Spanish Apple Pudding

I'm having a summer of Spanish cooking. Which, I find, is very often a more sophisticated version of Italian fare; where the latter is so often and very clearly the product of peasant kitchens and resources, its Spanish cousin is the result of centuries of a rich Royal Court, and a more varied and evolved culinary experience. For summer menus, now that the days are long and hot, and the evenings perfect for al fresco dining, Spanish dishes could not be bettered: light, and fresh, and deceptively uncomplicated in style.
From the pages of Penelope Casas (of long acquaintance), and of Elizabeth Luard (who I have never previously read from a purely  'Spanish' angle), and of Janet Mendel (a completely new find), I've been extracting splendid new nuggets. Of which this is one.
When I first started to make it, as I assembled the ingredients in the pan, a suspicion began to form in my mind that this was all very familiar, and that all it would be would be the puree that forms the base of a regular tarte aux pommes. And, when you see what the ingredients are, you'll understand why. But, not so. I'm unclear by what precise alchemy - perhaps merely the surprising length of the cooking time - but the finished product here is unlike anything else I've ever come across. And, it is good!
Serve it with cold, vanilla-flavoured Creme Anglaise. Cream, on its own, would be too one-note-ish, and the delicate flavour of the vanilla offsets the dense sweetness of the apple pudding to perfection.

For three:

Ingredients: 4 medium-large apples; 5 tbs + 8 tbs sugar; 4 tbs butter; 1 tsp lemon juice; zest from half a lemon; 1/4 tsp cinnamon; a pinch of salt; 2 medium eggs.

Method:

1. Make a caramel, using the 8 tbs sugar along with 4 teaspoons of water. Once ready, pour this into three small (internal dimension approx 8 x 5 cm) ramekins, already greased.

2. Peel and dice the apples, and place them in a small pan along with all of the rest of the ingredients, apart from the eggs; cook, covered, very slowly, for three hours. By which time they will almost entirely have collapsed,and the mixture will be quite dense.

3. Allow the mixture to cool, and then mix into it the two eggs, lightly beaten. Divide this mixture between the three ramekins, and then place them in a bain amrie and cook them in an oven pre-heated to 175 degrees C for one and a half hours.

4. Allow to cool to room temperature, and un-mould the puddings onto soup plates. Serve, surrounded with light, vanilla-flavoured creme anglaise. Exquisite!

Christmas Pudding Recipe

That time of year, again. The tree is in its place in the barn (but won't be decorated until Christmas week...we stick firmly to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of having the thing fully functioning not long before the 25th, but if we don't buy it and install it at the start of the month, we risk getting only the ratty remnants left unbought by the Italians, all of whom have to have their Christmas decorations up by December 8th, in time for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Which is today.)
The puddings are steaming away on the stove - one for us, and a larger one for the Paoli, who always have a rabbit's-friends-and-relations gathering for Christmas day.  As I've done for the past few years, the pudding more or less follows a very reliable recipe from Marguerite Patten, which includes not only apple and carrot, but also prunes and apricots...as well as all of the usual more run-of-the-mill dried fruit, and a healthy dollop of black treacle.
The recipe couldn't be simpler. So far, the puddings have had five and a half hours....so, they'll be about ready by the time I've finished writing this.

For two medium-sized, or one very large pudding:

Ingredients: 4 oz Suet; 1 lb 12 oz mixed dried fruit and peel; 4 oz dried apricots, chopped; 4 oz prunes, chopped; 4 oz slivered almonds; 4 oz muscovado sugar; 1 medium carrot, peeled and finely diced; 1 medium apple, peeled, cored and finely diced; 3 oz plain flour; 6 oz fresh breadcrumbs; 1/2 tsp each of cinnamon, nutmeg, and allspice; 1 tsp each of grated lemon and orange zest; 1 tbs each of lemon and orange juice; 1 generous tbs black treacle; 8 fl oz milk; 2 large or 3 medium eggs, lightly beaten.

Method:

1. Combine all of the ingredients in a large bowl, and stir carefully to mix together very thoroughly. Leave, covered, overnight.

2. Grease two pudding bowls (or one large one, as you wish), and fill them with the mixture, levelling the top once done. Cover each bowl with a circle of greaseproof paper, with one pleat in, to allow it to expand as necessary, then cover the greaseproof paper in turn with aluminium foil. Tie round the neck of the pudding bowl with string.

3. Steam over a low heat for 5-6 hours; if the lid of the pan is not tight fitting, you might need to replenish the water as you go; always best to check, just in case.

4. Once steamed, remove from heat, and once they have sufficiently cooled,  replace the greaseproof and foil cover with fresh versions of the same. Store in a cool place, until Christmas Day.

5. To re-heat, steam again for 2 hours.

Always served in this house with brandy butter.

Prune & 'Armagnac' Tart

I've lost track of the number of versions of this recipe that I've come across - all are good, some are better than others. The flavours work perfectly together, and the velvety creaminess of the texture, if cooked correctly at low heat, is luxury incarnate! On one occasion, I remember serving this as dessert to 120 diners, at a banquet at Trinity House, and being inundated on the following day with messages of congratulation...all of which with due humility I passed silently on to Marco Pierre White (whose recipe, in essence this is). I've played around to a degree with the quantities in MPW's original, which I took from the pages of his improbably named 'Wild Food from Land & Sea' ; MPW is in general lousy when it comes to specifying quantities, and a common-sense filter is always advisable when translating his recipes from the page to the kitchen -  more often than not, his stated quantity 'sufficient for ten servings' would in fact comfortably feed an entire squadron.
Ramsay has a version which works almost as well as the MPW one, except that in Ramsay's version the filling is blitzed in a food processor before being poured into the tart shell - which has the, to my mind, unfortunate consequence of giving it the worrying appearance of brown sludge.
I've put 'Armagnac' in inverted commas in the title here, since although the trad title for the dish refers always to armagnac,  it would be nuts to use good armagnac for cooking, and instead a perfectly serviceable bog-standard cognac does perfectly well. Armagnac is for drinking.

For one eight inch tart, with accompanying sauce.

Ingredients:
1 x 8" shortcrust pastry tart shell; 140g stoneless prunes; 125g sugar; 75 ml French brandy;  6 egg yolks; 150ml milk; 350 ml cream; generous tsp of vanilla essence (or the scraping of half a vanilla pod, if feeling extravagent).

