Three Recipes - Coriander Panna Cotta, Cauliflower Crackers, Quinoa Crackers

A few years back I was at a restaurant and full after eating a massive plate of ribs. But they brought out the dessert menu in that usual dance that has me reading the list and nothing really grabbing my eye, so I end up just getting the bill and going. Or maybe a coffee. I can be fairly selective about desserts, if there’s not something that sounds a bit different or exactly what I feel like, I usually don’t bother. Basil panna cotta. Interest officially piqued, I ordered it. A wobbly pale green mound was brought out to me, the aroma of basil evident before I’d even tasted it. The bright herb punched through the cream and sweetness, made brighter still by lime zest. It was such a fun little dessert. Ever since then, I’d had it in my mind to make some herby panna cottas. It sat on my flavour combination list and was largely ignored as I chose to make new dishes that cropped up. Until one day, it just jumped out at me. I needed to make a herb panna cotta. Only I needed it to be savoury.

This makes enough for 6 or so panna cotta, depending on how big your mould/serving dishes are, which meant I got two goes at serving it for Lance and I. The first time I served it with pulled beef and cauliflower crackers and called it Coriander Panna Cotta. The second time I served it with seed crackers and salsa and called it Guacamole pannacotta. The base for the panna cotta is the usual cream, but rounded out by avocado and Greek Yoghurt, which makes it more acceptable, nutrition-wise as a dinner option than just cream. Both ingredients adding their own special silkiness and flavour profiles to the dish. The cream portion is infused with coriander and spring onions with just enough honey to take the bite out of the yoghurt’s tang.

I’ve included both cracker recipes below as well. The seed crackers come together particularly quickly. I made them as some friends stood around one afternoon and they were done and baked before the first glass of wine was finished. They were fairly impressed! The cauliflower ones are almost as easy, but with the added step of steaming and draining the vegetable first. If you were going to make them fresh for a dinner party, the vegetable cooking portion could be done a day ahead and refrigerated. The addition of linseeds also helps to soak up some of the cauli’s excess water and bind the crackers together.

Coriander Panna Cotta

500mL cream

1 bunch coriander

2 spring onions, white and tender green tips

1 tbsp honey

½ tsp pink peppercorns

½ tsp salt

½ cup greek yoghurt

2 ripe avocadoes

¼ cup water

2 tsps gelatin powder

Place 450mL cream in a small saucepan along with the coriander, spring onions, honey, salt and pink peppercorns. Gently heat until just below boiling, then take off heat, cover and set aside to infuse for 30 minutes. Strain into a clean saucepan. Place the remaining 50mL of cream in a small glass and sprinkle the gelatin powder, set aside to ‘bloom’ for 5 minutes. Reheat the infused cream to a simmer and then stir in the bloomed gelatin cream. Stir to combine and continue stirring until the gelatin dissolves, then take off the heat.

Using a blender, combine the avocadoes, yoghurt water until smooth. Blend in the cream and check for seasoning. Pour into moulds and refrigerate 24 hours or so until set.

Cauliflower Crackers

½ head cauliflower

1 tbsp linseeds/flaxseeds

1 egg

Cajun seasoning to taste (around 1/4 tsp ought to do it)

Cut the cauliflower into tiny rice-like pieces (alternatively, process to ‘rice’ in a food processor). Steam or microwave for a few minutes until tender, then set aside to cool. Place in muslin and squeeze out as much liquid as possible.

Preheat oven to 160C. Grease an oven tray.

Mix together the cauliflower, linseeds, egg and seasoning. Mix well to combine, then press firmly into the greased oven tray. Set aside for 10 minutes, then bake for 15 minutes, or until golden on top. Cool 5 minutes, then slice.

Quinoa and Seed Crackers

½ cup quinoa flakes

2 tbsp sunflower seeds

2 tbsp pumpkin seeds

2 tsp sesame seeds

1/8 tsp salt

1/8 tsp pepper

1/2 tsp coriander seeds

1 egg white

Preheat oven to 130C

Mix all the dry ingredients together. Create a well in the centre and add the egg white. Gently whisk the egg, then slowly start bringing in the dry ingredients until completely combined. Dump onto a piece of baking paper. Place another piece of baking paper on top and roll out with a rolling pin until very thin – around 2mm. Gently pull the top piece off and discard.

