Category Archives: Chocolate

The best chocolate ice cream in the world.

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There is no easy way – unless you’re a professional food photographer in which case you’d be using anything other than actual ice cream – to photograph chocolate ice cream without  making it look like…something else…
See? Here is the same ice cream but photographed at night, by artificial light after we’d had some. See how glorious moussey it looks? That’s how it tastes if you eat it not long after making it. Even a few days’ later it’s still delicious.

I hesitate not in saying this is the best chocolate ice cream you can get. I mean, very probably my dad’s chocolate ice cream was better. And his chocolate chestnut ice cream was damn brilliant. But aside from that, you can search high, you can search deep but you won’t find a better, simpler, chocolate ice cream recipe.

I know because believe me – credemi – I’ve tried.

And, how sweet that this recipe didn’t come from some vast volume of ice cream recipes. I didn’t steal it from a gelateria, or my dad’s shop. It was in the fold out pamphlet of recipes that came from my Panasonic ice cream maker.

I’ve doubled the quantities, because the original made about two portions’ worth (how is it that doubling it seems to make more than double if you see what I mean?). If you can, make this in the morning for eating in the evening. That way it will have had a chance to set a bit, but not go rock solid. It will never be that good again although of course, like all ice cream, it will keep in the freezer for weeks/months.

This last batch I made was using eggs from our own chickens. Coincidence or not it was the best I’ve ever made. So tasty I wanted to eat the whole lot.

You will need:

4 egg yolks – freeze the whites to make madeleines or macaroons or friands another time
100g granulated sugar
160ml of milk – I use semi skimmed and it’s always been fine
2tbsp cocoa powder – I always use Green and Black’s
100g good plain chocolate – I always use Waitrose Continental  (70%), the packet looks unassuming (black with a vanilla coloured banner across the middle) but don’t be fooled, it’s superb chocolate
240ml of double cream, although I have just chucked the entire 300ml tub in there as this is what Waitrose’s comes in and 60ml of cream left in a tub is of no use to anyone.

Beat the egg yolks and sugar together until pale. Do this in a heat proof bowl or a bain marie. You can do this by hand using a little whisk. Don’t be a cissy. You don’t need an electric whisk.

Mix the milk and cocoa powder together to make what looks like a birruva mess. Add this mixture to the egg mix. Place the heat proof bowl over a pan of simmering water (or put the bain marie on the stove if you’re posh and have one, a bain marie that is). Stir until it thickens.

When it’s done, take off the heat and chuck the chocolate in and stir gently but firmly. You will have at the very least broken this into pieces, or if you can be bothered, cut it into smaller pieces. I never can be bothered and it goes in in big, chunky, pieces and it’s fine. You get the occasional shard that doesn’t melt but I quite like that as it’s a bit choc chippy in the final ice cream.

Put it aside to allow to cool – whilst it’s doing this cover the actual surface with a layer of baking parchment. Because I’m posh, I have ready cut circles for just this purpose. Whisk the cream until it’s thick and stir into the chocolate mixture. Refrigerate for a couple of hours before placing in your ice cream maker.

This is no time to be wailing that you don’t have an ice cream maker. YOu’re not taking this seriously enough. You need one. When it’s done decant into a suitable freezer container and freeze.

Eat with abandon and try to forget about the fact that you don’t have a pension. If you eat enough of this ice cream, anyway, you probably won’t live that long.

Chocolate Ganache Hot Chocolate

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I was going to write about Fruit Leathers aka Fruit Roll ups. But I just can’t be bothered. It’s too cold (at least where I am, which is in Suffolk) to write about blackberries and fruit stuff.

Instead I want to write about hot chocolate.

I’ve never been satisfied with commercially available hot chocolate mixes. My dad, in his coffee shop that he used to have, used to make the most exquisite hot chocolate – made with Cadbury’s Hot Chocolate syrup which you couldn’t buy it in the shops.  Cadbury’s has stopped making it now anyway. My dad would make me a cup of half hot milk with the syrup and half ‘schiuma’ – what you English call ‘foam’. It was the best ever hot chocolate and has never, really, been beaten. I’m guessing that if I tasted it now I’d think it was really sweet. But memories, and all that..