Method:

1.In a small pan, to 50g of the sugar add 75 ml water; bring to the boil, and simmer for one minute only over medium heat.

2. Dice the prunes into approx 1 cm dice and put in a small bowl. Add to these the sugar syrup and the brandy. Stir briefly, cover, and leave to macerate for at least four hours, and preferably overnight.

3. Blind-bake the tart shell at 180 degrees C, until the pastry has browned nicely. Reduce the oven temperature to 120 degrees C.

4. Mix together the egg yolks, cream, milk, remaining sugar, and vanilla.  Drain the prunes,  add the macerating liquid to the mixture in the bowl, and stir to ensure it is properly incorporated. Distribute the pieces of prune over the base of the pastry shell. Transfer the egg/cream mixture to a jug, and carefully pour into the tart shell as much of the mixture as you can manage to get in before it overflows - you should have about half of the mixture left over.

5. Bake the tart for an hour; the mixture will 'set' at this temperature, rather than bake.

6. While the tart is in the oven, pour the leftover mixture into a simmertopf or double boiler, and heat it gently, just sufficiently to cook the egg yolks.

Serve Tart and sauce while they are still warm (although served cold, they will still be pretty delicious!)

Tarte Bordaloue

I had thought I had posted this recipe on here ages ago - it having long been in my repertoire - and was surprised to find it not there recently when I wanted to check on the quantities I generally use for the ingredents in the almond cream filling (the recipe was originally based on a version from Michel Roux, but I know I don't use his quantities, as his are for a much larger tart than I would normally make). Anyway, I realised that I hadn't ever committed it to blog, which seems a sad failing on my part. The tart is delicious, and using this method it could not be simpler to make.

When adding the almond cream to the shell, don't bother trying to spread it evenly, or to make it look neat - the amount of butter in the mixture in practice means that as it cooks it sorts itself out and levels automatically, and if you heap the mixture on top of the pears, in the centre of the tart shell, and put it in the oven like that, as it cooks, the cream adjusts itself to fill all parts of the tart shell, and puffs evenly all over.

For one 8" tart.

Ingredients: 1 8" shortcrust tart shell (I make three such shells from shortcrust made from 8 oz butter, 10 oz plain flour 1 generous pinch salt, and 50 ml water....yes, I know, it's a hybrid of metric and imperial; that's what happens when a person's long ago schooling bridged the changeover between the two systems...anyway, the three unused shells go into the freezer, from where they can be baked from frozen as and when they're wanted); 2 large pears, of pretty much any flavourful variety; 2 tbs sugar, for sprinkling; 100g butter; 100g sugar; 100g ground almonds; drops of almond essence (optional, but I think necessary, since ground almonds these days have negligible flavour of their own, and need all the help they can get); 3 eggs; 2 tbs rum; apricot glaze (again optional, depending on how much of a perfectionist you are, and on how long before serving you have finished baking the tart; if it is to be left for several hours, it will look better for being brushed with glaze).

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180 C and then blind bake the tart shell until the base is partially browned but not completely baked.

2. Peel, quarter and core the pears, then cut each quarter into two lengthwise, so you have 16 pieces in all.. Lay the pieces in the partially baked shell, making an outer and an inner circle. Sprinkle with the 2 tbs of sugar. Put the pears in the shell back into the oven for ten minutes or so, to soften the flesh and to concentrate the flavour of the pears.

3. In a food processor, work together the butter and the sugar, then add the ground almonds (and optional almond essence), followed by the eggs and the rum. The mixture should be fairly dense.

4.  Out of the oven, spoon the almond mixture into the centre of the tart shell, over the top of the pears. It doesn't matter if the mixture doesn't go anywhere near the edge of the shell - trying to get it to do so will only mess up the arangement of the pear pieces and in any case isn't necessary, as the cream will sort itself out during baking.

5. Bake the tarte in the oven for about forty minutes. By the end of this time, the cream will have covered the entire tart, and should have puffed and browned.

6. Remove the tarte from the oven, and leave it to cool. At this stage, if using it, brush the surface with apricot glaze. Delicious either cold or still warm.

Galmiche's Lemon & Lime Tart

It seems inevitable. Whenever I trumpet a technique as being 'the best way of making...', you can be certain that at some future point I will discover one I think is better. I know I've posted at least two different methods for puff pastry, several years apart, and I'm conscious that I no longer follow the method I described on here for making farmhouse bread (the rising times are shorter, but I now let the flour and most of the water stand for half an hour before first mixing in the yeast - it makes it rise better; the additional step is apparently called 'autolysis'. It works.). In his 'Pedant in the Kitchen', I remember Julian Barnes getting quite aerated on one occasion about the fact that when he rang Jane Grigson ( a  mucker of his wife, so he had the phone number to-hand) to check the detail on one of her recipes he was trying to follow, not only could she not see what his problem was in understanding what she had written, but she further frustrated him by saying airily at the end of the conversation that anyway she 'didn't do it that way any more'. Which I think completely threw him, as the concept of there being more than one way to achieve the desired result was not something he wanted to hear, as he struggled with beating meringue and adding flavouring, or whatever it was, and all he wanted to know was what was 'the right way'. Choice was an undesirable additional that he could do without!
But, the fact is, that all cooks change their minds regularly about their preferred ways of doing things ....sometimes, I suspect, from boredom, and sometimes because they really have found a better way.

Anyway. Lemon Tart. For years, I've been doing it the way I posted on here in 2009 - five years ago! A light lemon-flavoured custard of cream and eggs, set gently inside a pre-cooked shortcrust pastry shell. It is very good....I wouldn't knock it. But this one - recently discovered from Daniel Galmiche's deceptively straightforward Brassierie Cookbook - is better! The appreciative noises around the table at the first mouthful will attest to that. The flavour is intense and edgy, and show-stopping.

For one nine-inch tart (halve the quantities for a 7 inch tart):

Ingredients: shortcrust pastry, made with 10 oz plain flour, 8 oz butter, half tsp salt, and 50 ml water; 1.25 cups sugar; 1 cup lemon juice; zest of 2 limes; 7 eggs; 1 cup cream.

1. Roll the pastry to line the tart form, and leave to rest in the fridge for half an hour; heat the oven to 180 degrees C, and bake blind ten minutes with the weights inside and another five without - the pastry should be fully cooked, and biscuity. Reduce the overn temperature to 100 degrees C.