Bake for 7-10 minutes, or until the edges start to look golden. Watch carefully. Remove from the oven, slice into desired cracker size and gently flip over. Pop back in the oven for another 5-7 minutes, or until they’re golden on the other side too. Set aside to cool, then enjoy!

Skamp's Chocolate Christmas Crackers

At Christmas time, I tend to get pretty adventurous around dessert. Not sure why I make an intricate dessert – I guess because if not at Christmas, then when? Last year, I made Gingerbread terrariums which I realise now never made it on to the blog. Gingerbread cake bottom, lime cheesecake “snow”, tiny Piparkoogid (Christmas biscuit) houses and marzipan trees. Time consuming and fiddly to make, but nothing terribly revolutionary in the elements. This year…this year I was genuinely worried about my dessert turning out. Because this year I had gone to the Yelp Elite Event at the new State Building and watched Sue Lewis do a little presentation on tempering chocolate that demystified the whole thing and made it seem really simple. And then I stumbled upon an Adriano Zumbo recipe for Chocolate Christmas Crackers and with this both happening a few weeks before a Christmas party, it seemed like it was something I needed to attempt.  The basic idea is a chocolate cylinder, with chocolate ends designed to look like a Christmas cracker. It’s filled with chocolate mousse and a pop-rocks truffle as the “pop” of the cracker. Cute, right?

Cute but terrifying! I was so worried about actually working with the chocolate, I actually did a trial run. And I never do trial runs for things like this because I’m lazy! In re-reading over the original recipe with Lance, I discovered a few things, 1. The picture from the Adriano Zumbo recipe is inaccurate. I don’t think it’s just styling and camera angles, I think his dimensions of a 5cm x 10cm tube is way too fat for the pictured Christmas Cracker look. And 2, as Lance pointed out to me – they aren’t even real. If you look carefully, they are just “bridges” of chocolate with chocolate ends balanced up against them. The chocolate doesn’t curl around to make a cylinder, so it’s not even the real thing. Tricksy stylists! That scared me even more. But…it’s actually not that difficult – given you can get a few simple items. I had a fairly infuriating trip to Spotlight trying to find sheets and/or rolls of acetate – which is listed as a product they stock on their website. I was sent to various corners of Spotlight by various staff members. I had one try to sell me PVC table cloth material instead. Described as “readily available in craft stores” by every chocolate and cake making resource, it was so hard to get, that I didn’t. In the end, I found a thicker acetate sheet that was designed for quilting templates. It’s less flexible than you ideally want it to be for chocolate, so it was pretty hard to make the chocolate coating – but with no time to search for an alternative (and not trusting posting times this time of year), I had to make do. You can buy 10cm high cardboard tubing for making your own cardboard crackers at Riot Art and Craft (but not acetate). You can prep ahead by making the mold elements (roll, acetate rectangles, baking paper rectangles) way ahead of time.

 The rest I simplified somewhat to make it a bit easier on myself. Not to mention cheaper by removing the gianduja chocolate. Instead of making a truffle centre, I made a long ‘string’ of pop-rock chocolate to simulate the cardboard ‘popper’ in a real cracker. Like the original, it uses toasted rice bubbles to enhance the pop quality, and I added chocolate crumb from the Milk Bar cookbook for extra chocolate-y texture. Feel free to just use rice bubbles and pop rocks if you can’t be bothered with the crumb. The mousse I flavoured with Chambord to play with the berry flavour of the pop rocks I used, and because I was intending on adding freeze-dried raspberries - but I couldn’t find any so used freeze-dried strawberries instead. The tartness of the berries adding to the 'pop' sensation - Lance's idea and it worked brilliantly. I used white chocolate instead of dark for the coating; both so I could paint the outside in a Christmassy fashion, and to lighten up the dessert from a fairly heavy dark-chocolate mousse with dark chocolate truffle with dark chocolate coating. 

The chocolate coating is really the only hard part of this recipe, and it is heat/humidity sensitive - so I was extremely lucky to have a cooler day to temper the chocolate in. This would be easier to make for a Northern Christmas or Southern Christmas in July. They are so cool though, so it's worth giving a go. It does take a little time to do all the steps, but it can be done in stages ahead of time, and they’ll keep in the freezer for a few days – but any longer than that and the pop rocks will lose a little of their ‘pop’. The mousse makes more than you will need. Any extra can be spooned into pretty glasses/bowls and refrigerated a few hours until set.

