Panettone and Hidden Chocolate Bread & Butter Pudding

Christmas time yields countless gifts, not least of which is the flurry of foods you only end up eating at this time of year. Like memories of ripe fruit from childhood, the recollection of these festive flavours is preserved in semi-perfection over the intervening year due to their short window of consumption. Like the Christmas tunes flooding the airwaves from the beginning of the month, they are welcomed in our house with open arms… (Though after a few weeks of these, you are happy to wave them off again.) Mince pies, pigs in blankets, turkey and stuffing, Christmas pud, Kirsty McColl & The Pogues… I love them all.*

In my perfect gingerbread house, the super-soft pillows would be made of rich, aromatic panettone. Light, buttery and filled with candied peel and dried fruit, choirs of (Italian) Christmas angels might have conceived this celestial sponge. A Christmas hit in our house, the BSG and I love it with Nutella for breakfast, a hot drink at teatime or a glass of sweet liqueur later. Quite frankly, it doesn’t stand a chance of lasting more than a few days. Should hell freeze over and stale leftovers remain once Christmas is over (fresh works too in case you can’t wait), then it makes the best bread and butter pudding out – a sneaky one to slip in just before any January detoxing…

For extra festive, sprinkle with icing sugar before serving and lace the layers with a few shakes of Gran Marnier for grown-ups.

Merry Christmas!

 

 

You need (Serves 2)

 

2 small round ovenproof dishes of ramekins, buttered

A couple of slices of panettone (whatever you have left, cut into rounds)

A few squares of good dark chocolate.  Green & Black’s Maya Gold works.

1 egg

160 ml whole milk

1 tablespoon caster sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Grand Marnier (optional)

 

Preheat the oven to 160C. Lay your panettone pieces in the buttered dishes and tuck a couple of squares of chocolate in amongst the layers. Beat the egg and other ingredients together in a bowl and pour evenly over the bread so it comes up the sides. Sprinkle the tops with brown granulated sugar if you like, for a little extra crunch. Put a dish on the oven shelf, with the 2 ramekins inside it and carefully pour boiling water into the larger dish so it comes at least halfway up their sides. Bake for 20-25 minutes until just set.

Serve with creme fraiche or yogurt to cut through the richness, with the essential Christmas clementine on the side.

*Give amazing little sprouts a chance: they’re not just for Christmas, but for the whole winter.

Pot-roast pheasant with butternut squash, Savoy cabbage and onion

The BSG is a game lover. However, after a bad experience with a sinewy, over-exercised rabbit we picked up in Lincoln a few years back, I haven’t been able to separate that gamey taste from a tough-as-old-boots food memory, so I’ve shied away from it somewhat.  So the prospect of three pheasants in our fridge, ready for the eating, filled me with dread. They say you must face your fears, so I thought I’d tackle mine head on…

When I asked the BSG what to do with it earlier that day, I received a very casual one line email: just bung it in a pot with the veg we’ve got left in the bowl and some stock and wine and cook for about 45 minutes. Easy.

OK, I thought, I can do casual, even though all I could think about was overcooking the damn thing, its stringy carcass languishing in thin, insipid juices. I made sure we had emergency freezer supplies, just in case…

But actually, what resulted was really rather good – helped by a pleasantly mild-tasting bird – and I’ll be doing it again. Not to mention easy; the very definition of a one-pot wonder. Two of us ate well, so figure that this recipe would serve three… It is easily multiplied, but increase the cooking times.

 

You need:

1 onion, roughly chopped

2 bay leaves

3 juniper berries

1 large glass red wine

1/2 pint of stock

1 whole pheasant

1 clove of garlic, crushed

1/2 a butternut squash, deseeded, peeled and chopped into 1 inch pieces

1/4 savoy cabbage, sliced

a lump of beurre manié: half softened butter and plain flour (optional – or add flour to the onions at the beginning)

 

Preheat the oven to 190 degrees.

In a heavy based lidded pan, sweat the onions in a little oil over a medium heat until they start to colour. Add the bay leaves and juniper berries – plus a tablespoon or two of plain flour if you want to thicken the sauce.

Deglaze the pan with the red wine and add the stock. Sit the pheasant in the pan amongst the onions, add the butternut squash pieces, garlic and season. Put the lid on the pan (I added a foil cartouche as well because I thought I ought to but I’m not ever really sure what this does. It just felt right).

Put into the oven for 45 minutes or so, turning the bird over halfway through (again – this just feels proper as I always do it with my roast chicken to keep the breast moist).

Remove the pot from the oven. Check the bird is cooked then rest it on a board and take out the squash from the pan whilst you reduce the sauce over a good heat – here you can whisk in the beurre manié to thicken if you like. Season to taste. Return the squash to the pan and add the cabbage. Put the lid on the pan and let this all cook for a further 7 minutes.

Carve the pheasant breast, joint the legs and serve in a bowl on top of the vegetables with plenty of sauce poured over, like a stewy soup (yes, you’ll need a spoon too).

For extra pleasure, I recommend mashing the squash into the gravy with the back of your fork. Watch out for lead shot – it’s in there somewhere and your molars will thank you for it.

Game on…

Nigel’s Chocolate Muscovado Banana Cake

It’s rare that a banana is allowed to sit for long in my fruit bowl, let alone languish for long enough to go black. Which is, I suppose, where I went ever so slightly wrong with my version of Nigel Slater’s banana muscovado cake, dubbed ‘the best cake in the world’ by my sister-in-law, Rosie. Being mum to a two-year old, Rosie gets cake thrust at her by virtual strangers in most social situations, so I reckon she’d be a bit of an expert. Besides, any excuse to make banana bread, right?

This cake erred towards the bitter because I didn’t have the patience to wait for the bananas to freckle and darken or permeate the kitchen with their ever-so-slightly-binny note. However, heed the words of St Nigel, people: you have to let the fruit go black so it can sweeten. Perhaps if you have a two-year old or willing accomplice, get them to hide a bunch somewhere around the house for a few days. Oh and next time I’d probably use a dark chocolate less intense than 70%. But otherwise, it is tremendous – and just keeps getting sweeter and squidgier as the days go by. Like them bananas, this cake won’t be around for long.

 

 

Ingredients

 

250g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

125g softened butter

235g muscovado sugar

400g peeled ripe bananas

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 eggs

100g dark chocolate

 

Method

Line a non-stick loaf tin with baking paper (we’d run out so I greased mine and the cake came out fine). Preheat the oven to 180C.

Sift the flour and baking powder together. Using an electric mixer (plastic blade on my Magimix) cream the sugar and butter until fluffy and coffee-coloured.

Mash the bananas in a bowl until lumpy. Stir in the vanilla extract. Beat the eggs and add them to the butter and sugar mixture. If it curdles (mine did), just add a bit of flour.

Chop the chocolate into small pieces and fold them with the bananas into the batter. Follow with the flour, gently.

Scrape into the tin and bake for fifty minutes (mine took about an hour). Check to see if its ready with a metal skewer: if its moist but clean then the cake’s ready. If you need to cook it for longer and there is still wet mixture on the skewer, return the cake to the oven and cover with foil for the rest of the cooking.

When its out of the oven, leave the cake in the tin for 15 minutes, then loosen with a palette knife and lift (or turn) it from the tin. Leave to cool a bit longer and then peel off the paper. Serve in thick slices.

 

 

Original recipe from The Kitchen Diaries II by Nigel Slater, published by Fourth Estate, 2012.