm milk.
Add in the well, the yeast, butter, caster sugar, egg and salt.
Mix until you obtain a nice dough.
Transfer into a large bowl, cover with a clean tea-towel and allow to rise in a warm corner until almost double.
Preheat the oven on 180°C.
Butter and flour your tarte tin. Transfer the dough and using the palm of your hand, spread it gently making a little edge. in the centre spread the soft brown sugar, then randomly pour the cream.
Rhubarb! Some may know, some may wonder what I am speaking about.
Rhubarb is definitely not, or maybe not yet, a fixture in the average customer’s grocery trolley. In places it is even hard to find. Well, well, it is the right season around Sydney. Let me introduce you to it.
The rhubarb plant
Rhubarb is a perennial (it means it grows again and again every year on its own) low-lying plant. The plant is half a metre tall and consist of long stalk of reddish colour which thick very large leaves. As a kid, we used to pinch leaves from the veges garden’s plant and use them as umbrellas!
The plant typically grows in temperate climate, hence you shall find plenty reference to it in Northern France, England, Belgium, Germany, etc and their equivalent climate countries around the world. The stalk is what is eaten, cooked. The leaves (I recently learned) are toxic!
Rhubarb Preparation
This is something you can get your child to help with, it is fun.
Cut the leaves and discard.
Rinse/wash the stalks.
Cut the bottom part of each stalk and pull any stringy skin that comes with it
Your rhubarb is ready.
What to do with it?
Here are 5 ideas of what to do with it:
Stewed rhubarb:
This is the easiest use! Just cut in 5 cm pieces, place in a saucepan, add water until mid-heigth (of the rhubarb) and cook gently for about 15 minutes. When stirred it should come apart, just add some white sugar to taste. Want more precision, look HERE.
Rhubarb, yogurt and cereal breakfast
A great combination for an uncommon breakfast. The name and the photo say it all. More HERE.
Roasted rhubarb
This one works great as a side to a vanilla pannacotta or the topping of a cake. To find how to prepare it, click HERE.
A simple rustic rhubarb tarte
This one is a french classic. A short crust pastry, the rhubarb stalks are diced quite small and placed on the pastry. There are 2 choices then: just add sugar and a few nuts of butter (not pictured here) or add an egg, milk, almond mixture, then bake! Yummy. The details HERE.
And finally, a leavened dough rhubarb tart
This dough makes use of the roasted rhubarb and a northern France traditional tarte which dough is made with fresh yeast, the sugar tarte (tarte au sucre). I will cover that tarte au sucre in an upcoming post, just delicious!
Actually double it all up, however I did not take any photo of the first one.
The first cake was a large Paris- Brest salted caramel chocolate ganache. Miam. Indulgent.
The second birthday cake had a few constraints: it had to be a plain cake and have plenty berries on top. Easy for a child birthday cake! For once! What I really like in that cake, is the sponge cake I use to do it. It is the fourth time I use it for birthday cakes (see the unicorn cake and the pokemon cake) and I just love it. This is what I am sharing today. For the full recipe, click HERE.
The sponge cake has hazelnut meal in it. I love that little extra. The rest is pretty simple, you only need to whip some cream and add some berries. I have previously used a raspberry chocolate mousse (based on whipped cream) to fill it, It was beautiful!
It has been a while since I last wrote about breads. Let’s go back to breads! I have updated my sourdough bread explanations with some photos and more details.
If you are still struggling with some aspects of the bread making, don’t be to hard on yourself, it takes time. I remember posting on FB a photo two years ago of a bread I found amazing. Looking back, it was not such a good bread, a beginner’s bread starting to get the hang of it! Keep perseverating!
Just for fun, here is a gallery of sourdough overtime, all mine.
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More fun with 100% hydration breads
100% hydration bread is not to be confused with 100% starter hydration. I am not blaming you if you are not sure of the difference, I wasn’t onto it myself for a bit, I thought this only related to the starter. So, without being too technical, here you are:
100% hydration starter
This is when the starter contains exactly a ration of 1 to 1 of flour and water (by weight). So, if you are always using a liquid starter (for those who make bread every day or every two days), and feed it an equal weight of water and flour, you have a 100% hydration starter.
For those like me, who make bread from every two days to every week (or more), we would keep our starter as a stiff starter to ensure it doesn’t have a mega tantrum. That is 2:2:1 (starter, flour, water). In words: same weight of starter and flour, but half the weight of water. It allows a slower development of the yeast and thus keeps for longer. When I save my starter, I take away 50 g of the developed starter (the rest will go in the bread I am about to make), 50 g of flour and 25 g of water. I mix it all in a ball and put back in the fridge!
Une petite disgression sur les ratios…./ lets explore these ratios….
As a result, when I develop the starter, the ratio of hydration is slightly less than 100%. For a feed of 200 g water, 200 g flour, the starter is 25 g short of water to be 100% hydration (it is 90% hydration).
Does it make much a difference? It depends on the quantity of bread you make per batch. For me 25 g out of a total weight of water (starter and bread) of 620 g of water (25 g in starter, 200 g in feed, 420 in the bread, minus removal of new starter assumed 25 g water), is a 4% difference in hydration. In the end using the 90% or 100% hydration starter in the bread with the quantity I use does not make any difference. The type and origin of the flour will have more influence at that stage that your hydration ratio.
When I go on holidays for a couple of weeks or more (it has worked up to 3 weeks, I have not tried more), I feed it additional flour and water keeping the ration 2:1 (twice as much flour as water).
Have I lost you?
