Back in the early days of our relationship, I may have poked some good-natured fun at Matt for being what I would call a “Prom Drinker”. A prom drinker, for those of you who don’t know, is someone who would walk up to a sophisticated bar and ask for a Malibu Sunset, a Midori Sour, or, God forbid, a Mudslide. Matt was nowhere near that embarrassing, but the first time he ordered a Bailey’s on the rocks, I pinched his cheek and called him adorable. And then I tasted it and was like, hot damn, that’s really good.
Bailey’s Irish Cream was invented in 1971, so it can’t really be classified as “classic Irish drink”, but it’s no less delicious for it. It’s rich and creamy, with a whisky bite tempered to a dessert-like sweetness. An indulgence all by itself. So why not use it as the inspiration for a St. Patrick’s Day dessert: Bailey’s parfaits?
In the spirit of the holidays, we’ve decided to publish one of our favorite recipes, Chocolate Frangelico Mousse, from our new cookbook, Cork and Knife.
It’s around this time of year that we load up at the grocery stores on cartloads of high-quality semi-sweet chocolate, cream, Frangelico hazelnut liquor and shelled hazelnuts. And that’s just our normal shopping list, it’s nothing to do with Christmas. But seriously though, this year we really are stocking up, because Cork and Knife was published this summer, and we’ve been overwhelmed with the positive responses to it! We’ve seen your wonderful Instagram posts and stories about recipes you’ve made from the book, and you’ve sent us so many wonderful emails. Thank you so much!
If you haven’t picked up a copy yet, now is the perfect time. Are you searching for a Christmas gift for that special foodie in your life? Is there a family member whose sock drawer is STILL bursting with all the socks you’ve bought them as gifts over the years? Are you looking for an unusual cookbook that combines the best of the food world AND the liquor cabinet? Well, here you go! Click on the book cover below to hurry over to Amazon and order your copy while you still have Christmas mailing days left!
(If you prefer to get your books elsewhere, no problem! Just head over to our cookbook page to find other places you can buy it! Or ask your local bookstore.)
As a holiday treat and a sneak peek at the book, we’re sharing just one of the recipes you’ll find in the book: Chocolate Frangelico Mousse. Think of it as an amuse bouche to get you in the holiday mood.
Sticky toffee pudding is a hallowed British dessert which translates to American as “warm date cake drizzled with toffee sauce”. Either way you say it, it’s a deliciously rich and comforting treat, perfect for a chilly evening.
Vanilla and turmeric-flavored pannacotta with hibiscus syrup. A) A rich, creamy, colorful dessert, or B) a murder victim on a teaplate? You be the judge! (Hint: It’s A.)
Every now and again with this blog, we create a recipe so unrepentantly weird that it seems a shame not to share it with the world. This week, we’d like to introduce to you a dish based on a gorse* pannacotta that we encountered a few years ago at one of our favorite restaurants, Llys Meddig in Newport, Wales.
Our vacation snapshot of the original dessert is too low-quality to share with you – suffice it to say that it was a delight and well worth trying to recreate. Pannacotta is pretty much a three-ingredient recipe (cream, sugar, gelatin) in its simplest form; all we would need, apparently, is some gorse.
So if you ever need to make a dessert suitable for a Murder Mystery night, we’ve got you covered.
*explanation of what the heck gorse is below
The turmeric gives these pannacotta a beautiful golden color and a delicate spice.
Light and airy pumpkin mousse, with a good splash of bourbon, in a rich chocolate cookie shell topped with whipped cream swirls and crunchy candied pecans. Yeah, you need to make this.
Go ahead, call me a curmudgeon, a cynic, an eye-roller. A grump, a sourpuss, a grumbler. A killjoy, a grouser, a mutterer. A crab, a sorehead, a miserablist. A gloomy Gus, a doubting Thomas. Go on, I can take it.
The truth is, I think Valentine’s Day is a crock of $&@%.
I think it’s a made-up holiday designed to make single people feel bad and coupled people spend money. It’s a scam, people! *
Now, while I may be an anarchist at heart, I am also a hypocrite so, while I don’t require a fancy dinner out, I do enjoy a nice Valentine’s Day dessert.
(*Full disclosure – I’m married to a wonderful man who has taken me out many times to delicious, romantic Valentine’s Day dinners. I still think it’s a scam, but a girl can only take the moral high-ground so far before someone waves a confit duck leg under her nose and then all bets are off.)
This post is kind of dedicated to two people, and the first one is me (Matt).
At the age of, oh, about 12, I don’t think there was a single thing in the world – except perhaps, mashed potatoes – that I loved with all my heart more than butterscotch flavored Angel Delight. Pudding, to you.
(Notes – 1: Yes, we’re really big on singing made-up words like “De-smoothest” in British commercials. 2: Apparently, we like throwing maraschino cherries on top of everything, for no damn reason that I can think of. And 3: strawberry pudding is pretty foul. Other than that, 4: you get the idea.)
On as many separate occasions as I could get away with, I would steal down to the kitchen while my parents were elsewhere, mix up a bowl of Angel Delight – butterscotch only – and take it up to my room, wait for it to set, and have myself a little butterscotch pudding party for one. I’d hide the bowl under my bed behind a stash of Doctor Who books, and pig out for as long as I remembered the bowl was still there. (Sometimes I would forget. Sorry, Mum.)
The second person I want to dedicate this to is Fringe scientist Walter Bishop, because … because if you don’t love Walter Bishop loving pudding, you have a dead black heart and you probably work in finance.
I don’t know what Angel Delight did to corner the market in gelatinous butterscotch-flavored dessert, but I never found a packaged version that stood up to their original recipe. We returned from England last spring with three butterscotch pudding packets, now just a delicious memory. So I decided to make some from scratch.
This recipe from the Pizzeria Locale in Denver, described by Melissa Clark at the Times – didn’t seem too tricky – the only cautious stage is cooking the sugar to the correct temperature. She recommends a candy thermometer – I haven’t had luck with the kind that clip to the side of the pan, they tend to slip around, and with a relatively small amount of caramel, the base of the thermometer isn’t guaranteed to sit comfortably in the mix. So I prefer to use our Thermapen (made in England, don’t you know), which has a really fast digital readout with great accuracy. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it powers down after a couple of minutes unless you deactivate it by closing and re-opening it, so if you’re focused on caramelizing sugar, it can be a pain to have to wake up the thermometer at a crucial moment.
That’s all the nerdy gadgetry for this recipe; everything else is quite standard.
Go ahead, call me a curmudgeon, a cynic, an eye-roller. A grump, a sourpuss, a grumbler. A killjoy, a grouser, a mutterer. A crab, a sorehead, a miserablist. A gloomy Gus, a doubting Thomas. Go on, I can take it. 
