White Chocolate Pannacotta with Roasted Rhubarb

I love rhubarb, and I’ve noticed that I often seem to pair it with similar flavours. The early season forced rhubarb has such a shocking pink colour and distinctive tart taste that I serve it with creamy, white and almost blander flavours to let the rhubarb shine. One of my favourite dishes I’ve ever blogged was this Rhubarb Tart from Mother’s Day last year and with its rich cream cheese filling it is a prime example of my way with rhubarb. Similarly with the rhubarb custard tart where the baked vanilla filling contrasted nicely with the bold rhubarb. So when I had a lot of rhubarb that needed using up I made one unusual recipe I have to blog in the coming weeks, but used the rest in roasted rhubarb with white chocolate panna cotta. Well, who am I to break with such good flavour combinations?This time I opted to make my creamy background flavour a little bit more interesting and created a white chocolate pannacotta instead of just vanilla. I liked the result – it definitely felt rich and indulgent and had a really nice smooth texture despite the quite large amount gelatine. It also lasted for a week in the fridge so it was nice to have it always ready as a quick treat! White chocolate is a tricky flavour to make truly shine and I think in this case it would be more an issue of noticing if it wasn’t there rather than directly being able to pinpoint that the sweetness coming from chocolate. On their own the pannacottas were possibly a little bit too decadent, and I think they need an accompaniment to keep them interesting – another roasted fruit such as plums or fresh raspberries I’m sure would work well too. However I loved the rhubarb and found it the perfect thing to go alongside the pannacotta and delicious to eat just on its own as well. Enjoy!

White Chocolate Pannacotta with Roasted Rhubarb
Serves 5

Pannacotta: 500ml/18fl oz double cream
150ml/5½fl oz milk
100g/3½oz white chocolate, broken into pieces
25g/1oz sugar
4 Dr. Oetker gelatine sheets, soaked for 5-10 minutes in warm water, then squeezed dry

Roasted Rhubarb: 250g rhubarb, cut into even pieces
1 orange, zest and juice
5tbsp golden caster sugar

1. Heat the cream and milk in a saucepan over a medium heat until simmering.

2. Reduce the heat to low and stir in the white chocolate and sugar until the ingredients have melted and the mixture is well combined.

3. Remove the pan from the heat and add the gelatine leaves. Stir until the gelatine leaves have melted then set the mixture aside until it has completely cooled.

4. Pour the pannacotta mixture into ramekins, then chill in the fridge for five hours, or until set firm.

5. Meanwhile, tip the rhubarb into a tin so that they are in a single but snug layer (I used a 22cm square tin). Add the zest and juice of the orange and the sugar. Stir together to coat the rhubarb, then cover with foil and roast at 180’C for 15mins until tender but still holding its shape.

6. To serve, dip the ramekin bases and sides in warm water to loosen the pannacotta from the moulds. Turn out one pannacotta into the centre of each of plate and serve the rhubarb alongside.