Skamps' Chocolate Christmas Crackers

For the “poppers”

1 cup rice bubbles

1/2 cup “chocolate crumb” (100g plain flour, 100g white sugar, 65g cocoa powder (the best quality you can find), 1 tsp corn flour, 85g melted butter)
70 gm popping lollies, such as Pop Rocks
200g 70% dark chocolate (I used Lindt raspberry intense)
15g freeze dried raspberries, chopped

Chocolate Raspberry mousse

660mL whipping cream (1x 600mL carton, plus ¼ cup)
150mL whipping cream
8 egg yolks
100g white sugar
30mL shot Chambord
200g 48% dark chocolate, broken
100g 70% dark chocolate, broken

For the casing

500g white chocolate

Decorator pens (optional)

To start, make the ‘poppers’. To start making the ‘poppers’, you need to toast the rice bubbles and make the chocolate crumb, then set aside to cool.

Preheat oven to 180C. Spread rice bubbles on a tray and bake for only 2-3 minutes until golden. Watch them, as they toast quickly. Reduce oven to 150C. In a mixer, blend together the flour, sugar, salt and cocoa powder. Add the melted butter and mix until it all comes together into a clumpy mess. Break the clumpy bits onto a lined baking tray, then place in the oven to cook for around 20 minutes. Half-way through, gently toss. Remove from the oven and set aside to cool and harden. Measure out 1 cup of the crumb (breaking up any very large pieces), and freeze the remainder for another use – such as ice cream topper!) When the rice bubbles and crumb are completely cool, mix together in a bowl.

Set a glass bowl over a pot with about 5cm of simmering water, making sure the bowl doesn’t touch the water. Add 2/3 of the chocolate and leave to melt, stirring here and there. Once it’s melted, remove from the heat and add the remaining 1/3 of the chocolate. Leave to sit for 1 minute, then stir through to completely melt and make smooth. Mix the pop rocks through the rice and crumb, then pour the melted now slightly cooled chocolate over the whole mess. Mix quickly to coat everything. You will hear a few of the pop rocks go off as they get wet then hit the air, but if you work quickly, the popping will be minimised as they’re coated. On a baking paper lined tray, use a spoon to create thin lines of ‘pop’ mix around 10cm long (the length of your tubes).  You want them to be around 1cm thick. Pop in the fridge to set hard.

Before you can make your mousse, make sure you have your molds ready. Cut out 12 rectangles of acetate, 10cm by 12.5cm. Roll into tubes, placing them inside cardboard tube (such as the inserts for paper towel rolls cut to 10cm tall). Cut out 12 rectangles of baking paper, roll into tubes and place inside the acetate. Place them standing upright on a piece of baking paper inside a tray and set aside.

Now you’re ready to make your mousse! Whip the 660mL measure of cream to soft peaks, set aside. Place the whisk attachment in your standmixer and place a bowl ready. Combine the 150mL cream, yolks, chambord and sugar in a small saucepan and whisk to combine. Place over low heat and keep whisking until it thickens, much like a lemon curd would – around 5-7 minutes. Scrape it into the standmixer bowl and leave it whisking on low until it cools to room temperature, around 10 minutes. While that whisks, add the 48% dark chocolate and leave to melt, stirring here and there. Once it’s melted, remove from the heat and add the 70% dark chocolate. Leave to sit for 1 minute, then stir through to completely melt and make smooth. Stir for 2-3 minutes to cool down to around 40C. Fold the chocolate through the whipped cream, then fold in cooled yolk mixture.

Gather your mousse, ‘pops’ and prepared mold tray. Spoon the mousse around 2/3 of the way into the molds. Holding the mold hard against the tray, gently slide a ‘pop’ into the centre of the mold. Tidy the top and/or top up with extra mousse if required. Cover with cling wrap and freeze for at least 4 hours until set.

