Candy, sauce

With raspberries in season, a great topping for ice cream is raspberry coulis. It’s tart and delicious and dead simple to make!

Murphys Raspberry Coulis

Ingredients:

• Small punnet (125 gm) raspberries
• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 teaspoon fresh lime juice

What to do:

1. Combine all the ingredients in a blender or food process and puree until smooth.
2. Pass through a fine sieve using a rubber spatula or the back of a wooden spoon until only the seeds are left.
3. Discard the seeds.
4. Enjoy!

Yield: 150 ml coulis

It will last around 3 days if refrigerated, but I suggest you eat it straight away!

Technorati tags: raspberry, lime, coulis, sauce, recipe

I made one of the tastiest things I have in a while – Cajeta. Similar to Dulce de Leche, this Mexican treat is made by reducing goat’s milk with cinnamon and sugar until it caramelises.

The recipe I used was out of Rick Bayless‘ excellent book, Mexican Kitchen. The result was thick, creamy, and utterly delicious.

In fact, I have never made anything from that cookbook that wasn’t fantastic (as long as I could get my hands on the ingredients, which isn’t easy in Ireland!)

If you want to try it, there is a recipe here or here.

We ate it mostly over vanilla ice cream (see right), and it disappeared pretty quickly, I can tell you. Ausra, from our Dingle shop found an excellent use for it – a Cajeta Latte – a Mexican twist on a caramel latte. Yum!

Technorati tags: caramel, cajeta, recipe, goat’s milk, cinnamon, dessert

I have written about Sweetbank Farm several times, the fruit farm in Wicklow. Well, we have just received our first fruit from them – trays of luscious strawberries.

It’s good timing, because I’ve had strawberry and sage on the brain for a while now.

I’ll get around to making ice cream from it, but I started by making a coulis, which can be used as a sauce for many different desserts. It’s an easy recipe, and I was eating it over vanilla ice cream within 15 minutes of starting out!

Strawberry and Sage Coulis

Ingredients:

300g fresh, ripe strawberries
1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 teaspoons sugar
2 fresh sage leaves

What to do:

1. Rinse and hull the strawberries.

2. Put them in a food proccesor or blender and pulse two or three times. You don’t want a puree here! Just break them up a bit.

3. Chop the sage leaves in to fine pieces. (If you use dried sage, use about a half teaspoon).

4. Combine all the ingredients in a sauce pan and cook over low heat for about 10 minutes. Don’t bring it to the boil. Cook it slowly simply to infuse the strawberries with the sage.

5. Serve hot or cold over ice cream or with another dessert.

Technorati tags: strawberry, sage, coulis, sauce, ice cream

 Few Irish people seem to like marzipan, but I certainly do. Perhaps people don’t like it because most marzipan here is terrible, and finding the good stuff is very difficult indeed. It helps that I have a sister-in-law who is from Lubeck, and brings back Niederegger every time she returns from a visit home.

So I was thrilled when a friend recently showed me a recipe for making it, which I had never done before or even considered. My first attempt wasn’t nice at all – dried out and tasteless, and that got my juices flowing – things not turning out become an irresistible challenge!

So I tested several recipes. The best one I found in terms of method was here. Cooking the ground almonds as directed brings out the flavour, and the egg white keeps it soft. (There are recipes using raw eggs, but I kept away from them, in case I ever wanted to use the marzipan in the shops). 

If you want to try it, a few suggestions:

1. Use half the quantities unless you want a huge pile of the stuff.

2. I ignore cream of tartar whenever I come across it.

3. I found I had to add another half cup of ground almonds because the initial marzipan turned out quite soggy.

4. Make sure your ground almonds are super-fine (I gave mine a whirl in the food processor).

In the end, I had soft, tasty marzipan, which I enrobed in 70% chocolate. Yum!

I do think it could use a bit of extra flavouring, and I’ll play around some more. Perhaps I’ll post a recipe when I’m completely happy with it…

Technorati tags: marzipan, almond, chocolate, recipe

 We have been serving chocolate and caramel sauce in our shops for the past six years, and I feel we’ve pretty much perfected them. Hot fudge sauce, however, is something that I miss from time to time. It can be time-consuming to make, but it is so tasty that I’ve been considering adding it to the mix. I feel I’m pretty close with the following recipe, and I’ve also worked on a method of cutting the time down for preparation (some recipes take upwards of two hours to make). If you want to try it:

Hot Fudge Sauce

Ingredients:

150g 70% chocolate
100g butter
100g cocoa
300g sugar
150ml cream
100ml milk

What to do:

1. Melt the butter and chocolate in a double boiler over simmering (not boiling) water.

2. Add the cocoa and stir until it is completely integrated.

3. Keep the chocolate mix warm in the double boiler.

4. Combine the sugar, milk and cream in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring until the mixture boils. Remove from the heat.

