Molten chocolate babycakes with raspberry and redcurrant sorbet

Yesterday my beloved Mr 'Splorer turned 30. He didn't seem too excited about the prospect of a birthday. In his parents' house, birthdays are met with a cake and a sing song but not much else. But you don't turn 30 every day. Plus, how can I demand week long celebrations of my birthday, involving about ten meals out, if I don't make a bit of a fuss of him? So, I secretly took the day off and spent it preparing a three course meal. Which made me feel quite a lot like a contestant in Come Dine With Me. Especially with a menu that included scallops, a sorbet that didn't set properly and chocolate fondants. All Come Dine With Me staples!

Don't we have the most horrible curtains!?

But there was method behind it all - not just too many hours watching More 4 repeats of horrible people having dinner parties. Mr 'Splorer loves his seafood, hence the scallops. And I had to make something with chocolate and raspberries for the new blogging event, We Should Cocoa. 

This is a new monthly chocolate challenge organised by Chele of The Chocolate Teapot and Choclette of Chocolate Log Blog. It involves making something chocolatey involving each month's extra ingredient, which this month is raspberries. I knew I'd have to participate, as I love that combination. Much better than strawberries and chocolate - a vastly overrated combination, in my opinion (though I'm nowhere near as passionate on this topic as little sis, who has been known to hold forth for quite some time on this matter). 

So, the menu was as follows: 

Roasted sea scallops wrapped in pancetta with tomato and gremolata

This was lovely, and also very simple and quick. I shall be exploring Curtis Stone's website further.

Sicilian fish couscous from my Sicilian food cookbook

This was good, but I think I'd like to make some changes next time I make it. So watch this space for a new, improved version! 

Molten chocolate babycakes (a Nigella classic) with raspberry and redcurrant sorbet (discovered in Delicious magazine via Google)

There was nothing in the We Should Cocoa information about the chocolate and raspberries needing to be in the same creation, so hopefully the same plate is close enough. And I must say these two worked together rather wonderfully - the hot, sweet chocolate contrasted against the slightly sharp, cold, fruity sorbet. And, also it seemed very suitable for this time of year. A summer fruit sorbet to say goodbye to summer, and a warm, comforting pudding to say hello to the best kind of winter foods.

Of course all the magic happens when you dig into the babycake and find an oozing, gooey centre. (Hurrah, it wasn't all just like Come Dine With Me, in which they invariably overcook the chocolate fondant.) 

I followed both pudding recipes to the letter, so check out the links above. They both went swimmingly and I wouldn't change a thing. I made the sorbet without an ice cream maker, stirring it up every hour or so, and didn't have any ice crystals. Hurrah! It could have done with another hour or so in the freezer, but once you were tucking in, it really didn't matter.

And check out Chocolate Teapot for the other entries.

Sunday round-up of deliciousness

Breakfast  
Quick skillet granola - one of those wonderful why-didn't-I-think-of-that ideas - you just cook oats and seeds with honey and butter in a frying pan (or skillet, if you must!) and you have instant granola. 

Vegetarian delights
Vietnamese spring rolls - I love ordering these in restaurants and they look so easy and healthy. I might even bring myself to buy some peanut butter (ick!) for the dipping sauce.
Jamaican corn soup - a thick, tropical soup with coconut milk, sweetcorn and chilli. The perfect way to keep some tropical summer flavours going while warming yourself up with some spicy soup.
Corn fritters - another sweetcorn recipe from Food Stories, these fritters look so crunchy and good. Helen's suggestion of serving them with bacon has literally got my mouth watering. 

Meaty feasts

Beef satay skewers with peanut dipping sauce - succulent, marinated cubes of beef, and another excellent reason to go peanut butter shopping.

Roast chicken and bread salad - only a salad in the very loosest sense of the word, but just the name of the recipe tells you everything you need to know!

Buttermilk "fried" chicken - a scrumptious looking recipe for chicken which is actually baked, from Bill Granger's new book.
Chicken katsu curry - in which the chicken is breaded and fried before being smothered in a curry sauce. It looks delicious.
Sicilian pork ragù with chocolate - I'm still slightly obsessed with all things Sicilian, so this recipe caught my eye. But I'm also intrigued to see what happens when you add chocolate and cinnamon to ragù. It certainly looks delicious.
Lumpia (Filipino spring rolls) - I've never ever heard of these deep fried rolls of pastry filled with minced pork, but they look extremely tasty. 