Mini Lemon Drizzle Cakes

I think it’s amazing the amount of random kitchen equipment you can get nowadays, Lakeland catalogues in particular are brilliant to introducing you to all sorts of things you never realised you needed – it has 15 different tin openers, a 3-in-1 avocado tool, banana holders and much, much more. It can get pretty dangerous for the bank balance! I’m pretty restrained though, my least used pieces of kitchen equipment are probably the deep fat fryer I’m slightly scared of (for both calorie and fire issues!) or the slightly fiddly doughnut maker, which I should really use more. Another underused piece is a tin from Williams-Sonoma that makes very pretty mini flower-shaped cakes, which I have avoided due to its intricacy and obvious issue of getting the delicate cakes out whole!  When Dr. Oetker offered to send me something to try, I was intrigued to try the Cake Spray. I’d seen it on TV cookery programmes, mainly Lorraine Pascale or American shows, but never tried using it myself. I wasn’t really sure what the benefits of it would be over simple butter or baking paper, but I was intrigued and wanted to to give it a go. I thought the intricacy of all the shapes would be the perfect way to put the spray to the test, as well as get some delicious cakes!
I’m pleased to say, as you can probably tell from the photos, the spray worked perfectly! The cakes slipped out super easily and it was easy to use as well, less faff then I think butter would be for a tin like this with lots of nooks and crannies. I  thought the cakes had quite crispy edges on them, but as I rarely use this tin this could be caused by the weighty and dark metal. I was pleased (and relieved!) with the results and I will continue to use the spray for more fiddly bakes, when I don’t want to use liners for appearance reasons or when I’m out of butter or paper. Now – onto the cake!
I wanted to do a lemon drizzle cake as I thought the bright flavour would suit the cute flower shapes nicely. I found it surprisingly difficult to find a recipe that suited what I wanted with plenty of lemon flavour and a simple lemon syrup instead of crunchy coating or glace icing topping, so I adapted a couple of different sources to make my own! The cakes had a strong lemon zing, the syrup kept them moist and their diminutive size made it very easy to eat several in one go…. Enjoy!

Mini Lemon Drizzle Cakes, adapted from The Big Book of 365 Cakes and Cookies by Hannah Miles

Makes around 40mini cakes (sounds like loads but remember they’re tiny!) or one 20cm/8in large cake

225g softened butter
225g caster sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
225g self raising flour
2tbsps milk
3 lemons, juiced and zested
2tbsps icing sugar

1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F. Spray your mini muffin tins or a 20cm springform cake tin.
2. Beat the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs gradually, beating well after each addition. Add the flour, lemon zest and juice of 1 lemon and fold into the mixture.
3. Fill the mini tins 3/4 fill and bake for 10 minutes, until golden and springing back. If doing one large cake, bake for 25-30 minutes. Turn the cakes out onto a wire rack.
4. Heat the icing sugar and remaining lemon juice in a small saucepan until the sugar has dissolved, then boil for 1 minute to create a syrup. Spoon over the cakes whilst still hot, repeating until all the syrup is used up.

Raspberry, Oat and Almond Bake

I’d describe this time of year as ‘muddled’. It’s definitely still winter, but there’s the occasional sign that Spring will soon come. Mock exams are here, whilst the real things are still a few months off yet feel just round the corner. I’ve applied to uni, but have to wait till August for the grades. I’ll finish school forever in June, but it feels scarily close. It's a weird limbo time of year and I think this bake suits that perfectly. It’s got the oats for a flapjack, texture of a crumble and jammy fruit yet somehow manages to be none of these things!I should have predicted this from its vague ‘bake’ title and lack of photo, but the ingredients list sounded to good to miss out on: marzipan, lots of berries, cinnamon, flaked almonds, a dash of honey – all good flavours combined into one tin. The results were hard to explain. Clearly, these flavours combined into something delicious that was impossible to stop eating and vanished in one weekend.The sweet marzipan cutting through the sharp berries, the almonds adding crunch, the oats a bit of sustenance. The problem was that it was impossible to know how to serve it as it was so crumbly! It was hard to cut proper slices of, yet still a bit more solid than granola. It was like a fruit crumble that was super heavy on the topping! I think it would make a delicious luxury brunch item, served unapologetically messily in bowls, perhaps with yoghurt? Don’t let its confusing nature put you off, the results are absolutely gorgeous and make up for whatever it lacks in appearance! You can find the recipe here – enjoy!