2. Add the sugar to the lemon juice in a small pan, bring to the boil over high heat, then reduce to a low simmer for ten minutes - the quantity should reduce a little over this time. Then, add the grated lime zest and leave to cool, off the heat.

3. Beat the eggs with the cream, and add this to the cool lemon/ugar/lime mixture. Allow to sit for an hour, for the flavours to blend together.

4. Carefully, pour the cream mixture into the tart shell, and bake for approx 45 minutes at 100 degrees C.  Allow to cool before serving. (One additonal option is to sprinkle the surface with icing sugar and brown it briefly with a flame thrower, in order to give the tart a crisp surface; allow to cool once more before serving, if you do this.)

Excellent with vanilla ice cream!

Crème Brulée Pomme Verte

There's a lot to be said for a well-made Crème Brulée...including the fact that they aren't that easy to find. There seem to be many ideas of what constitutes a good one - how thick or how light, with or without the addition of soft fruit or other things to be discovered under the Crème, and whether the crust should be light and delicate, or dark and practically impenetrable - and even more different methods of making the thing. I've tried versions from Pierre Hermé, Loubet, Leith, Galmiche, Marco-Pierre...and probably many others that I can't even particularly remember. Almost all use bains maries; some pre-cook the crème as a custard, and others go straight from the egg mixture to the oven; temperatures and timings vary wildly, and so do the end results.
This version was discovered somewhere on the internet by the Technical Dept - I suspect it might have been on the Vedrenne website, in fact - and passed on to me. Technically, I don't think it can be bettered, and it has become my standard.

I first discovered Vedrenne Pomme Verte sirop a decade or so ago, when I was in search of Vedrenne sirops at a reasonable price, and tracked down the UK importer - a genial chap, based somewhere in Oxfordshire. He was quite happy to supply me, as long as I bought a minimum of a case of a dozen litre bottles at one time; and since the case could be mixed, I happily chose at random from a whole list of flavours I'd never previously heard of, to supplement the Framboise, Cassis, and Pêche de Vigne flavours that were what I was really after. And amongst them was Pomme Verte. A novelty, smelling intriguingly of almonds, I was initially at a loss about how I could use it - as with all sirops, the flavour disappears if cooked too robustly. In practice, it is good if added to other things, to give them a kick...a spoonful added to apple sorbet as it churns, for example, or added to the custard for a tarte normande, or a flavoured filling to go inside a crêpe. And, for something like crème brulée, it is perfect.

Oh, it is excellent also in a large,chilled gin and tonic....in fact, I'm almost tempted to say that that is its best use of all!

If you leave out the sirop in this recipe, then the recipe works either as the base for a differently-flavoured Crème Brulée, and if you don't bother with the burnt topping, then the recipe is effectively the same as for a petit pot à la crème.

For two individual servings.
Ingredients: 125 ml cream; 125 ml milk; 3 egg yolks; 15g sugar (for the base); 2 tbs Pomme Verte sirop; caster sugar, for the topping.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 90 degrees C.

2. Put the cream and milk into a simmertopf, and leave over a gentle heat for a few minutes, to heat through.

3. Beat the egg yolks and 15g sugar, until pale yellow.

4. Add the heated milk/cream to the egg mixture, along with the Pomme Verte, and whisk to incorporate.

5. Divide this mixture between two ramekins, and place in the pre-heated oven, on  baking tray (no bain marie!) for 40 minutes. At the end of this time, they should be quite firm - if they aren't, they should firm up whilst cooling after they've been taken out of the oven.

6. Once they have coled down - after twenty minutes or so - place in the fridge to chill for at least two hours.

7. Thirty minutes or so before serving, sprinkle the tops with a covering of caster sugar, and use a blowtorch to caramelise the sugar to a dark brown. Place the ramekins back in the fridge after this, until you want to serve them.

For perfection, serve with puff pastry sugar twists.

Wine Tart from the Vaudois

This is my version of something which comes from Fredy Girardet - and both the recipe and the author are a splendid new discovery for me. These past few months, I've been aggressively re-visiting the work of 'starred' french (and french-ish, extending into Belgium and Switzerland, and even into the UK, with the Roux brothers) chefs from the eighties, which were IMHO a culinary high-point. Girardet is amongst the previous unknowns (to me) from that period, and his 'Cuisine Spontanée', of which I tracked down a copy in January, has seen much use in my kitchen over the past few weeks.
These days, it's rare that I come across a new recipe which I can't immediately place as some kind of variation on a familiar theme - roasting, braising, boning, baking...the number of techniques available for use is limited, and within them, the changes are generally rung in the form of relatively subtle new combinations of flavours and textures. And, after a while, everything can be pretty much seen to be a first or second cousin of something I know from before - which might sound boring, but in fact is anything but...think of them rather as old friends that one's happy to rediscover!  This recipe, however, I can relate to nothing I've previously come across. The pastry case is not blind-baked...a detail which I found almost sacriligious, and which I mistakenly chose to ignore the first time I tried the recipe...cooking is brief and at a fierce temperature...the filling contains no eggs, and rather than being 'set', is effectively 'melted' inside the pastry shell, and then firms properly only as it cools down after cooking.
On a practical level, as long as you have the pastry ready in the fridge, then this is another of those dishes that finds a home in the 'Oh, God - it's that time already, and I haven't even started anything for dinner yet' category. Pre-heat the oven, roll the pastry, mix the filling...all of which might take five minutes, and then let it bake for a quarter of an hour and you're done. If you're really running late, then this is best made as individual tarts, which don't have to cool down completely before being served; if you make a large tart, and then try to slice it before it has properly cooled, then the filling will flow as you cut into the pastry shell, and the result on the plate is less than picture perfect. It all tastes the same, though...

For two individual tarts (for one 8" tart, multiply the filling ingredients by 150%):
Ingredients:
Pastry (made with 10 oz flour, 8 oz butter, a pinch of salt and 50 ml cold water - this is enough to make many tart shells, both large and small, but these are the proportions I use to make a standard batch of pâte brisée, which goes into the fridge and generally gets used up over a week. In his version for this recipe, Girardet uses a pastry made with baking powder...don't. I've tried it and the result is sub-standard.); 120g sugar; 10g flour; 1 generous tsp ground cinnamon; 100 ml white wine; 10g butter.

