Author: Alex

Chocolate Pudding Recipe

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Jamie Oliver's Chocolate Puddings

I was looking around for a chocolate pudding recipe and when I found this one by Jamie Oliver I thought I’d give it a go, because it has the bonus of being gluten free. As you may know, despite living a very gluten filled life myself, I’m always on the look out for gluten free recipes, because I have a few relatives who are either coeliac or avoid gluten.

This recipe has also been posted relatively recently over at Just as Delish. If you’re interested in gluten free recipes, or recipes with a healthy slant, check it out.

Jamie’s recipe, originally featured in Jamie’s Kitchen, serves 6. As we were just two (this was originally going to be made for Andy’s birthday, but it took me a while to get organised) I halved things, made three puddings and fed one to my mum for morning tea.

Begin by melting 60g of dark chocolate with 25mL (5 tsp) of strong black coffee (espresso, if you’re in my household!). I did this as usual in the microwave and a burst at 30 seconds on high was long enough to cause the chocolate to seize. As this is a tiny amount of chocolate, with liquid, be very careful if you’re using the microwave. Otherwise, just chop up the chocolate and pour over the piping hot coffee. Pour the mix into small ice cube trays and freeze.

I used 4″ ramekin dishes as my moulds. Jamie tells you to use 3″ pastry rings or dariole moulds. This makes me pretty sceptical about his quantities for this recipe because even though I halved things and was using larger moulds, I still had enough mixture left over to make a generous sized ‘muffin’ of pudding (the fourth ramekin having been broken some time ago!). So, whether you’re halving or making a full batch, make sure you have a couple of extra moulds in reserve!

Butter the moulds well and refrigerate.

Preheat the oven to 190°C (conventional oven, not fan).

To make the sponge, melt 160g of chocolate with 60g of butter (unsalted). When this mixture has cooled, add to it 3 egg yolks, 50g of ground almonds and 50g of rice flour*.

Whisk the 3 egg whites until soft peaks form and then add 100g of caster sugar and beat until stiff. Note – just because you may have used the KitchenAid while the baby is asleep previously, there is a massive difference between making some brownies using the flat beater and vigorously whisking egg whites on full speed …

Fold the egg whites into the chocolate mix and ensure everything is well combined.

Spoon some mixture into a mould, top with a frozen square of chocolate and coffee, and then cover with more mixture.

Bake for 18-20 minutes (if you’re using a larger mould, like me, you may want to extend that by 5 minutes or so). The puddings will puff up a little while baking and should be reasonably firm.

When done, remove from moulds while hot and serve immediately. We served with cream, because, well, if you’re doing pudding, you may as well do it properly.

While these puddings were nice they were … just that. I thought it was a lot of effort to go to for a dish that didn’t really stand out. I disliked the ‘just in time’ nature of the dish – if you were entertaining you’d spend the pause between dinner and dessert in the kitchen making these as there’s so little you can do in advance. Of course, unmoulding anything is always fraught with danger (and, in this case – massive fail – but I think my puddings were slightly underdone) but there’s no harm in serving this dish unmoulded. It looks fine in the ramekin.

There are other Jamie Oliver recipes I return to time and time again (his spinach and feta pie, and also his brilliant cheesecake recipe, which I haven’t yet written about). But this will not be one of them.

* As mentioned once or twice in other places, rice flour is readily available in Australian supermarkets. Just make sure you buy rice flour and NOT ground rice! Also, if you are cooking for people who have a medical issue with gluten, always check that any products like this are gluten free (100% white rice). You’d be surprised at the places where gluten crops up.

Easy Pasta Recipe

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IMG_2105

Disclaimer: San Remo was kind enough to send me some of their artisan pasta to try out for myself.

A while back I noted that San Remo had released a range of artisan pasta. I’ve now had an opportunity to try this pasta for myself and I’m pleased to report that it is definitely a cut above the average dried pasta.

Andy and I like our pasta cooked quite differently. In my opinion, he likes his pasta cooked too much, and he thinks I like it underdone. This means that dried pasta needs to be able to handle a fair bit of cooking without going soggy and claggy. And trust me – there are plenty available that do!