When set hard, remove the cardboard and acetate, leaving the baking paper casings and popping back into the freezer until needed. Wash the acetate and dry thoroughly. Absolutely no water can remain. Temper the white chocolate by melting 2/3 of the chocolate over heat, then take off the heat and stir through the remaining 1/3. Continue stirring to cool down to where it is a little cooler than body temperature (dip a spoon in the melted chocolate, and place it on your lip. It should be a little cooler than your lip). Place it back over the heat for around 30 seconds, and check the temp again. It should now be a little warmer than body temperature and shiny. Working with one piece of acetate at a time, spread a thin layer (around 2mm) of melted chocolate with a palette knife, set aside until starting to set, 3 minutes. Wrap around a chocolate mousse cylinder, chocolate-side inward. Tape the acetate closed. Refrigerate until chocolate is well set, remove acetate and refrigerate until required.

Brush insides of 24 mini patty cases or the flower ice molds from IKEA with most of remaining chocolate, freeze until set, peel away the cases/pop out the molds and refrigerate chocolate cases until required. Brush underside of chocolate cases with a little more melted chocolate, attach to each end of chocolate-coated cylinders, decorate with edible decorator pens, refrigerate until required.

You Only Get One...Slice - Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodle Chocolate Tart

This is another recipe I created with my brother for his work’s Cake Club. It is a fairly simple baked chocolate custard, baked into a Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodle base. We made two tarts that day, but I’ve scaled it down to make just one tart for this recipe. To make the most of this tart, I’d suggest using the best quality cocoa you can get your hands on, as well as the best milk and eggs. I’ve swapped out some of the sugar from the original recipe with coconut blossom sugar. It was actually on a whim after Mike bought some ‘to try’, but the flavour profile was so fabulous and I thought it would enhance the chocolatey-ness. I’ve then put it through some mascarpone cheese to continue the flavours. If you haven’t tried it, it has slightly floral tones, but it’s also a touch savoury and almost yeasty. I don’t think I’m describing it very well, but I don’t know how else to do it. It is fabulous in black coffee, if that helps!

 

The recipe for the baked custard is based on this recipe, but I found that their cooking time was off for me. Like, way off. I’d checked my tart a bit before the halfway mark and my tarts were already overcooked, so I’ve adjusted the times accordingly below. I’m assuming it’s because theirs made a much taller slice, rather than a pie. The texture goes rubbery if you over cook it. It’s not inedible that way, just not as good as it could’ve been. So make sure you keep an eye on the time. 

Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodle Chocolate Tart

Makes 1x 23cm tarts

MHCS Base

1/4 batch Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles (other chocolate cookies can be used, it just won’t be as delicious! – seriously though, just bake the whole batch and eat the rest)

50g Butter, melted

Chocolate Custard

50g butter

1 ¼ cups whole milk

½ cup plain flour

¼ cup cocoa powder

2 large eggs, separated

Pinch cream of tartar

½ cup icing sugar

½ cup coconut blossom sugar

1 tbsp strong brewed coffee

1 tbsp dark rum

To serve

Cocoa powder for dusting

Crushed cacao nibs

Flakey sea salt

200g mascarpone whipped with 3 tbsp coconut flower sugar

 

Cook the Mexican Hot Chocolate Snickerdoodles and set aside to cool. Grease a pie plate. Taste one snickerdoodle to make sure they’re still good. Place the snickerdoodles in a food processor and pulse to crush to a chunky crumb. Add the melted butter and pulse to combine. Pour into the pie dish and press firmly into the base to create a solid foundation. Make sure there are no holes. Refrigerate until ready. Beat together mascarpone with 3 tbsp coconut flour sugar until light and fluffy. Refrigerate until ready to serve. 

Preheat the oven to 160C (or turn down to 160C if you’ve just made snickerdoodles).

Melt the butter and set aside. Warm the milk to blood temperature and stir in the coffee and rum. 

Blend together the flour and cocoa powder in a bowl. In a new, clean and dry bowl, beat the egg whites until foamy. When foamy, add the cream of tartar and continue whipping until stiff peaks form.

 In a third bowl, beat the egg yolks and two sugars until light and fluffy with a balloon whisk. Add the butter and whisk to combine. Then whisk in the flour mix. Finally, whisk in the milk mixture, stirring gently first to encourage it to blend in, then whisking to make it smooth. 

Fold the egg whites in 1/3 at a time, this will have a curdled look, rather than incorporate fully. Gently pour the mixture over the snickerdoodle base and even more gently, place it in the oven.