Saturday 17 November 2007

Wobbly bits

I was going to write about sex, but I’m still researching….
What I mean is, I still have to interview the Reformed Libertine who would certainly be a source of knowledge both factual and anecdotic

In the meantime I got the first pressie for my birthday! A lovely wobbly silicone cake mould. A round one with ridges and a hole in the middle.

So it was that I fought with the cat for the possession of the two-steps ladder and climbed to the dizzy heights of my cookery book shelf to take down the venerable Artusi: the Bible of Italian cooking. Boldly I went where I never dared before: Blancmange And retreated straight away to the safety of panna cotta from a modern practical cooking collection. Cholesterly challenged but easy to do, it necessitated one key ingredient: leaf gelatin. 2 sheets. This mysterious ingredient comes in a 25g bag of 10 sheets. In Ireland, that is. Apparently in Italy (where the recipe originated) it comes in single 25g sheets. The result was a very sorrowful looking liquid mix of cream, milk and sugar. I checked again in the morning, just in case by some strange anomaly of physics it had solidified out in the shed overnight. It hadn’t.
Ado and The Chef dug deep in their culinary expertise (one having been a bohemian salad chef in Paris, the other having earned a proper C.E.R.T. qualification) and instructed me to rescue my mixture by adding 2 tubs of Philadelphia and one further sheet of gelatin thus transforming the disaster into a cheese cake. Foreboding an ill outcome, I got cheep cream cheese from Lidl As I was stirring it into the warmed up creamy mess to be rescued, I managed to have a long conversation holding my mobile phone between shoulder and ear. Miraculously the phone didn’t join the cheese in the bowl. Problem was, I was distracted from proper stirring and half of the tiny sheet of gelatin stuck to the bottom of the pot and there it remained. A further night chilling in the shed did nothing for the physical quality of my disaster. It was still at the liquid state. Maybe going sour as well. Or maybe it was the cheap cheese. We’ll never know.
Attempt number 2 was a budino, as wobbly as the mould but edible. Regrettably it is still lurking in the fridge. I wonder why…

Pinzimonio

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