Method:
1. Heat the oven to 250 degrees C.
2. Roll out the pastry, to line two individual false-bottomed flan rings, which have already been greased, and placed on a baking tray.
3. Mix together the sugar, flour, cinnamon and wine. Carefully pour this mixture into the two pastry cases.
4. Finely dice the butter and scatter it over the surface of the two tarts.
5. Place the baking tray at the bottom of the pre-heated oven, and leave to bake for about fifteen minutes; keep an eye on the tarts as they cook, to ensure the pastry doesn't go too far.
6. Once the pastry has turned a deep brown and the filling has bubbled inside the pastry shells, remove them from the oven, and set aside to cool down for at least half an hour, before serving.

Chocolate Soufflé Crêpes with Orange Sauce

The recipe - or rather, the version I've always used, as I think it can be found in quite a number of books, these days -  comes from Michel Roux, with the sauce imported from a Fredy Girardet recipe where he uses it to coat a construction of vanilla ice cream encased in a warm crêpe, which is then passed under the salamander. I remember being deeply nervous the first time I made this souffle crêpe recipe, with the misplaced fear that the whole thing was extremely fragile and delicate and that it therefore  risked falling to pieces when being transferred from baking tray to serving plate. In fact, it's perfectly robust, and requires no more complicated treatment than to be scooped up with a fish slice and plated, quite unceremoniously, on a decently warmed plate, before the sauce is poured next to it.

The first three steps of the recipe can be done in advance, but thereafter you need to do the remaining steps just before serving - the oven stage is quick, and it might take only around five to six minutes from starting to assemble the crêpes and souffle mixture to actually serving the completed dessert.

To serve six

Ingredients:
For the crêpes:  20g cocoa powder; half tbs icing sugar; 10g flour; 2 medium eggs; 1.5 fl oz cream; 2 fl oz milk. Icing sugar, for shaking over the finished dessert.
For the souffle mixture: Crème Patissière made with 1 egg yolk, 20g sugar, 7g flour, and 80 ml milk;  35g cocoa powder; 4 egg whites; 60g sugar.
For the sauce: grated zest and juice of one orange; juice of one lemon; 140g sugar.

Method:
1. For the crêpes, liquidize all ingredients together; using the standard technique, use this mixture to make six crepes, and set to one side. Once cool, use a sharp knife and a cake ring (or any other appropriate sized circular form) to cut from the centre of each crêpe a perfect circle of about 6" diameter. Leave these on a plate covered with clingfilm until needed.
2. If the creme patissière is cold, reheat it gently in a double boiler, and stir in the cocoa powder.
3.  Put the sauce ingredients in a small saucepan, and simmer for five minutes or so, until thickened and slightly reduced.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

4. Whisk the egg whites until half-risen, then add the sugar by spoonfuls as you continue whisking until the egg white makes soft peaks. Stir a third of the beaten whites into the crème patissière, and then fold in the remainder. 
5. On each of 2 greased baking trays set out three of the crêpes. To the right of the centre of each one place a generous spoonful or two of souffle mixture - approx 3/4 cup of mixture per crêpe - and fold the 'empty' half over the mixture, to make a semi-circle.  When all six are ready, place them in the pre-heated oven.
6. Re-heat the sauce.
7. Watch through the oven door as the souffle mixture cooks and rises, and fills the crêpes as it does so. It should take about five minutes in total to cook - you'll have to judge by eye when they look done.
8. Take the trays from the oven, shake icing sugar over the top, and quickly transfer the crêpes to warmed plates to serve, with a generous spoonful of sauce poured alongside each one.

Almond & Raspberry Genoise

Adapted from a Roux brothers recipe for a mango and green pepper cake (which works better on the page than in reality, as 'mango' has loads of menu-appeal, but in fact seems to lose almost all of its luscious edginess in the process of cooking), this is another of those quick-and-easy recipes that, for me, come to the fore as soon as the weather and the clocks allow garden work to continue in the evening until well after dinner-preparation should already have been significantly underway. Five minutes prep, and then into a hot oven for twenty five minutes or so while dinner is already being consumed, and after an appropriate period of resting, this is perfect, served ideally with cream or with a light crème anglaise. Like all of these sorts of things, you can play as many tunes as you like with the recipe - substitute blueberries, or blackberries, or peach (or whatever you fancy) for the raspberries; add a little chocolate powder to the cake mix if you want to introduce a chocolate flavour; add a spoonful of any alcohol of your choice to the fruit, once you've put it into the ramekin....the world is your oyster. The dessert itself is light and delicious, and comes highly recommended.

Ingredients: 1 punnet fresh raspberries; 30g sugar; 1 egg, separated; 50g icing sugar; 15g ground almonds; 15g flour; 2 or 3 drops of almond essence.

Method:

1. pre-heat the oven to 220 degrees C,

2. Grease the inside of two ramekins. Put a strip of aluminium foil across the base of each ramekin, long enough to come up the sides of the rameking and fold down over the rim - this is to allow you to unmould the finished dessert more easily. Divide the fresh raspberries between the ramekins, and sprinkle the sugar over the fruit.

3. Beat the egg-white until frothy, and then beat into it half of the icing sugar. Beat the remaining icing sugar into the egg yolk, and then fold the yolk mixture into the egg white mixture.

4. Fold into the egg mixture the flour and almonds, adding the almond essence at the same time.

5. Divide the mixture between the two ramekins, to cover the fruit. (Don't worry if some of the fruit pokes through - as it cooks, it will spread and cover.

6. Bake in the pre-heated oven for twenty to twenty-five minutes; it will be done when the top is visibly browned and crisp.

Remove from the oven, allow to cool for about ten minutes, and then unmould onto plates to serve, along with ether whipped cream or crème anglaise.

