Part 3
After a day mostly spent in the kitchen
with a brief trip out to buy cream, and an not insubstantial amount
of time spent chatting my festive catering now amounted to:
* some chilled short crust pastry
(destined for mince pies)
* some undecorated multi-spice biscuits
* a big pan of unblended soup
* a bowl of sugar and eggs
I was now on a mission to make my Bûche
de
Noel, this would require
focus and I must reveal that I was rather neglectful of visitors 3
and 4. After a quick hello I left them in Matt's capable hands, I
could hear one of my favourite board games being played so had no
concerns. I finally
whisked up the sugar and eggs, for quite a while on the highest
setting of the electric whisk. Then I carefully added the self
raising flour (65g)
and cocoa powder (40g).
In a most unusual display of care I actually sifted these into the
egg / sugar mixture – I don't know why but it seemed particularly
important not lose all the air that I had whisked in. When it came to
pour the mixture into the tin (you haven't missed an ingredient, this
is a fat free sponge) it looked basically like a chocolate mousse.
While
this baked (at 220ºC
for 10minutes)
I started the filling. I whisked 150ml of cream. In another bowl I
whisked (this recipe uses a lot of bowls and a lot of whisking) half
of the tin of chestnut purée (I did cut a corner here as the recipe
said you were supposed to sieve this but this just seemed crazy) with
3 tablespoons of hot milk, 1 tablespoon of hot coffee (you're
supposed to use coffee essence but I don't have any and there was a
little bit of coffee left in a cafetiere that Matt had made for
himself earlier) and 50g
of caster sugar.
You're also supposed to put brandy in but not being sure of the
alcohol consumption practices of our expected (and possibly
expectant) guests I left this out. Then
you fold the cream into the rest of it. And that's the filling.
The
next bit of the recipe seemed like it was going to be the tricky bit.
You have to take the sponge out of the oven and immediately turn it
out, remove the
greaseproof paper and roll
it up (the cake, not the
paper). I
prepared for this operation by covering a board in icing sugar to
turn the sponge out onto. The sponge turn out subsequently resulted
in an icing sugar bomb effect all over the work surface. It wasn't
until I later re-read the recipe that I realised you were supposed to
use caster sugar, which would probably have made considerably less
mess. I worked quickly but
the sponge rolling was entirely unsuccessful, despite following the
recipe's tip of scoring where the first roll would go. I ended up
with three separate pieces of sponge that sort of fitted together.
You then have to leave it to cool before adding the filling.
I
used this pause to decorate the biscuits. Time pressures meant that I
needed to keep this simple. I melted some plain chocolate and used
this to drizzle over the holly leaf shapes. We
had reached the ominous 5 o'clock when I was actually expecting
people to arrive. I had a lot of melted chocolate left and decided
that I would cover the Christmas tree shapes with this and then put
on a few silver balls. The
timing was bad because just as my haphazard decorating was going on
Matt's auntie who is an expert cake decorator arrived. But
I was not to be deterred. After
greeting our new guests I returned to the Bûche.
But
it was still not cool and despite my impatience I knew better than to
put a cream based filling in a hot cake.
So
I went back to the biscuits. I melted some white chocolate and used
this to drizzle over the angels / fairies (to which I then added a
bit of pink sprinkly sugar stuff) and to cover the snowmen (to which
I then added some multi-coloured hundreds and thousands).
Every spare work surface was now covered with festive biscuits
covered in chocolate that needed to set.
To
be continued.......
(This would
be a really far too long blog if I don't split it up; you are after
all getting multiple recipes.)