For a long time, in the absence of Mr Cadbury’s syrup, the way I’d make hot chocolate was by heating up some milk with some 70% cocoa content chocolate in it, then whisking it all up. It would be dark, rich and not too sweet.

When I was out and I could get it (and you can’t here in Suffolk, please could you open up a branch Antonio), I’d drink Carluccio’s Cioccolata Fiorentina, which is served in espresso cups and is dark and custard-thick. It’s delicious – I urge you to try it if you are ever in a Carluccio’s. You can buy the powder to recreate this drink at home, but it’s hard to replicate what they do in the shop and to have any hope of success you need to make it in large quantities. Also, don’t look at the ingredients as it will put you off.

But the idea of a small cup of something that really hits the spot appeals. I’ve never been a fan of large, mediocre drinks: small and potent is what I’m after.

Last year my youngest daughter was baptised. For the cake part of the party, I made lots of chocolate cupcakes using Nigella Lawson’s recipe (Nigella Domestic Goddess p.168). The icing was chocolate ganache – chocolate melted with cream (I don’t really do sugar or buttercream icing, I mean, it’s nice, for the first mouthful but then it leaves you in a diabetic coma). Nigella’s recipe always makes more ganache icing than you could possibly ever pour onto the cupcakes (as it is, the  icing is a good centimetre thick), but I always make the amount she recommends because I live in fear of my cupcakes one day going naked cos I skimped. On this occasion I had plenty left over, so I kept the rest in the fridge.

(For those interested, I topped the cupcakes with an orange wafer rose from Jane Asher. The effect – orange on a glossy dark brown cupcake in brown paper holders – was smart and sleek which is just what I wanted).

As the party wore on, some die-hards remained. It was October and the evening air was fairly fresh and I fancied hot chocolate. I looked at my now set-solid chocolate ganache in the fridge. I wondered what would happen if I melted it again, added some hot milk and whizzed it up with my Aerolatte frother wand-thing.

It made hot chocolate that was so superb that everyone commented on it, even though by that stage they were fairly tipsy and deep in conversation. Everyone said it was the best hot chocolate they’d ever tasted, even those I didn’t get in an arm lock.

I served it in little ceramic cups so you got just a few mouthfuls, which is all you’d want as it’s imaginably rich…

Chocolate Ganache Hot Chocolate

I’ve adapted this from Nigella’s original recipe as otherwise you’d be drinking it for a week…

90g 70% cocoa chocolate (I use Waitrose Continental – which comes in a black, rather unassuming wrapper – it’s very good)
40g milk chocolate (I use Green and Black’s as it’s a higher percentage cocoa than most milk chocolates, but I don’t use its plain chocolate as I don’t like it as much as Waitrose’s)
100ml double cream
a few drops of vanilla extract (about quarter of a teaspoon).
Milk to suit

Melt the milk and dark chocolate with the cream. You can do it straight in a pan but you may feel safer doing it in a bowl, above a pan of boiling water. Stir until melted.

You should have a very thick mixture. Warm up some milk separately, then carefully and slowly add it to the chocolate/cream mixture. What you’re aiming to do is loosen up the ganache, but you don’t want to add so much milk that you change it into a really runny mixture. You want to end up with something that’s thick: so thick you could eat it off a spoon, but is still drinkable.

Look, no-one said this was going to be easy. If you want a normal, easy to make hot chocolate drink, get any old shit from the supermarket. This is proper stuff that will warm your body and your soul because it requires a bit of care in the making.

It will be worth it.

If you need to homogenise the mixture, you can whisk it up. I use my Aerolatte whizzer thing.

Serve in small espresso cups. If you don’t want to use all the mixture, just refrigerate it before you add the milk; and if you don’t end up eating it straight out of the fridge with a spoon, just melt it down and add warm  milk and whisk it up like that. This way you can actually make just one cup at a time.

Enjoy it. It’s good.

Zotter Chocolate – beware, crazily good

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 Zotter Plum Brandy chocolate. Disgustingly good.

The other Friday I was in London. I’d had a really productive meeting discussing something Really Secret. I had something small and healthy for lunch and decided I really wanted chocolate.

Now for some time, the only chocolate I eat is 70% plus cocoa content. This cuts down what I can buy and how much of the stuff I can eat as it’s really hard for me to eat too much of it. Plus, you know, high cocoa content chocolate is full of iron and antioxidants. Practically health food.