Instant (practically) steamed puddings

About once a fortnight - if not more frequently - there comes a moment when I realise that already it's 7.30, and I've spent longer than intended  'just doing that last task' in the garden, and I haven't actually got round to doing anything about dessert, and the apple tart/zuppe inglese/vacherin/chocolate parfait that I'd had in mind just isn't going to happen. That's when I turn to one of a whole host of instant remedies....like zabaglione, or a hot souffle, or apples baked in cream, or (if possible) the remains of that apple sorbet or ginger ice cream that has been lurking unregarded in the freezer for the past week or so. And this method of practically instant  'steamed' puddings falls happily into that category.
For me, it involves an unusual foray into the use of the microwave - which, in this household, like many others, is normally reserved for re-heating coffee and the occasional mug of lunchtime soup. Several years ago, I toyed with a book called 'Madame Benoit's Microwave Cookbook', which came from Canada, and was initally appealing largely for the fact that Madame Benoit had actually been a pupil in Paris of Pomiane himself. Published in the seventies, it was presumably an attempt to ride the wave of enthusiasm back then  for the wonders of a new technological age...and I imagine that in most households, as here,  it was tried out experimentally on a few occasions, before being quietly relegated to the upper shelves, while the microwave was consigned to re-heating coffee and to dealing with frozen vegetables. Sic gloria transit.
In this recipe, however, the microwave actually cooks something - and once you've worked out exactly how to use your particular machine to get the best results (which is the only tricky part) then the results are really pretty good.
The original recipe was by Dan Lepard, and specified either a marmalade topping or a version of treacle sponge. I haven't actually tried either of those, but discovered that you can play as many tunes as you like with the topping (I think my favourite, so far, was a few fresh raspberries, and a spoonful or two of apricot jam...homemade, not the sad commercial variety ...which collapsed and melted deliciously as the puddings baked). The other day, which had been in general quite fraught, when the technical dept discovered that  what he'd thought was merely bruising from having fallen over on the walkway as he was rushing to get the post was in fact a broken scapula, and he'd spent the day dealing with doctors and hospitals and x-rays and medication, dinner was inevitably a confused event - and I ended up adding a teaspoon of chocolate powder to this basic recipe  and topping it with fresh blueberries...and the result was excellent.
As indicated, it appears - which I hadn't previously appreciated - that microwaves are not all the same, and so trial-and-error is required in order to find out exactly how your machine will work best for this recipe; for me, the machine in Italy takes 5 minutes on the high setting, and the machine in London needs at least 9 minutes. You'll need to work it out for yourelf.

For two individual puddings:

Ingredients: 65g butter; 65g sugar; zest of one orange (or a few drops of orange oil); 65g flour; 1 tsp baking powder; 1 egg; 1 generous tsp chocolate powder(optional);  topping ingredient of your choice (jam, or fresh berries, or a comination of the two, or syrup....as you wish)

Method:

1. Either butter or trenwax the inside of two large ramekins (the ones I use for this are 10cm diameter and about 8 cm in height). Cover the base of the ramekins generously with your chosen topping ingredient.

2. Using an electric beater, cream together the butter and sugar, and then add in the egg. Fold in the flour, orange, baking powder and chocolate (if using).

3. Divide the mixture between the two ramekins - in ramekins of the size I use, it should about two-thirds fill each one.

4. Cover each ramekin with a piece of clingfilm, stretched tight, and microwave them for the time it takes for them to rise (quite dramatically) and to cook through. In his recipe, Lepard quoted only a minute or so being needed, but then maybe he uses a state-of-art microwave with all-singing-all-dancing hot-and-cold-running everything, as opposed to something that came free along with the new fridge-freezer we got from Media World, more than a decade ago. In any event, the finished pudding should be above the top of the ramekin and the surface should look distinctly 'cooked' (i.e dry, and not unlike a cake surface). If in doubt, stick a knife into the middle and see if it comes out clean; if it doesn't, put the ramekin back in for another minute or so.

5. Unmould onto a heated plate, and serve with cream or the sauce of your choice

Tarte à l'Orange

A first cousin of the ubiquitous Lemon Tart, and yet something which is rarely to be found on menus or in recipe books. I have no idea why. If anything, this tart is even more delicious than the lemon version, with a deeper and more complicated flavour, and a texture which is generally creamier and more sensual on the tongue.
This recipe comes from Marco Pierre White - although, as is often the case with him, the quantities were all over the place in his published version, and his idea of what was appropriate for 'eight servings' would have fed an entire platoon, by my reckoning. You can play tunes on the recipe, as well - in the past, for instance, I've scattered fresh raspberries over the pastry shell before filling it with the orange cream (not something I tend to do now, as I use oranges from the garden, and for obvious reasons, they never coincide with garden raspberries), or you could use toasted slivered almonds in the same way.
I have, before now,  used OJ from a carton for this recipe, and it works perfectly well - I suppose I now just have the zeal of the convert in relation to the fruit growing outside my own door, and so eschew the commercial option.
The quantity given here will probably give more orange cream than you need for the tart - it depends somewhat on how high the sides of the tart shell are (or if it has shrunk in places in blind baking) and also perhaps on how much 'displacement' there has been if you have added other ingredients to the tart shell before pouring in the cream. No problem. Pour any additional cream into a ramekin (or two) and bake in the oven alongside the tart. The baked creams are meltingly delicious, and can be served on another day as a dessert, heaped with fresh berries.
  
For an eight inch tart:

Ingredients: Shortcrust pastry shell ( I generally make a batch of pastry using 8 oz butter, 10 oz flour, a pinch of salt and 50 ml water - this makes three 8" shells); 500 ml fresh orange juice; 200g sugar; 4 eggs; grated zest of 2 oranges; 125 ml cream.

1. Blind bake the pastry shell at 180 degrees C until completely brown and crisp - it won't get cooked any further at the lower temperature used for setting the cream filling, so all the baking needs to be done at this stage. Reducethe oven temperature to 130 degrees Conce the shell has been taken out of the oven.

2. Put the Orange Juice into a pan over medium heat, and reduce to half the original quantity.

3. Beat the Eggs with the Sugar, until pale yellow, then whisk in the reduced Orange Juice, the Orange Zest, and the cream. Stir to ensure all ingredients are thoroughly amalgamated.

4. Carefully fill the tart shell with cream, as full as you can, and place in the 130 degree C oven for half an hour. At the end of this time, the tart should still visibly 'wobble' in the centre - it will continue to firm up under its own heat once it has been taken out of the oven.

Allow to cool to room temperature, and serve.

Fig & Raspberry Tart

Opportunistic eating. The figs are now just ripening (which I don't entirely understand, as they were harvesting them already several weeks ago up in Belforte, and we must surely be warmer down here in the plain, and therefore you'd think we'd be ahead in terms of fruit-ripening... ), and the raspberry canes continue to crop generously. Dessert planning is done on an adhoc basis at this time of year, and tends to be a process of deciding what needs to be picked and eaten immediately. Hence this tart. Prepared entirely in advance, it works well for entertaining. If raspberries aren't available, follow the recipe and merely omit them; the end result is a different thing, but equally as good in its own way.

For two individual tarts.

