Desserts To Impress

Anyone who knows me, knows that if I had to choose, I would choose a starter and over a dessert in the 2-course set menus every time.  I like desserts, of course, but I have a greater fondness for savory than sweet.  The obvious exception to my starter/dessert maxim is the cheeseboard.  As the father of a french exchange student I stayed with rather crudely put it, "a dinner without cheese is like a woman without breasts."  Although, on these occasions, I would probably push the boat out and go with a 3-course set menu!

Last weekend, I was kindly invited to a BBQ being held by the Partner in the team within the law firm that I am working at.  Everyone who was going was allocated a task - some colleagues were to bring salads, others burger buns.  My task was to bring desserts.

Not being a strong pudding maker, and with all of my recipe books packed up in storage, I turned to my friend and the internet for inspiration.  Mary Berry provided a very good, relatively easy, recipe to impress with a lemon meringue roulade.  My success with this recipe was somewhat hindered by 1) not having an AGA (the recipe came from her AGA recipe book); and 2) not having a roulade tin - something which I feel I may now need to purchase.  As it happens, a similar recipe is available on the internet here.  My recipe did not call for raspberries, but I scattered them round the outside anyway.

Lemon Meringue Roulade

By using a roasting tin instead of the prescribed roulade tin, my meringue was slightly under-cooked I thought, a fact which became more apparent when the rolling process began.  Thus ensued the epic battle of wit and stamina against the once-used Christmas blow-torch.  Good triumphed, the blow-torch was duly subjugated, and the pudding was saved!

I also made little chocolate mousse pots with Grand Marnier twist.  Nigella Lawson's recipe can be found here.  I used Willie's Cacao chocolate (not cacao) for the pots and, while extremely tasty, perhaps this was a little too dark for the average taste.  I also made little chocolate leaves covered in edible gold luster.  For the leaves, you melt the chocolate (there is a more precise tempering method that you could use, but melting seemed to work fine for me!) and brush it onto the underside of a leaf with very visible veins.  Allow to harden.  Now, you're meant to give it a second coat, and I should learn to follow instructions, because I didn't and I think a second coat would have been good.

When the chocolate is hard, peel the leaf off the back and voila!  A pretty, easy decoration.  To top it all off, I brushed edible gold luster on the leaves.  I ordered mine on the internet, but I discovered that Waitrose also sells it - and very reasonable priced too.  I used very little of it, so it will do for many other days.

And there we have it, two desserts to impress that were embarrassingly simple to pull off!