Fishy bits
Fish tacos with mango radish salsa and sweet potato wedges - these tacos are made with fishfingers, one of my very favourite guilty pleasures, and look very tasty indeed. 

Miso mackerel - a really tasty looking dish of mackerel marinated in sake, mirin and miso.

Masala mackerel with daal and salad - a dish inspired by festival food. Again, the mackerel is marinated, this time in a mix of Indian spices before being grilled. 

A couple of breads

Coby's bread - this bread sounds too good to be true. No kneading required, crunchy crust, a centre full of flavour and a very forgiving recipe.
Pumpkin spiced bread - a wonderful autumnal treat made with pumpkin purée and some lovely spices. The pictures of it toasted with butter are so very inviting.  

A single sauce 
Garlicky red chilli hot sauce - a recipe from the New York Times that apparently has the potential to both make you famous and take you to the hottest day of summer. Sounds amazing!

Cakes, cookies, muffins and other assorted sweets

Chocolate orange panettone - as made in The Great British Bake Off, Ruth makes panettone, a real favourite of mine, look totally possible. And it's chocolate and orange - one of the very best flavour combos.

Chocolate chip cookies - making chocolate chip cookies is always a shortcut to the round-up, but these are from Nigella's new book, so definitely worth a try. 

Cornish fairings - beautiful cracked biscuits with ginger and candied peel. Apparently they're traditional in the West Country, but I'd never heard of them.

Cañones de guayaba (guava cannons) - like a kind of fig roll with a guava paste filling, to be filled with queso blanco or fresh goat's cheese when hot.

Chocolate fudge cake - a recipe I need to dig out of the Ottolenghi cookbook, as it looks dark, dense and delicious.
Easy peasy chocolate cake - what every domestic goddess needs in her repertoire, this cake looks totally decadent smothered in shiny chocolate ganache icing.
Mother in law bran muffins - a proper handed-down-the-family recipe, the name makes these sound virtuous (and they are low in fat) but they look wonderful - soft and spicy.

Buttermilk currant cake - part of the wonderful History corner, this cake looks delicious, and also comes from the wonderful 'Currant recipe book', which makes a whole host of wild and wonderful claims about the wonders of currants, such as 'Currants give radiant vitality'. There's only one way to find out if this is true... 

Puds
Frozen raspberry Kent mess - like an Eton Mess but with strawberries and frozen. I think freezing it was a stroke of genius. Surely the only thing better than a mess is a messy ice cream!
Blackberry Bakewell - I love Bakewell tart with all the fervour of a recent convert (my silly younger self wasn't a big fan of almond flavoured things) and a version with fresh blackberries sounds just perfect for this time of year. 
Classic profiteroles - a perfect rendition of this fantastic classic dessert, which was one of my absolute childhood favourites. It's definitely time I gave these a go. 

And finally...

Here's a post featuring the poem Jim, by Hilaire Belloc, a family favourite in my household. Altogether now, "There was a boy whose name was Jim..."

Pasta con le sarde

We got back yesterday from a wonderful week in the west of Sicily and I'm quite pleased with myself for making my very own Sicilian dish within 24 hours of getting home. In fact, I spent quite a lot of the time there wishing I had a kitchen so that I could make use of the wonderful ingredients, rather than taking on the restaurant lottery. (This being Italy, we were generally successful, especially with pizza, but there were some dodgy moments, including some very strange - and massively overpriced - swordfish croquettes.) Next time I think we'll be renting an apartment and raiding the markets, bakeries and shops. In the meantime, I've been writing a list of the things I want to try making at home. It's quite a long list, so I thought I'd better get started! Luckily, in the spirit of holiday preparation, I bought myself a copy of Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor-Simeti. It's a stupendous book which combines a history of the island with loads of traditional recipes (and she's refreshingly honest about the ones she doesn't like very much!).