Ingredients: 2 pre-baked phyllo shells, made with a sheet of phyllo, 15g butter, and a sprinkling of slivered almonds between the layers of pastry; 4 medium-sized, ripe green figs; 2 tablespoons grandmarnier; 2 generous tbs apricot jam; half a cup of fresh raspberries; icing sugar, to dust the finished tarts before serving.

Method:

1. Cut the tips from the figs, and discard. Cut the fruit into half-centimetre dice, and put into a small bowl along with the grandmarnier to macerate for an hour or so.

2. After maceration, drain the grandmarnier into a small saucepan; add the apricot jam, and heat gently, until the solid fruit in the jam is entirely liberated. Carefully remove the solid apricot from the liquid in the pan and use this to make a layer in the base of the two pastry shells. (In the last batches of jam I made, I didn't chop the fruit at all, and so the process of heating the jam leaves large chunks of apricot in the bottom of the pan....if your jam doesn't have fruit in it, then you'll have to use it purely as a glaze, and omit the stage of putting the solid fruit into the base of the pastry shells).

3. Pile the diced figs into the pastry shells, and carefully arrange the fresh raspberries over the the top. 

4. Heat the remaining jam and grandmarnier until it visibly thickens, stirring all the time, and then spoon this carefully over the tarts. Allow to cool completely, and dust with icing sugar just before serving.

Spiced Kumquat Ice Cream

An adaptation from something I tried first of all with some chinotti in syrup that the Pauli gave us at New Year - chinotti are a small citrus, which I think one is supposed to spear with a cocktail stick and eat carefully (beware heavy drips of syrup!) along with a cup of coffee, but which in fact are too sweet for modern taste to do anything of the kind. Much better to cut a couple of them into fine dice and add, along with a spoonful of syrup, when churning some homemade vanilla ice cream. The end result is delicious. As it is with the spiced kumquat version. The Brancolis gave us a bag of kumquats from their tree when they came to dinner, several weeks ago, to which I decided to give the same treatment. Simmered  for twenty minutes in syrup (for one pound of kumquats, use two cups of water and one of sugar) to which has been added five cloves, three crushed star anise, half a tablespoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon of vanilla, the kumquats should then be bottled; reduce the syrup by about half, until noticeably thickened, then strain and cool slightly before pouring over the bottled fruit, along with a quarter cup of brandy. Seal, shake to mix the syrup and brandy, and refrigerate for a fortnight before use.

To make the ice cream:

For four servings:

Ingredients: 6 egg yolks; 250 ml milk; 250 ml cream; 50g sugar; half a vanilla pod, or a teaspoon of good vanilla essence; 2 kumquats, preserved as above, along with a tbs of their syrup.

Method:

1. Heat the milk and cream together in a bain marie or simmertopf. If using vanilla bean, then carefully scrape out the innards and add them, along with the scraped bean, to the combined milk and cream.

2. Beat together the egg yolks and sugar until light yellow in colour, and thickened. To this, add the heated milk and cream, mix, and return to the simmertopf. If using vanilla essence, add it now. Cook over gentle heat, stirring constantly,  until thickened sufficient to coat the back of a spoon, then return to the mixing bowl to allow to cool down.

3. Once cooled, remove the vanilla bean (if used) and churn in the ice cream machine. At the start of churning, add the kumquats, finely diced, and their syrup. Continue as for making any ice cream.

Cinnamon Meringue Nests

I was recently given a copy of the Ottolenghi recipe book, and although I confess I wasn't immediately grabbed by the contents in general (although I might come back to it at a later date, and discover riches beyond the dreams of actresses...you never know), I was struck by what, to me, was a novel way of making meringue. So, with only minor adaptation, I tried it. To great success.

Not for the faint-of-heart, or for anybody concerned about calorie intake - the amount of sugar in this recipe is rather alarming! -  this is definitely something for those occasions when you want a theatrical flourish, and can banish thoughts of the waistline to the following morning. The density of the meringue mixture is such that you can build a towering structure which will retain its shape perfectly as it cooks, with no worry that it might spread or topple or do any of those irritating things which are so depressingly familiar to cooks.

Another surprise about this particular recipe is the prevalence of the flavour of cinnamon, despite only using such a small amount of it. On this occasion, I filled the meringe nests with creme fraiche and raspberries (to balance the inevitable sweetness of the meringue itself), both of which have quite strong flavours ...yet the lasting sensation at the end of it all  - subtle, but certainly there - was of the cinnamon.

Apologies in advance to those of you who don't have a stand-up mixer. Ottolenghi says it isn't possible to beat the mixture hard enough or long enough without one, and that it just isn't possible to do it properly with a hand mixer. I can't comment - I wasn't interested to disbelieve him, so I didn't try.

For two large 'Nests'.

Ingredients: 100g egg whites; 70g Muscovado Sugar; 130g granulated Sugar; quarter teaspoon of Cinnamon.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 110 degrees C.

2. Put the egg whites and the sugars into a simmertopf or bain-marie, and heat gently for ten  minutes or so, stirring occasionally, until the sugars have dissolcved into the egg wite, and the mixture has reached about 45 degrees C.

3. Remove the egg-white/sugar mixtur to the bowl of a stand-up mixer (Kenwood, KitchenAid....whatever you have), and beat at high speed for eight minutes. It will firm up and increase in volume dramatically.

4. Fold into the mixture the Cinnamon, then put everything into a piping bag (I always piped meringue using a 'ribbed' nozzle, but that's just personal preference), and pipe two nests onto a baking tray lined with either greaseproof paper or a silicon mat.

5. Bake for between one and a half and two hours. Allow to cool, and preferably use on the same day as baking.

How to make the perfect soufflé

Soufflés were one of the (relatively) first things I learned to make - after pastry, and crème patissière, I think. And certainly, I can remember about thirty years ago happily churning them out without a moment's thought, and often, when we were entertaining in the kitchen at Bankside, getting up from table mid-supper and getting on with soufflé production, without missing a beat in the general conversation. As with much else in those days, I learned from the late great Julia, in Mastering the Art...and, as with everything else that came from her instruction, the technique worked perfectly. (I've never been entirely clear how much that was Julia, and how much was Simone Beck, but at the end of the day, who cares?).