We tried out the San Remo casarecce – short lengths of twisted pasta which hold a finer sauce really well. I was impressed before the pasta even hit the pot because the packet was easy to open without resorting to scissors or ending up with massive tears in it or pasta all over the floor. I know this sounds trivial, but the standard plastic packaging used for most food stuffs seems to defeat me.

Sauce wise I made a very simple tomato based sauce. For the two of us, I finely sliced one onion and cooked that gently with a few cloves of garlic. I added two roughly chopped rashers of bacon and one (very hot!) finely chopped chilli. When the bacon was starting to look cooked, I added a tin of crushed tomatoes, a sprinkling of oregano and a splash of white wine. I let that all cook down for a while before adding a chopped red capsicum. I finished the sauce off with some beef stock that I had lying around in the fridge.

The beef stock was definitely the masterstroke, as it gave the sauce a lovely depth of flavour. Given the elements of this sauce, if I hadn’t been using up what was in the fridge I would have opted for either chicken or vegetable stock.

So – the sauce was excellent (of course), and easy and all done in hardly any time at all. One thing to note – when using tinned tomatoes I do find it a good idea to let the tomatoes cook for a little while. Not only does this reduce and thicken their juices but it also cooks out the slightly weird ‘raw’ taste that you sometimes get with tinned tomatoes.

The pasta, with its twisty shape and little crevices, held on to the sauce really well. It didn’t collapse from a little extra cooking, and I felt that it still had a good bite to it. It also definitely tasted better than the average dried pasta (and also better than many ‘fresh’ pastas available).

One note: San Remo clearly thinks us South Australians are big eaters! The packet says that a serving size is 125g (so four servings in a 500g packet). I used 100g per person and we still had a very generous amount of pasta left over. Unless you’re very, very hungry you might want to adjust the serving size appropriately. Of course, if you don’t, you’ll have some left over for lunch!

Un Caffe Bar, Hallett Cove

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This café has now closed.

date of visit: Saturday 22 June 2012

I work on the premise that venues are either open or not. If a venue is open and a customer walks in that customer gets treated the same as a paying customer at a different time of day.

I daresay you can guess where this is heading. We turned up at Un Caffe Bar in the Hallett Cove Shopping Centre somewhere between 3 and 4pm on a Saturday. I know this isn’t prime time, by any stretch of the imagination, and I know, from having worked in retail, that people who turn up close to closing are really pretty irritating. However, the Hallett Cove branch of Un Caffe Bar is open til 5 so you’d have thought our visit would not pose a problem.

Not so – the baby and Andy ensconced themselves at a table and I headed over to order coffee and cake. There were two staff – one of whom was chatting to some friends, and showing no sign of getting a wriggle on to attend to any other customers (that would have been me). The other member of staff was busy making coffees for these friends. To her credit, she did apologise a couple of times. Unfortunately, short of reminding her colleague of their core business in a rather public fashion, I appreciated that there was little she could do.

Order finally placed, I sat down to be informed that the high chair was ‘filthy’ (Andy’s exact words) and so we began our wait. Our order was for 2 coffees, a babycino, a biscuit and slice of lemon curd cheesecake. The wait was far longer than you’d expect and when our goodies turned up we were short a biscuit. Because the staff were ‘busy’ (which means that they were standing by the coffee machine, chatting and eating some of that same cheesecake) I had to go up to the counter to ask after my biscuit.

I doubt I need to go into any detail about exactly what I think of that level of service.

On the plus side, the coffees were definitely passable, the cheesecake was tasty and I was impressed that I was asked if we wanted marshmallows with the babycino. But, having parted with $17 and being treated so poorly I doubt we’ll be heading back.

The Hallett Cove Shopping Centre has more than its fair share of places to have coffee – and I know from personal experience that one rates as very good (I’ll go again and then write it up … I’m a martyr in that way …). So there’s just no need for anyone to put themselves through slow, shoddy service.

Un Caffe Bar on Urbanspoon