A Brazil-themed evening with my ladies group

On Tuesday my ladies group (NWR) came round to my house for a Brazil-themed evening and to discuss various aspects of life in Brazil. I took the opportunity to bake some finger food and desserts that are popular with Brazilians. I had not made any of these before and did not taste them before my friends did, so it was all experimental. The first problem I had was on the recipe selection. Most snack or street food in Brazil is deep-fried, which I try to avoid. Several of the recipes I chose had ingredients I could not buy here so they had to be discarded. The majority of the rest included condensed milk and/or coconut. These were the recipes I made.

 Brazilian Cheese Bread (Pao de Queijo)

 This is gluten free because it is made with tapioca flour. I could only find this flour in a health food store. The other ingredients are olive oil, water, milk or soy milk, salt minced garlic, parmesan cheese and 2 beaten eggs. It is made in a similar way to choux pastry as all the liquid ingredients are brought to the boil in a pan and then removed from the heat and the flour added immediately. When mixed with the liquid it looks like cottage cheese. The egg and cheese are added after the mixture has cooled for ten minutes. Golf-ball size portions are put on an ungreased baking tray and cooked for 15 minutes until slightly brown. The result was doughy and slightly greasy, but  very pleasing. (allrecipes.com)

White Pudding (Cuscuz Branco)

This is a traditional dessert. It is made from milk, coconut, condensed sweetened milk, pearl tapioca, (again from a health food shop) and granulated sugar. The dry ingredients are placed in a serving dish and the liquids brought to the boil and poured over them, then left to cool for several hours. It is then covered with coconut shreds and served cold. (Meal Planner Pro)

 Coconut Little Kiss (Beijinho de Coco)         Brazilian truffles (Brigadeiro)

These two recipes are very similar. They are both made by boiling up a can of condensesd milk with butter until firm and then moulding into balls. The white ones had coconut added and were decorated with a whole clove while the dark ones had cocoa added instead of the coconut and were decorated with vermicelli (sugar strands). Both were quite squashy and very sweet. Too many saturates for my liking. (bbcgoodfood.com)

Rice Pudding Cake with Rum and Raisin Apples 

Most countries have a varient of this cake, but this is the way they make it in Brazil. It is made from whole milk, double cream, vanilla, lemon zest, light brown sugar, salt, butter and risotto rice. All the ingredients except the eggs are boiled in a saucepan and simmered whilst stirring for 15 minutes until thickened. Then allowed to cool slightly. In the meantime a sandwich tin is greased and spread with dulce de leche (caramel sauce). The cooled rice is spread on top and baked for 25 minutes until just set.


To accompany the cooled cake a few apples are peeled and sliced, tossed in cinnamon sugar and fried in hot butter. Once brown, the rum and raisins are added. This makes a nice fruity toffee sauce to serve with the slices of cake. (Food Network UK)



Passion Fruit Mousse (Mousse de Maracuja)

This was absolutely delicious and so easy to make. Double cream, sweetened condensed milk and passion fruit pulp. Mixed together in a blender and poured into glasses or ramekins. The hardest thing about making this recipe was getting the passion fruit juice. I looked everywhere for it and the only thing I found was a passion fruit coulis in M&S. To this I added the pulp of 3 passion fruit. I think the big black pips are unsightly so I sieved the mixture before putting it in the glasses. The recipe called for it to be topped with a raspberry but I thought that detracted from the flavour of the passion fruit. The mousse was slightly acidy, but not too sweet and very flavoursome. This was a big hit with my ladies and I shall make this again.

My overall conclusion about Brazilian food is that it is quick and easy to make, but the desserts are very sweet and laden with fat. However it was enjoyable trying out these dishes and the evening was a big success.

January treats

Chocolate Yule Log

This is a light sponge filled with chocolate ganache. It is Edd Kimber's recipe published in the Christmas Food special of the Radio Times in December. Mary Berry uses similar ingredients to make her Celebration Chocolate Mousse cake. It is very light and delicious as a dessert, but can only be eaten in small portions as it is very rich!

