caffeine_fairy and chomper99 came over for dinner on Friday night, 'cause we hadn't seen them in ages... well, not in a proper social way, anyhow. I fed them smoked salmon on dark rye bread (a recipe from my bread-machine bread book but which doesn't really work properly in my breadmaker since it's so sticky -- it cooks a lot better in the oven), followed by braised beef with new potatoes, spinach and mushrooms, followed by black & white bread & butter pudding (of which more below), followed by cheese and biscuits.The bread and butter pudding was a bit experimental but it worked very well (and now I wish I'd taken pictures). It started out life as Delia Smith's recipe for chocolate bread and butter pudding. Instead of making the sauce with plain chocolate (Green & Black's 70% is what I normally use), make two-thirds quantity with plain chocolate and make the same again with white chocolate. (Two-thirds rather than a half because splitting eggs in half is a pain in the a*se and the full recipe calls for three eggs.) You will of course need to scale the amount of bread, and the size of the pan, up accordingly.
Take your chosen dish in which you're going to cook the dessert, and make a barrier of tin foil down the middle of the pan. Do the sauce-bread-sauce-bread-sauce thing on either side of the tin foil, one colour each side, and leave the foil in place while the sauce soaks into the bread (Delia always reckons this takes 24-48 hours, but three seems to work adequately). Put the dessert into the oven with the foil still in there, and then remove the foil _carefully_ about half-way through the cooking time, by which time everything should be firm enough that you won't get much, if any, mixing between the two sides.
I served this with a choice of raspberry coulis, fresh raspberries, or double cream (or combinations of the above).
On Saturday
rotwang drove chomper99 to Reading to reunite him with his car, while I dragged caffeine_fairy round most of South London (or that's what it felt like ;)) and introduced her to the Wing Yip store in Croydon, where we also grabbed some lunch (dim sum for me, crispy duck for her).Later on we pottered over to
thalinoviel and bytepilot's place for dinner with them and mitchy (hi!) which was dead yummy, especially the wild mushroom sauce.Sunday morning saw us about ready to strangle England's cricketers for losing a Test match they should have easily won, up until the point where they snatched victory from the jaws of defeat (instead of the other way round which is much more usual). To recuperate,
thalinoviel showed us the delights of the food court at Oriental City (usually we go to Zen CX). Mmm. Dim Sum again. 