In brief, if you do a few breads at the time (750 g of flour or more), using a stiff or liquid starter before feeding it will not influence the end result.
100 % hydration breads, a trial
I have been reading blogs and following some keen bakers (Ca mia for example has great results with that method) working hard on 100% hydration breads. This ratio applies when you make the bread itself (using 100 % hydration starter or your normal fed starter of course). For those breads, water is used in the same proportion as water. This makes for a very liquid dough. Be assured, the process is completely different. Why do people do it? because of the bubbles! Big beautiful bubbles.
So, I gave it a go this week. I doubled my quantity of starter at the feed stage (just making 2 “normal” sourdough as a back up!). And I had this watery mix which sticks so much to your hands and can end up in a big big messy kitchen before you know! That time you need plenty flour to prevent the dough from sticking onto the workbench or onto your banneton (I use a tea towel shaped in a “U” shape in my roasting dish). When I baked it , I did not give it a chance to come back to room temperature thinking that the cold shape will be slightly firmer to move. Even so, it is really very soft!
And the result? Yum! In taste, much lighter, it is another bread! It is closer to the ciabatta. One bread was a bit flat, the other bread was quite high but had a big bubble in the upper section in one part of the bread. There is definitely a fault in my technique there.
Welcome to autumn! Yeah ! And goodbye to summer fruits. Ohhh 🙁
Here are two inspirations for you:
Autumn inspiration:roasted figs, to serve with a panna cotta, ice cream, a cake or simply some yogurt.
End of summer inspiration: a peach frangipane tart.
Roasted figs
The first one is a dish everyone can make without much kitchen skills. You need a non-stick fry-pan, some butter (salted is better), balsamic vinegar, honey and obviously fresh figs. I bought a tray of over 40 figs for $15 last week, very cost-effective when you consider they can be at $2 piece! It is peak season, so go for it, it is now or never. I had not cooked figs like this before and I must say I will do it again. Make sure to roast them just before serving. And if you are into it, why not flamber them?
I served mine with a vanilla panna cotta and an orange semolina cake. The cake recipe is from the GoodFood website. The cake is surprisingly moist, even before adding the syrup (for the syrup I did not follow the recipe).
As for having figs, plus panna cotta plus cake at once, it was a bit of an extravaganza! The cake was not strickly necessary, it could have been some small dry biscuits, but I thought the children may not be so fan of the panna cotta (and I was wrong).
The frangipane peach tart
For this tart, I was pretty pleased with myself I must say. Ambrine was preparing a pizza (a school assignment was to prepare a meal). I wanted to do a tart to use some peaches which didn’t look too good. They ended up being really good actually! I decided at the last minute to use a tall edges tart tin and dress it up a little bit. This is by no means something hard to make, it takes just a little more time. It took me from start to finish the same time as the pizza from start to finish (including dough), so about an hour and a half.
The tart is a plain short crust pastry, lightly blind baked, a frangipane custard at the bottom then the slices of peaches and to finish it off a brush of apricot jam and some rosemary. Yum!
Here goes another school lunchbox bake. This one is born out of last week storms. From Friday to Sunday, we had strong lightning storms at the end of the days, the storms were quite gusty too! As a result we lost power for a couple of days from Sunday. Not just our house, but all of Scotland Island and the western foreshore actually (map here); a couple of trees brought lines down.
Back to my story, I had this block of beautiful ricotta in the fridge which on day two I realised was not going to last much longer. What do you do with ricotta. Ricotta pancake? Yum, but, no thank you that day. Pasta ricotta bake? Yum, well, one of my daughter is not fan. I was also planning to bake a plain cake of some sort and divide into portions for the children’s lunch boxes. Think a second, what do you like ricotta with? Orange, honey, rhubarb, figs, berries, nuts…all those end of summer, early autumn flavours.
The cake of the week, a 4 minutes chocolate mousse cake
This is the cake of the week. I had been going through my list of recipes “to try”. I must have had this one for a few years!
In essence it is a chocolate cake. What is great is the texture, light and soft. The taste is intense chocolate heaven! Ahah! It is very strong in chocolate warning. We had this cake over two dinners. Try it, it will take 10 minutes to prepare and 4 to bake!
It is not a very tall cake (or use a smaller diameter tin than me, it was my smallest at 18 cm). The recipe is HERE.
3 quick and last minute desserts to help fix that lunch or diner when you are either pressed for time or not willing to spend much time behind the stove!
Then keep scrolling down for a few photos of the week trials! Some are part of upcoming posts!
1 The Summer Fruit Log
This is really simple and requires a very low level of effort! You need one good quality puff pastry, some cream for whipping and some berries. The photo says it all or pretty much!
Such an australian dessert in its style!
2. The Chocolate Friands (for tea or coffee after lunch) for that little extra craving…
This is one of these recipes where you place all the ingredients together, mix, place in the oven and bake and this is it!
The plus +++ of that recipe is that they are gluten free, loaded with chocolate and of course quick and easy to make. And by the way, GF!
3. Back to basics with this yoghurt and berry ramequin
This may not impress the crowds but will definitely please the whole family. Whiz some strawberries with a little icing sugar. Roughly mix it to the yogurt. Add blueberries and sliced almonds on top.
To attach two halves together, heat up a baking sheet (not too hot). Place each half on it to melt the edges a little. If you are filling the eggs with a truffle, fill them ensuring they do not overflow. Then stick the two halves together!
And the result? Yum! In taste, much lighter, it is another bread! It is closer to the ciabatta. One bread was a bit flat, the other bread was quite high but had a big bubble in the upper section in one part of the bread. There is definitely a fault in my technique there.
