Chilli chocolate dipped cherries

I prefer to make small foodie gifts if I can, and came up with the idea for these as I stood in the chocolate aisle of my supermarket earlier in the week. I was about to grab the 70% cocoa Lindt when the chilli flavoured caught my eye... Umm an idea in the working.

A lap around the supermarket collecting random necessities, and I had justified the combination in my mind, yes cherries dipped in chilli chocolate should be very good.

And you know what, they were fabulous!

Chocolate and chilli is no revolutionary idea, both originally from South America, the flavours have a strangely alluring relationship together.

Chilli and fruit is another inspired combination. In South East Asia I love the little pounches of chilli/sugar/salt that comes with sliced seasonal fruit, the street food in Bangkok is the best in the world, and this is a definite highlight for me.

So thinking laterally, using chilli chocolate for my dipped cherries is not a crazy stretch of the palate, and this is coming from someone that would usually prefer the classic food combos over the fashionable.

Do you need a recipe?
No way... Just melt the chilli chocolate or infuse your own if you're feeling fancy (but getting the portions right scares me!), make sure your cherries are straight from the fridge, dip in the hot chocolate and lay out on baking paper lined trays.
Refridgerate until set and firm. Eat as soon as possible.

I placed mine into a vintage glass bowl and wrapped in pretty paper and ribbon and had an impressive Christmas inspired gift with a twist.

NB Would you believe that when we shared these after lunch, I had not disclosed the chilli flavour, yet the first taster blew the fun for everyone announcing - "wow that chilli chocolate is great"! Bloody ex-sommeliers and their freaky palates!

Merry Christmas everyone.

Christmas with Jack

I had a quiet Christmas at home this year, PDC had been working like crazy, so I decided to prepare a modern Aussie style Christmas lunch for the two of us.

One of the difficult things about working out what to serve is that a lot of otherwise beautiful produce is usually so over demanded at this time of the year, that what is available is generally of poor quality. Take seafood for example, there are only so many fish/prawns/oysters etc to be caught and sold over that period so the chances of getting good produce over the other thousands at the market (no matter what you are prepared to pay) is slim, as the retailers will stretch themselves (and their prices - why were raspberries $6.50 a punnet last weekend, yet $4.00 the one prior, when the season is actually getting better?) to supply as much as they can sell.

Therefore my mission was to create a special, 'Christmas feeling' lunch without using the produce that everyone else wanted and would be easy to 'finish' on Christmas day and partially prepare the day before.

Therefore, the menu...

Entree
San Daniele prosciutto and seared scallops with saffron and manzanilla braised leek, peas and their tendrils

Main
Rare venison fillet and quince sauce with anchovy and asparagus stuffed zucchini flowers and taleggio polenta chips

Cheese
Chaource with pecans and bread to dip (actually on the menu but postponed until dinner...)

Dessert
Black cherry and almond clafoutis with eggnog crush

So the entree (scallops, fitted my requirements as some of the best ones comes frozen from Canada or Japan) - served on a glass plate that you can't see here!

The San Daniele ham is my new favourite thing, I can't believe I have been getting by eating the plastic Australian stuff for years. After eating in Spain earlier this year and my new palate for Spanish jamon, I can confidently tell you this is truly up there!
The entree was matched beautifully by PDC with a fancy white burgundy, 1996 Bonneau du Martray Corton-Charlemagne.

You can tell its summer when the zucchini flowers are at the market.

I (or PDC actually) stuffed the flowers with a very quick combination of a finely sliced asparagus spear, a couple of chopped anchovies, a blob of goats curd, lemon and S+P. The flowers were panfried and then finished in the oven, the stuffing leaked a little when i turned them but still offered a powerful flavour punch that you could not miss.

Pre cooked and set buckwheat polenta, cut into 'chips' to be seasoned and panfried.


The cherries before the batter... (and during PDC's nap - hence time for a few extra photos)

They were large cherries, but not plum sized as they look here... And then...

Baked... yes trust me it tasted as delicious as it looks here (I was very proud!)

We ate this with what I ended up calling eggnog crush, essentially my recipe for eggnog that I froze some of this year, in the hope of turning into a rough ice cream, yet as I discovered my taste for booze in the eggnog also stops it freezing hard, so we ended up with s slushy consistency for the 'crush', but the flavour combination was outrageously good.
The incredibly interesting thing about the clafoutis was that if I had not cooked it myself, I would have argued about the fact that I could DEFINITELY tell that the cherries had been soaked in Amaretto. But since you can tell from the first photo there was no soaking just beautifully plump, fresh, fat cherries, the flavour had come from the seeds, the exact reason why they are traditionally left in this dish. I love it, and love the way the best understanding of something comes from doing it yourself.

I hope you also had a very merry christmas
Jack