Bread Pudding
This is Bread Pudding which is eaten as a cake, rather than Bread and Butter pudding which is lighter and eaten as a dessert.

I made it from a left-over Hovis wholemeal loaf. The loaf was soaked in a bowl of water for half an hour, then the water squeezed out. I used a sieve to push down on the mushy bread until the water stopped dripping out. Then added sugar, vegetarian suet, spice, mixed dried fruit, juice and zest from a lemon and orange, 2 beaten eggs, and lots of mixed spice. It should end up with the consistency of a fruit cake, if not add some milk. Put in a greased roasting tin and cook in the oven 180C, 350F, Gas Mark 4 for an hour and a half. Allow to cool and cut into squares. Best eaten soon after baking, otherwise store in the fridge and then sap it in the microwave before eating. It freezes well and tastes delicious. Great for those needing high fibre diets.

First cook-up in the new house

To introduce ourselves to the neighbours we invited them round for pre-Christmas drinks and nibbles. It was a chance to try out the new kitchen which is my ideal baker's kitchen. I planned a lot of finger food, but time limited me to the following:

 Nibbles for Neighbours

 Prawn Cocktail crostini

From a BBC Good Food magazine recipe, but I left out the avocado and cut the slices of ciabatta in half to make small finger bites. Cocktail sauce is just mayonnaise and tomato ketchup with a sprinkling of cayanne pepper on top. Lettuce leaf and tiger prawns completed the crostini.

 Smoked salmon blinis

This is a recipe I have done many times. I downloaded it many years ago. It should be smoked salmon on soured cream on party blinis, with a sprinkling of lemon zest on top. However my nearest Tesco supermarket did not stock blinis. I bought square wholemeal pitta breads. Toasted them and cut them in four. They made a good canape base.

Cheese on toast with ham hock                        These were a failure. I adapted a recipe I saw somewhere, but the experiment didn't work. The base was toasted rye bread. The cheese mixture had mustard and milk in it and after spreading on the bread was sprinkled with ready-pulled ham hock before toasting. They tasted very salty and the rye bread was hard.

 Baby meringues.

Mary Berry's striped baby meringues. I made hollows in the top of some and when cooked placed a raspberry in the hollow. My mistake was using thawed frozen raspberries. With hindsight it might have worked better with fresh raspberries. The plain meringues were great. Three egg whites produced dozens and they keep for weeks in an airtight container.

Portuguese custard tarts

I love these. They are best eaten fresh, but freeze well. They are just shop-bought puff pastry rolled out and then rolled up into a sausage-shape. The pastry is then sliced (like refridgerator biscuits) into rounds and these are placed into a mini-muffin tin. The custard uses whole milk and egg yolks so it is very rich, but these are just one mouthful each. The recipe comes from: Petits Fours published by Murdoch

books.

Christmas buns

Recipe from BBC Good Food magazinne. These are made from yeast dough rolled out to the size of a swiss roll and spread with dried cranberries, dried apricots and cinnamon. I soaked the dried apricots in orange juice before hand. The dough is normally rolled up tight and sliced to produce buns the size of Chelsea buns, but I wanted them finger size so I halved the oblong of dough lengthwise before rolling up into small rounds. After cooking they were glazed with apricot jam and when cold drizzled with icing sugar. Very sweet, but moist and delicious.

Not shown here are my signature mini sausage rolls. I use shop-bought puff pastry, a pack of sausage meat intended for turkey-stuffing, and my home-made red onion marmalade. After rolling out the pastry I cut it into 6cm strips. I then spread the strips with the marmalade and then a thin roll of sausage meat before sealing the edges of the pastry around the sausage meat. I then cut the rolled up strip into 1 cm sections and bake. They produce bite-sized sausage rolls with a sweet oniony flavour. Lovely!