5. Add the hot milk mixture to the warm chocolate mixture as follows – add one sixth of the liquid, stir until the liquid is completely incorporated, then add the next sixth, stirring again, and continue thus until all the liquid has been added.  

6. It will clump at first, and it may separate, but keep adding a bit of the milk mixture and stirring it in until the sauce is glossy and smooth.

7. Serve the fudge sauce warm over ice cream! 

Note: This makes quite a bit of sauce, but you can keep it refrigerated for a couple of weeks (if you have that kind of self-control!) 

Technorati tags: hot fudge, sauce, chocolate, ice cream, recipe 

 I have been in the mood for fudge, and with David Lebovitz hosting an event based on chocolate by brand, it seemed a good excuse to pull out the Valrhona and go making it, even though I missed his deadline. Why Valrhona? Well, it is my favourite eating chocolate, and it also tastes the best in many cooking applications. So which one? I decided on Caraibe, because it’s dark enough to keep the fudge from being over-sweet and smooth enough to balance the bitterness of the coffee. In fact, eating it, you would never guess that it has such high cocoa content…

Please note – you will need a good thermometer. The temperatures are very important!

Kieran’s Coffee Fudge Recipe

Ingredients:

500 gm caster sugar
250 ml cream
120 gm Caraibe (66%) chocolate
75 ml very strong coffee
40 gm butter

What to Do 

1. Put all of the ingredients in a good, thick-bottomed pan (it shouldn’t be too small, or it’s more likely it will burn).
2. Melt over low heat, stirring until chocolate and sugar are dissolved.
3. Cease stirring, increase the heat, and bring the temperature to 115C.
4. Immediately place the pan in a cold water bath to stop the cooking process (you can use your sink, half-filled with water).
5. Cool until 80C. Beat with wooden spoon until fudge lightens in colour and becomes more solid.
6. Pour into baking tray and cool until the fudge sets.
7. Cut and serve.

Technorati tags: fudge, chocolate, coffee, valrhona, recipe

 With Wiebke our baker out on maternity leave, I decided to vary things up slightly for the Dingle shop. I’ve always been a big fan of fudge, so I decided to try a combination fudge with dark and white chocolate. It came out very well, and here’s a recipe if you want to try it!

You will need a thermometer. The temperatures are very important!

Kieran’s Fudge Recipe

Ingredients:

1000 gm caster sugar

500 ml cream

120 gm 70% chocolate

120 gm white chocolate

80 gm butter

What to Do 

1. Take half the sugar, half the cream and half the butter and combine with the dark chocolate in a good, thick-bottomed pan (it shouldn’t be too small, or it’s more likely it will burn).
2. Melt over low heat, stirring until chocolate and sugar are dissolved.
3. Cease stirring, increase the heat, and bring the temperature to 115C.
4. Place the pan in a cold water bath to stop the cooking process (you can use your sink, half-filled with water).
5. Cool until 80C. Beat with wooden spoon until fudge lightens in colour and becomes more solid.
6. Pour into baking tray and cool until the fudge sets.
7. Repeat with the other half of the ingredients and the white chocolate.
8. Cut and serve.

(Note: I put in some of the Valrhona craquantes into the white chocolate fudge just before pouring it into the pan and gave it a quick stir. The chocolate melted, and that’s what gives it the marbled effect…)

Technorati tags: fudge, chocolate, white, candy, recipe

 The blackberry season in Dingle hasn’t been great. I don’t know if the last month has been too wet, but so many of the prime picking areas are less than inspiring.

However, there are blackberries to be had, and one great thing to do with them is to make a blackberry coulis. This is basically a sauce that you can serve with desserts, and it’s wonderful over ice cream.

Murphys Blackberry Coulis Recipe

Ingredients: 

250 g fresh blackberries

25 g sugar

25 ml lemon juice

What to do:

1. Combine all of the ingredients in a small saucepan.

2. Cover and cook over low heat for about 20 minutes, checking occasionally to make sure it doesn’t dry out (the moisture from the berries should prevent this).

3. Transfer to a food processor or blender and puree.

4. Pass through a sieve, using a spoon or spatula to force through everything but the seeds.

That’s it!

Note: I served it over vanilla ice cream (see photo right), and it’s a tasty dessert. I got the tower shape simply from cutting away the cardboard from one of our mini tubs and inverting the ice cream…

Technorati tags: blackberry, coulis, sauce, ice cream, recipe