The continuing tale of Christmas Dinner. Truth be told I’m getting a bit bored with this series of posts, I started so I’ll finish and in any event the dessert was a recipe from Essence that I wanted to write about, but I think this post might be quite short.
Where were we, hmm after a short break we enjoyed some Cheese which I could write about but for the sake of brevity I will resist the temptation then on to Dessert.
As I said I wanted to do something from Essence and had opted for Lemon and Pine Kernel Iced Mousse with Fromage Blanc and Black Pepper Sorbet this was great fun to make but with one minor catastrophe and one observation. The recipe uses liquid glucose, not that unusual an ingredient for a top flight chef, buy liquid glucose in France is difficult and unnecessarily expensive, fortunately visiting relatives came to the rescue.
Making the Fromage Blanc and Black Pepper Sorbet was pretty straight forward, though next time I will put in more black pepper, trying to season sorbet or icecream is always difficult, more a process of trial and error. I didn’t use the called for cubeb peppercorns as I couldn’t find them.
The Lemon and Pine Kernel Iced Mousse for also straight forward, the key to this is patience. Patience when toasting the pine kernels, patience when beating the egg yolks and sugar syrup and so on.
Lemon and pine kernel iced mousse weith fromage blanc and black pepper sorbet ( with out the caramel bloody craquant)
We had some decent quality lemon curd as Julie is a dab hand at making that.
The disaster was making the caramel craquant, the first stage of making the powdered nuts and caramel was fine, the second stage of melting the craquant powder on a tray in the oven just resulted in a black sticky mess, this was caused by using a brand new oven, though the temperature was correct, I think if I was to do the dish again I would use a lower oven temperature or even try making the craquant in a pan.
et voila that was it, the plate was intensely lemony, balanced by the clean tasting sorbet and the deep nutty flavours of the pine nuts but unfortunately no caramel craquant. Yum
