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Archive for the ‘Fruit’ Category

Panna Cotta with Raspberry and Blueberry Coulis

Posted in Desserts, Fruit, Recipes, tagged , , , , , on March 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

This dessert is perfect for dinner parties because you can do all of the preparation work earlier in the day or even the day before. Some people like to get the panna cotta out of the ramekin for serving, but I don’t see the point – it might fall apart, and the ramekin needs to be washed anyway.

Panna Cotta with Raspberry and Blueberry Coulis

Serves 4.
Preparation time: Can be done in 20 minutes if you make both at the same time. Serving time: 2 minutes.

For the panna cotta
300ml double cream
300ml milk
60g caster sugar
1 vanilla pod
2g agar agar

For the coulis
200g blueberries
200g raspberries
50g sugar
1 cinnamon stick
40ml water

Preparation – Panna Cotta

1. Slice the vanilla bean in half lengthways and scrape out the seeds. You could probably substitute vanilla essence for the seeds.

2. Put the vanilla seeds, double cream, milk, sugar and agar agar in a pan and warm on a medium heat until the mixture is hot. Simmer for 5 minutes – do not let the mixture boil. You can tell when it’s boiling because of a) the bubbles and b) the noise, which sounds like a kettle.

3. Remove the pan from the heat, leave to cool for 5 minutes and then divide the mixture between 4 ramekins. Remember to leave enough room for the coulis! Leave to cool for a further 5 minutes and then put in the fridge for at least a few hours.

Preparation – Raspberry and Blueberry Coulis

1. Find a pan with a lid.

2. Put the blueberries, sugar, cinnamon stick and water in the pan and cook on a medium heat until the sugar has dissolved.

3. Reduce the heat to low, put the lid on the pan and simmer for 3-4 minutes.

4. Remove the lid, turn the heat back up to medium and cook for a further 4-5 minutes. At this point you should have something that looks like a sauce and the berries should have collapsed slightly. If it is very thin you might want to leave it for longer until it thickens up.

5. Remove from the heat, retrieve and discard the cinnamon stick, add the raspberries and stir well.

6. Transfer the mixture to a suitable bowl or dish, leave to cool for 5 minutes and then put it in the fridge next to your panna cottas.

Serving

Simply retrieve everything from the fridge and spoon the coulis on top of the panna cottas.

Nutritional information: if you care, you should not be making this dish

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Blueberry Muffins

Posted in Baking, Breakfast and Brunch, Fruit, Recipes, tagged , , on February 10, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Apologies.. it has been a long time since I’ve written a new post. I’ve been busy finishing up my PhD and unsurprisingly didn’t have any spare writing time. I’ve now pretty much finished it and have started work full-time. I’m planning to return to my blogging and enjoy cooking again. Earlier this week I had a craving for blueberry muffins so on Friday I bought some blueberries on my way to work and today I made some yummy blueberry muffins. I used the site NutritionData.com to calculate the nutritional information which I must admit was much worse than I had thought. I did use reduced-fat butter so the numbers should probably be a bit less than those quoted for my muffins. Feel free to use margarine or other reduced fat spread.

Blueberry Muffins

Makes 12 muffins.

Blueberry Muffins

1/2 cup butter
1 1/4 cups brown sugar
2 eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup milk
2 1/2 cups fresh blueberries

1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease and flour muffin pans or use paper liners.

2. In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and mix in.

3. Mix flour, baking powder and salt. Add flour mixture, alternating with milk. Mash 1/2 cup berries and stir into batter. Fold in remaining berries.

4. Fill muffin cups. Bake for 20 minutes. Remove from oven and wait 5 minutes to remove from pans.

Per Muffin: 222 kcals, 9g fat(5g saturated), 4g protein, 36g carbs, 718g sugar, 0.6g salt.

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Apple Crumble

Posted in Desserts, Fruit on July 14, 2007| Leave a Comment »

During my time at Cambridge I have been an avid college rower. One of the main benefits of rowing a lot is eating a lot! Before races or when we need morale boosting, we usually have a crew meal where we all eat together and usually eat way too much. People have been know to have to unbutton their jeans on the cycle ride home.

For a crew meal during the recently passed May Bumps 2007, I made this Apple Crumble Recipe from an Australian recipe blog, Exclusively Food. Because I was making dessert for 9 hungry rowers, I made a triple batch. I made few modifications to the recipe. As they suggest, I substituted brown sugar for the white sugar in the topping. I also used walnuts in the topping instead of pecans or almonds because I didn’t have any. I had to adjust the flour-butter ratio in the topping as well because when I mixed it up it I thought it was way too buttery for a crumble topping.

I managed to cycle into town with two Pyrex baking dishes of crumble in my bike basket and the crumble was enjoyed by all.

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