Orange and Pineapple Cake

Whilst looking for a different type of recipe to test the skills of my Kitchenaid mixer I came across a recipe for an Orange and Pineapple Cake in a Good Houskeeping Complete book of Cakes and pastries. The recipe called for glace pineapple cubes, which must have been available when the book was printed in 1981, but I could not find them. Instead I used fresh pineapple in the cake and dried pineapple on the top. It was very tasty. I shall make this again.

More experiments with the ice-cream maker

I made a mango sorbet using the Kitchen Aid ice-creamer maker attachment. I used real fruit and liquidised it and then sieved it. The Kitchen Aid manual recipe only uses the juice to make a sorbet, but I notice that other ice-cream recipes use the fruit pulp. I decided to use the pulp as well as the juice. It was delicious. It only took ten minutes of mixing to produce a 'slushy' which I then froze into a sorbet. The result was a very flavourable dessert. What we didn't eat I froze for another day. Sadly the the next time it was served the flavour was not so strong. Lesson 6: Do not keep fruit sorbet too long as it loses its flavour.

It occured to me that if I froze the sorbet in a silicone baking mould I could make the sorbet into shapes. I used a canele mould to produce these. I will try other moulds next time.

 Cheesecake

I love cheesecake, but I am on a low-fat diet. I recently saw a baked cheesecake recipe that used no-fat quark so I tried it. It worked well. Rather than make one large cake that might have tempt me to eat more than I should I made individual ones in a silicone small loaf mould. I baked the base separately then cooled it and added the Quark and baked that. When cool we ate the cheesecake 'bare', but it needed something else so I poured a sweetened blackcurrent coulis over it.

The fruit flavour was a bit overpowering, so the following day I added gelatine to the coulis and topped the remaining cheesecake portions with it. It made all the difference. A really nice dessert without overloading the blackcurrent flavour or the saturates.

First batch of ice-cream

For the first go at making ice-cream I decided to make the 'pukka' vanilla ice-cream with whole milk, egg yolks and double cream.

It was great - creamy, smooth, delicious. The problem was that it was too rich and so could only be eaten in small quantities. I will now experiment with other flavours and fats. The good thing about the ice-cream maker is that it can be stored in the freezer and ice-cream or sorbets can be made within half-an-hour. This is the length of time the maker needs to stir the batter mixture into ice-cream.

Last night's dessert was a meringue cake. I used the egg-whites left over from making the ice-cream and a recipe from an earlier series of Bake Off. There was a layer of chocolate fudge cake with a meringue layer at the top and bottom. The filling was creme fraich and tinned mandarin oranges. It should have had raspberries but I didn't have any. It tasted OK, but with the cake element was a bit filling. Lesson Number 5: Find another way of using up the egg whites, or eliminate the cake layer.

More from the mixer ...

The mixer manual has a setting for creaming potatoes so I thought I would cream the potatoes for these shepherds pies. I used red-fleshed Highland Burgundy Red potatoes that go very mushy when boiled (I bought these because they were red-labelled with a 75% reduction!). To make up the quantity I added a parsnip.

Individual Shepherds Pies

The mixer did not cream as well as I had hoped and I had to finish the creaming by hand. I then grated cheese on top of the potato for a nice finish. 
Lesson No 4: refer to Lesson number 1.









Having learned from Lesson No. 2 that the mixer is great for whisking I attempted a lemon meringue pie from scratch. I used a James Martin recipe, but only used half the quantity because my dish was smaller than his.

Lemon Meringue Pie

The result was great, and as you can see from the photo the mixer produced an enormous amount of meringue from just three egg whites. Next time I will try piping the meringue to give a better finish.

Kitchenaid Ice-cream maker attachment

There was big excitement this week. Kitchenaid's special Christmas offer was a free ice-cream maker and when it arrived on Tuesday I was eager to try it out. Disappointingly the first requirement is to place it in the freezer for a minimum of 15 hours before it can be used. I also need to buy some whole milk, cream and more eggs before I can make the recipes in the manual. In the meantime I have been surfing for ice-cream recipes and found lots that have less fattening ingredients so I will experiment with various milks and alternatives to cream and let you know how they compare. I have never used an ice-cream maker before so I am really keen to experiment.