And then, over time, somehow I lost the knack. I'm not quite sure when...but I suppose I got hi-jacked by other people's methods and recipes (different temperatures, different base recipes, whether or not to use a bain marie, different ways of recognising the correct consistency of the mixture, different - but confident - opinions about everything...), and at a certain point I recognised that soufflés had become, for me, rather hit-and-miss. Which meant that I produced them less often, which meant that when I did they became even more hit and miss. Which was deeply frustrating, and basically kind of stupid....since I knew I used to be able to do it with my eyes shut. The final straw was the Larousse Book of Soufflés, which was one of the things under the tree for me this Christmas. Packed with wonderful-sounding things....except that when I tried the first of them, somehow instinctively I knew it didn't feel right, and when the end-result rose too high and then toppled over messily inside the oven, it was clearly time to take action. Following the time-honoured dictum that 'When all else fails, read the instructions', I decided to do just that, and crack open Julia once more.Which I did. January was significantly - and remarkably successfully - devoted to re-learning soufflés, and by the end of the period I felt as though I'd emerged from a bout of rehab, and all was once more well with the world.

The following method is for sweet soufflé (the method for savoury is different, and I'll post on that some other time), and is a basic recipe for Vanilla Soufflé, with variations thereafter for a number of different alternatives.

For two individual soufflés, in circular moulds 9cm diameter x 4 cm depth.

Ingredients: 11g plain Flour; 70 ml Milk (2.5 fl oz, if you're working in imperial - I switch between the two, all the time); 28g Sugar, plus 1 spoonful; 2 medium Eggs + one extra egg-white (if adding the extra white from whites you'e saved otherwise, and therefore need to measure a quantity, then one egg-white is approximately 30 ml); 1 tablespoon Vanilla Essence; a pinch of Salt; Icing Sugar.

Method:

1. Heat the oven to 200 degrees C.

2. Grease the inside of your two soufflé moulds.

3. Into a bain marie over medium heat, place the Flour, and add a couple of tablespoons  of the milk, to allow you to make a lump-free paste. Once the Flour has been properly incorporated, add the rest of the Milk, and mix together thoroughly with a hand whisk. Add the 28g of  Sugar, and cook for a few minutes, stirring from time to time, until the mixture has cooked and thickened. 

4. Remove the mixture from the heat, and beat in the egg yolks, one at a time. Allow the mixtrure to cool slightly, then mix in the Vanilla Essence.

5. In separate bowl, whisk the egg whites with a pinch of Salt, and when the whites start to stiffen, sprinkle a spoonful of sugar over hte surface; continue beating until the whites are stiff.

6. Mix a quarter of the stiff whites into the base mixture, then carefully fold in the remainder.

7. Fill the prepared moulds above the rim, and then run the side of a palette knife across the top of the mould, to scrape away excess mixture and to fill the moulds perfectly.

8. Run your thumb right round the edge of each mould, to create a small channel round the surface of each soufflé - this will stop the mixture from sticking to the mould, and allows the sides to rise vertically. Using a template (a piece of card or papaer, from which you've cut a circle about a cm in diamater less than the top of the soufflé) sprinkle icing sugar over the top of the mixture, to make a crisp skin on the surface of the finished product.

9. Place the soufflés in the oven, and as soon as you've closed the door, reduce the tempertaure setting to 180 degrees C.

10. Bake for eleven minutes. (This may take slight experimentation in practice, as no two ovens are identical, and ten seconds more or less can make all the difference with the finished consistency - you might find with your own oven that the best result is given by 10 and a half minutes, or by eleven and a quarter; for me, it's eleven.)

Serve. Immediately. And with pride. Best to put each soufflé dish on top of a folded napkin on each plate, as this stops the dishes from skidding around as the plates are taken to table.

The variations: For Coffee Soufflé, replace half of the Vanilla Essence with two teaspoons of Coffee Essence,  or better still, mocha paste;  for Praline soufflé, replace half of the Vanilla with two tsp of Praline Paste; for Orange soufflé, replace half of the Vanilla with the finely grated rind of one orange, plus 2 tbs of cointreau; for Almond soufflé, add to the Vanilla mixture a quarter tsp of almond extract, plus 90g of toasted ground almonds (you might need an extra egg white in this version, as the base mixture is thicker than with the other recipes, and so needs more beaten egg-white to lighten it.)

Recipe: The Best Chocolate Ice Cream...

...bar none. According to the Technical Department, at any rate - and he considers himself something of an aficionado.Neither too bitter nor too sweet, with a velvet texture, and an undertone of vanilla which kicks the whole thing up a very definite notch.

I found the recipe, several years ago,  buried deep within the pages of a volume called 'Chocolate Passion', where it formed merely a part of an elaborate and overly-constructed dessert.  The rest of the dish left me cold - as did much of the rest of the book, in fact, with a lot of illustrations of rather indigestible chocolate concoctions that sat heavy on the stomach just from their photographs! Following Nico Ladenis' philosophy that the purchase price of any recipe book is justified by the discovery in its pages of only one recipe that enters your repertoire, though, I don't begrudge a cent spent on this one. Try it and you'll see what I mean.

For five servings:

Ingredients: 5 medium egg yolks; half a cup of sugar; generous pinch of salt; one and a quarter cups of cream; 1 cup of milk; 6 ounces of dark chocolate (coarsely chopped if in one piece; I generally use small chocolate buttons); 4 teaspoons of vanilla extract.

Method:

1. Heat the milk and cream in a bain-marie or simmertopf, along with all but two tablespoons of the sugar, and the pinch of salt.

2. In a bowl, beat the egg yolks with the remaining sugar, until they are pale yellow in colour and leave a tail behind the whisk.

3. Add the liquid to the egg yolks, mix together thoroughly, and then return the combined mixture to the simmertopf. Cook over medium heat for about five minutes, until the mixture it has visibly thickened and will coat the back of a spoon.

4. Turn off the heat, add all of the chcolate and let it stand for 30 seconds before whisking the chocolate into the custard.

5. Remove the chocolate custard to a bowl, and whisk in the vanilla extract. Allow the mixture to cool completely, stirring from time to time, before churning it in your ice cream machine, and then freezing.

If the ice cream has been in the freezer for more than a couple of hours, remember to put it in the fridge to defrost slightly for about half an hour before you want to serve it.

Recipe: Campari & Prosecco Sorbet

This summer's signature dessert, this recipe is simple, straightforward and superb. Nobody guesses what the flavours are (well, Paola did, after a bit of thought...but she's the only person who has), but they all hoover it up with great enthusiasm as they consider the matter. Generally, I serve it with fresh raspberries, and the combination of flavours and textures works well. It might seem a little strange to be posting a recipe like this as we head into mid-September, but summer in Tuscany is just going on and on and on - temperatures were again up in the thirties, yesterday, and the forecast is for yet more of the same stretching ahead as far as the eye can see.