I went to the Food Hall in John Lewis, aka Waitrose in the basement and got into a bit of a tizz in amongst all the whicker baskets (everything, it seems is displayed in them).

“Where is the chocolate?” I asked. Now because the staff in Waitrose are trained to accompany you to the food stuff you’ve asked for, the man took me there, after asking “what sort of chocolate, bars?” to which I’d nodded cautiously (who wants to miss the other kind?)

He took me to this mini display of chocolate, none of which I recognised. The bars were small, 70g, but intriguing. I looked at the price tag of the ‘hand scooped’ chocolate bar: £3.25.

Ordinarily, I would never spend this much  on a bar of chocolate, but I was in London and I live in Suffolk, so I was sort-of on holiday and the sea-air went to my head. My choice was cut down (no “bacon bits” for instance) as only some of them were 70% cocoa. I selected Plum Brandy. I knew I was onto a good thing when the woman at the check-out said “God they’re so good, I had Bacon Bits last week when we had a tasting session”.

I fully expected to, you know, eat half and save half. But this is where I came unstuck. When I opened the bar there were no pieces. It was one big slab of chocolate. I have to say, I’ve dreamed of this. In films like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie bites into one huge slab of chocolate at one point. Plus one big slab is so bossy, it’s like it’s telling you  you can’t cut it up, you have to eat the whole thing.

And it was really hot, so it would have melted, and I couldn’t let £1.625p worth of chocolate just turn to mush in my bag.

Even if it hadn’t have been hot, or the chocolate hadn’t have been in one big slab, it was hopeless. This chocolate bar was just amazing, the inside was this wonderful goo and tasted of plum brandy. I also felt slightly drunk by the end of it which must have been my imagination. I’m so glad it’s not sold in my local Waitrose but if you live in London you can probably find it in yours.

Be careful. Remember what happened with the MaltEaster bunny, although these are two VASTLY different animals.

The MaltEaster bunny

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According to The Grocer magazine, in October 2008, this bunny was launched, by Mars, for the Spring 2009 market.

I never saw it. Did you?

It was/is aimed at the “25-44 year old woman”. That seems improbably precise. Also not true since this is an ideal sweet for children but obviously they can’t say that. It was also backed up by a 1m campaign which was surely a waste of money as I’d never heard of them. But then last year I had just had a baby so maybe was too busy stuffing croissants down my face to notice new chocolate launches.

I’m not a fan of Maltesers. Or I haven’t been since I was about 22. They’re really sweet, although I don’t mind finding one in my Revels. So I wasn’t really ready for becoming addicted to this.

It’s not even cos it’s cute. We have hundreds of feral rabbits in our garden and believe me when I say I’d shoot any one of them without a second thought if I had a gun. Which I haven’t had since I was 18, but that’s another story for another time.

So these bunnies came on display in my local Waitrose just as soon as the December page was turned on the calendar. At first I despaired. Easter egg-type things, already? Then I saw the hot cross buns and realised we really were, fully, on the flight path to Easter. My first Easter confectionery purchase was the two-pack Cadbury’s Caramel bunnies. I like a bit of Cadbury’s Caramel. The bunnies were 59p for two and I like that the damage is limited. By that I mean I’m the kinda girl (unfortunately) that can eat a whole bar of something, (well, up to about 100g, I’m not a total pig, but 100g is easy to consume in a day, especially if you have deadlines to avoid). So something small, treaty, but not diabetic-coma inducing is a good idea for someone like me. Incredibly, one Caramel bunny seems to satisfy me and I even sometimes go as far as sharing/saving the other for my boyfy-husband.

But then, because the MaltEaster bunnies were on special (two for £1) I bought them. They’re not like Maltesers, or whatever it is about Maltesers that I don’t like is remedied with this bunny.

Anyway, the upshot is that you should try them. For one, it’s a chocolate that’s not by Nestle – and that’s getting harder to find. For two it’s nice. For three it’s like a giant, chocolate, jelly baby, albeit a bunny, but you get that moment of indecision where you feel slightly psychopathic as you decide whether you go for the ears or legs first. I always eat the ears first.

I will buy one and take a picture of it, if it can live that long, and put it up later.