And the first recipe to get an outing in my British kitchen is pasta con le sarde, or pasta with sardines. It's the Sicilian national dish according to Mary and I had it a couple of times in Sicily, where it was generally served on a long curly pasta called busiate (see right). According to the book, the legend goes that Euphemius of Messina landed at Mazara del Vallo in Sicily in 827 with a Saracen army and instructed his Arab cooks to find some food. Because it was a fishing port, there were loads of sardines around. Then they found wild fennel on the hillsides, currants in the vineyards, and saffron and pine nuts in the market and mixed it all up. Oh, and there always seem to be breadcrumbs on top for a scrumptious bit of crunch.
When I made my version of the recipe, I skipped the fennel because I couldn't find any and, more importantly, I'm not a massive fan. If you do want some, the recipe specifies a large bunch of fresh wild fennel greens which are cooked for 10 minutes in salted boiling water. And the water is then used to cook the pasta. I added some capers, which seemed to be a very popular ingredient in Sicilian cooking, and some parsley for a bit of green. And it all worked rather well, I must say. In fact, I'd dare to say that it was a lot better that the versions we had in the restaurants (though I'm sure it's not a patch on what all the Sicilian nonne are churning out behind closed doors). The saffron flavour was lovely, and the sweetness of the currants worked surprisingly well. And I'm now a big fan of sprinkling crunchy toasted breadcrumbs on pasta. A very nice textural contrast. And Mr 'Splorer's reaction? "I'm so glad I married you." So I think he liked it!

Pasta con le sarde

(Adapted from Sicilian Food by Mary Taylor-Simeti)

Serves 2

4 whole sardines

½ onion (I used red, which is what we had in the house, and I think always goes well with fish, but I don't think it matters too much) 

25g pine nuts 

25g currants, plumped in hot water for 5 minutes

25g toasted almond slivers (optional) 

4 anchovy fillets, chopped finely

1 pinch of saffron, soaked in a tablespoon warm water 

a handful of capers (these are my addition so however many you like!) 

200g pasta*

100g breadcrumbs
handful of parsley

lots of olive oil

*The recipe specifies bucatini or maccheroni. In Sicily it was busiate, which I suspect you can't buy in this country. I used fusili lunghi bucati because I thought they had a similar twisty turny long thing going on as busiate.

Cut off the head, fins and tail of the sardines. Remove the scales, slit the belly and remove the guts. Then holding the fish belly upward between the palms of your hands, run your thumb along the backbone so that the fish opens like a book, the two halves remaining joined along the dorsal ridge. Remove the backbone.

Put ½ tablespoon of olive oil in a heavy frying pan. Add the breadcrumbs and toast over a  low heat until they are a rich golden brown. Set aside. (This made too many toasted breadcrumbs, but they're rather yummy!) 

Fry the onion in 2 tbsp of olive oil over a low heat until it begins to colour. Add the pine nuts, currants, almonds, anchovies**, and the saffron and water. Stir and simmer for a few minutes. 

Fry the sardines in 2 tbsp of olive oil, leaving two whole and mashing the other two with a wooden spoon. 

Cook the pasta. Mix with the oniony mixture and the mashed sardines. Top with the other sardines and then sprinkle with breadcrumbs. Serve the breadcrumbs on the side for more sprinkling. 

(The recipe says this really good cold, but I wouldn't know about that!)

** According the recipe you should 'melt' the anchovies in olive oil separately and that's what I did. But it just seemed to create more washing up, so next time I'm just going to chop them up and chuck them in!

And before I go, here are a few more culinary highlights from our trip:

Pane cu' la meuza - or a spleen sandwich with caciocavallo and ricotta cheeses. Not sure if this counts as a highlight for me (texture was a bit odd) but Mr 'Splorer enjoyed it! 

Arancina - massive great ball of cheesy, ricey goodness.

Fish couscous, which came with a wonderful cinnamony fish broth

Rianata pizza, with anchovies, garlic, pecorino and oregano

Ice cream brioche sandwich (how do the Italians stay so thin?!)

Bellibrutti - little almond cakes at the Maria Grammatico pasticceria in Erice, as recommended by Mary Taylor Simeti. These ones were nice but we thought that all the other little morsels we tried were rather horrible - far far too sweet.

 Ricotta tart and chocolate cannolo - yum!

 Oh, I wish I was still in Sicily...