For four servings.

Ingredients: 200 ml sugar syrup (made by briefly boiling a litre of water with a kilo of sugar - or pro rata'd down, if you want to make a smaller amount, but I generally make this quantity and keep it in the fridge to use over several weeks, since it doesn't go off ); 250 ml Prosecco; 4 tablespoons Campari.

Method:

There almost isn't a method, since the process is so simple. Chill the ice cream machine, then add to it all of the ingredients listed above and churn for 20-25 minutes, until the sorbet is quite firm. You might need to churn a little more than with other sorbets, as it's important that all the campari is properly incorporated into the sorbet mixture - if you stop too soon, then the campari can be still slightly liquid, and the flavour too prevalent when you serve it.

Put the sorbet into a container, and into the freezer for several hours before serving. It should be soft enough to serve straight from the freezer, without any intervening 'softening' period in the fridge. Garnish with fresh raspberries to serve.

Recipe: Greengage & Almond Tart

 

The Plum and Greengage season is upon us, with a vengeance. Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of the things, and all - helpfully - at the same time. Paola has come and picked (industrially) three times, and I've been pressing bags of fruit on anybody who stands still for long enough not to avoid it. Still, the branches are loaded, and I'm afraid I'm just going to have to leave the remainder for the birds. Part of the problem is that there isn't actually a great deal to be done with them, once picked...they've gone into ice cream, and tarts, and bavarois, and fruit salads, and even been used to make daiquiris. But unless you want to go the 'chutney' route, which I don't really (the fruit/meat combination isn't something that works for me), then the options run out fairly quickly.

One delicious way of using them - either plums, or greengages - though, is baked in a crisp tart shell, on a bakewell tart base. Good with plums, and even more delicious with greengages. The recipe comes from Jane Grigson (who seems equally stumped when it comes to breadth of uses for fresh plums) and is definitely one to be repeated as often as you can get the fruit for it.

For an 8" diameter tart.

Ingredients: shortcrust pastry made with 125g butter, 150g flour, 50 ml water and a pinch of salt; 100g ground almonds; 100g melted butter; 1 egg; 100g sugar, half tsp almond essence; sufficient greengages that halved they will properly cover the surface of the tart.

Method:

1. Roll the pastry into a greased false-bottomed 8" tart tin, and blind bake at 180 degrees C. Allow to cool slightly

2. Combine all the other ingredients apart from the greengages, and mix well with an electric beater. Pour into the blind baked shell.

3. Halve and stone the greengages. If they are still hard, then poach them briefly in a very little water and a spoonful of sugar, just until they soften. If they're properly ripe, you shouldn't need to bother with this stage. Be careful if you are poaching them not to let them go too far,  as the appearance of the tart will be compromised if the greengages are a soggy mess!

4. Place the greengage halves, skin side up, on the almond base, arrangeing them pretty much to cover the surface of the tart. Bake for about half an hour, until the almond mixture has risen and puffed around the greengages. remove the tart from the oven as soon as the almond cream begins to brown.

5. Serve either warm or cold.

Recipe: Mascarpone Sorbet

One of Jennie's offering's for last month's Masterchef Weekend, this is light, delicious, and perfect for the current summer heat. If you like, you could add chopped fruit (plums, cherries, strawberries...whatever you happen to have) to the basic recipe, as it churns in the machine - but, personally I prefer the refreshing crispness of the penny-plain version. Perfect at the end of a languid summer lunch...

For six servings.

Ingredients: 250g Mascarpone; 270g Sugar; juice of one large Lemon.

Method:

1. Heat the Sugar gently along with 350 ml water. Stir until the Sugar has all dissolved, then raise the heat and bring briefly to boil, before removing from heat.

2. Add the Lemon juice, and then leave to cool down for twenty minutes or so.

3. Put the Mascarpone intoa bowl and whisk to lighten the texture, then stir into this the colled Sugar syrup.

4. Put the mixture into the fridge to chill for about an hour, then churn as normal in the ice cream machine. Freeze - but remember to transfer the sorbet from  freezer to fridge about half an hour before serving, to allow the texture to soften appropriately. 

Recipe: Soufflé base (sweet)

Completely different from the usual method for soufflé base, this version comes from Gaston Le Notre ( the late, and very great), and is one of the 'basic' recipes to be found at the front of the wonderful pâtisserie book he published in the seventies. The flour-to-milk ratio is very much higher than I've  found anywhere else, and in fact the process is more akin to making choux pastry than to making a custard. The result is much more robust than a soufflé made using a creme patissiere base - although not noticeably denser in texture, to the palate of the unwary diner - and will make the journey from oven to table with much less risk of deflating en route. Casting around, I find that the identical approach was suggested by Madame Saint-Ange, when she was publishing recipes around the end of the 1920's...so Le Notre wasn't making it up!

The first time I tried this method, it was a disaster, and the soufflé came out with the density of a pudding. I was tempted to think the method was wrong, but decided that it was worth trying again, on the basis that Le Notre was a fantastic technician, and it made no sense that he would have been advocating a process that didn't work. The trick is at the 'boiling' stage (see below); if you cook the flour too much, it produces a dense cowpat of stodge that will resist any attempt to rise in the oven. When I tried it again, and was much more careful, the result was perfect ....as it has been every time subsequently.

For enough soufflé base for two individual sweet  soufflés: half a cup of milk, 30g Sugar, 22g Flour, 2 medium Eggs, 10g Butter.

Method

1. In a bowl mix the Flour and Sugar with about 3 tbs of the Milk. 

2. In a saucepan, bring the remaining milk to the boil, add it to the Flour/Sugar/Milk mix and stir well, then return all to the saucepan.

3. Stirring vigourously with a whisk, bring the mixture to the boil, and cook until it visibly thiskens - probably about thirty seconds. Remove from the heat, stirring for a further ten seconds or so, then add to this the Butter; cover the pan with a lid, and leave for ten minutes.

4. After ten minutes whisk the melted Butter into the base, along with the 2 Egg yolks.

5. Add whatever flavouring ingredient you want to the base, and leave to one side until time to cook the soufflés; then whisk the egg whites and fold in as usual.

6. Cook the soufflés in a 180 degree C oven for fifteen minutes (no need to use a bain marie with this method)

Serve.