Double Chocolate Muffins

My form at school has decided to have breakfast together every Tuesday, with us taking it in turns to bring the food. It’s been going since about October, meaning we’ve had quite a variety – despite only having a microwave and kettle in our common room kitchen. We’ve had American pancakes and maple syrup, chocolate brioche, iced fingers, croissants, bacon sandwiches and more. When it was our teacher’s turn she brought in a full cream tea – scones, clotted cream, jam, strawberries and hot tea. Slightly strange at 8:30am but delicious all the same! Sometimes the breakfast is homemade, sometimes its shop-bought but either way it’s nice for us all to get together and there’s always a slight twist to the meal, be it Sri Lankan tea bought home from somebody’s holiday or cinnamon rolls made using a family recipe. My friend and I were the first to bring food so we played it safe with something we knew everybody would like – chocolate muffins. They went down so well that when our turn came round again there was no chance we were allowed to try something new: the muffins made a comeback. At the end of the day my History teacher came up to me and said ‘So, I hear you’ve been making muffins…’ – word clearly gets round fast when it comes to chocolate! No doubt I’ll be making more of these soon then!When I made these for the second time, I made a few slight changes to the recipe. The recipe (courtesy of Nigella) has a generous amount of chocolate chunks but I thought the actual sponge could do with an extra boost of flavour so I swapped out 2tbsps or so of flour for some more cocoa. I make these in the morning so they’re still warm and fresh out of the oven at breakfast club and this is definitely a recipe best eaten on the day of baking as they dry out quite quickly. Overall though they are moist, sweet and perfect for an indulgent breakfast! You can find the recipe here or in Nigella’s Feast book. Enjoy!

Orange Highlanders

Recently I’ve got into a baking routine of doing all my baking at the weekend – one bigger, main recipe such as a showy cake or elegant tart, and then one recipe for happy snacking during the week. Muffins, flapjacks, tablet – something to fill the 4pm sugar dip. More often than not, this recipe is some sort of biscuit.A simple recipe I can make when I’m not completely awake on a Saturday morning and that will be out the oven by the time my sister wakes up. Bright citrus flavours are perfect for February and for a trusty cookie recipe I turn to my Granny’s old WI Book of Biscuits, which led me to these Orange Highlanders. I was confused about the name but essentially these biscuits are an orange version of these so the link must be due to shortbreads origins in the Scottish Highlands. I loved the crunchy demerara coating and the crumbly, buttery shortbread centre – they definitely didn’t last the whole week!Orange Highlanders, adapted from WI Book of Biscuits
Makes about 20 small shortbreads
100g butter
50g icing sugar
75g plain flour
75g self raising flour
zest of 2 oranges
25g demerara sugar
1. Preheat the oven to 180’C/350’F. Cream the butter, orange zest and icing sugar until light and fluffy. Sift the flours together and fold in to make a dough.
2. Shape the mixture into a sausage. Sprinkle the demerara sugar over a piece of cling-film and roll the dough in the sugar, pressing it to make sure it sticks. Wrap in the cling-film and chill for 1hour.
3. Cut the dough into slices (5mm-1cm thick), place on baking sheets and bake for 8-10 minutes. Remove to a wire rack and leave to cool. Enjoy!

Orange Lightning Cake

There seems to be a permanent trend and desire for super fast cooking. Jamie Oliver went from his 30 minute meals to just 15 minutes and magazines sell editions by emphasizing the fast and simple nature of recipes that are perfect for after work. Often, however, these recipes are hardly recipes at all, using pre cooked, chopped and garnished ingredients to get something tasty on the table fast. This cake is the best of both worlds: fits the speedy bill – hence it’s name – yet you end up with something delicious and all natural.I’ve seen lots of recipes for all-in-one whole orange cakes that involve boiling oranges for hours until soft and then whizzing to a smooth cake mixture. Today’s unusual cake goes one step further – simply quartering a whole, raw, unpeeled orange, taking out any pips and whizzing until smooth in a food processor followed by the rest of the ingredients. It feels quite strange, and a little bit wrong, but it works out so well! Whizzing up the fresh orange means the mixture and cooking cake smell amazing and the final cake has a great sunshiney orange colour.The little chunks of orange peel add a nice texture to the cake – just like candied peel but without all the added sugar! All in all I was a real fan of this cake – it’s one of those that you just keep cutting tiny slivers of until you realise rather a large proportion of the cake has now gone… You can find the recipe here (I left out the walnuts, keeping the delightfully soft and squidgy texture of the cake) – enjoy!