Festive Desserts

I made two desserts for the Christmas period, as something chocolate is obligatory, but my daughter had also asked for a repeat of Dan Lepard's Mont Blanc Layer Cake.

The Mont Blanc Layer Cake recipe, based on meringue, is far too big for just three of us, particularly as it doesn't keep well, so I made a meringue roulade with only 3 egg whites, filled it with a half quantity of the chestnut and ricotta cream and drizzled melted chocolate over the top.

We decided, on trying the dessert, that although it was delicious, we all preferred the crisper meringue of the original recipe, which gives a better textural contrast with the chestnut cream than the soft meringue of the roulade.

For  the chocolate dessert, I made a half-sized quantity of Delia Smith's Chocolate Truffle Torte, which fitted nicely into a 7" (18cm) shallow cake tin. The only departure from the recipe was to use Amaretto liqueur instead of rum.

My daughter also contributed a batch of mince pies, which has become a tradition now. She uses this Mary Berry recipe, which adds dried apricots to the mincemeat and tops the tarts with grated marzipan.

Lemon Blueberry Ricotta Cake

However much you like the traditional winter treats that use dried fruit, spices and chocolate, there are times when you really crave something lighter and fresher tasting. This Lemon Blueberry Ricotta Cake fitted the bill nicely, for a New Year tea party, as I thought everyone else would probably be tired of mince pies and Christmas cake by then, too. As it turned out, not much of it got eaten, as everyone went for the chocolate cake, but my niece was happy to take most of it home for her large family, leaving myself and my husband just a couple of slices each.

I can't remember now, why I chose this recipe; I think it was probably to use up the rest of the ricotta cheese that I'd bought for my Christmas Day dessert. The only change I made to the recipe was that my punnet of blueberries weighed 170g, and I used them all.  I didn't have a loaf tin of the required dimensions, so I baked the cake in my 30cm long loaf tin. Although it is long, it has the cross section of a small 1lb tin, so gives a lot of dainty slices from one loaf.

The batter was quite wet, so I was worried that the blueberries would sink, but everything was OK in the end. Despite a shallower, narrower baking tin, the cake still took the full suggested time to cook, and didn't need covering.

I was in two minds about this cake - it tasted great but I thought the texture was too moist and dense. It didn't have the light crumb that you expect from a cake of this type. I think it would have made a better dessert than a tea table treat, served with a blueberry coulis and some cream. It did make a refreshing change to all the Christmas treats still lying around though!

Chocolate Ricotta Tart

Would you believe I've been too busy cooking (and eating) to write up any of my recent efforts? My sister visited for a week, which distracted me from the routine of life, then it was a birthday dinner for my daughter and the arrival of a new food mixer, which needs a good work out before I can form an opinion on it's usefulness.

This Chocolate Ricotta Tart was the dessert I made for my daughter's birthday dinner. It's very similar to a cheesecake in a pastry case, and is a classic Italian or Sicilian dessert. There are dozens of recipes online and many add chopped nuts, mixed peel and citrus flavours (with or without the chocolate), but I was drawn to this version in one of my recipe books, which added only finely chopped chocolate and coffee to emphasize the flavour.

The recipe quantities in my book (The Essential Dessert Cookbook) were huge, making a deep 25cm pastry case filled with a mixture which used well over 1 Kg of ricotta. For our humbler needs,  I made a 22cm case and adapted the filling, using half quantities of the ingredients and adding some coffee flavoured liqueur. I didn't halve the amount of chocolate though - I just cut down from 125g to 100g - there's rarely such a thing as too much chocolate in this type of dessert!

I used standard shortcrust pastry for the case, although the classic recipes use a type of pastry called Pasta Frolla. The filling consisted of 625g ricotta, 2 egg yolks,  65g caster sugar, 1 tablespoon plain flour, 100g finely chopped dark chocolate, one teaspoon instant coffee dissolved in 1 tablespoon of hot water and 1 tablespoon of Tia Maria liqueur, mixed together and chilled in the raw pastry case for an hour before baking at 180C for about an hour, until firm. After cooling slowly in the slightly open oven, the tart was decorated with drizzles of melted chocolate and chilled.

The tart was not as good as expected, unfortunately. The flavour was great, but the cheese mixture was very dense  - I had expected something lighter, as ricotta is such a light cheese. I originally picked the recipe because it didn't contain extra cream, but perhaps this is needed to keep the texture lighter. Although it's considered a classic recipe, there are so many versions around that it's difficult to decide which is going to be the best.

I'm hoping to have time to make something specially for the We Should Cocoa baking challenge this month, but if I run out of time, this will be my entry, as the remit this month is to use chocolate and alcohol together. One tablespoon of liqueur hardly counts, but it might have to! More later if necessary!

Courgette and Ricotta Tart

With a  long hot sunny spell followed by a lot of warm rain, the vegetable garden has run amok. It's not all good news - the tomatoes are very leggy, trying to catch up on missed growth when it was so cold, and the beans don't seem to be getting the usual second flush of flowers, but at the moment we are getting regular supplies of beans and peas, and more courgettes than we know what to do with.

This courgette and ricotta tart was ideal for both using up some of the excess and for providing a light meal on one of the recent hot days. We ate it with coleslaw and a tomato and green bean salad.

I followed the recipe more or less exactly (!!!).  The first change was that I used a pack of Tesco ready-rolled puff pastry which was flavoured with dill and lemon - I thought these flavours would complement the courgettes and cheese well. I used four small courgettes for the topping, and my tart looks as if it has more courgettes on top than the one in the recipe. I also added some seasoning to the ricotta and egg mix, as I didn't have much basil to add. (I recently trimmed the basil plant for a batch of pesto and could only glean a couple of tablespoons of very small leaves from it.)

The results were delicious. All the flavours worked well together, and the tart was very light and refreshing - just right for appetites blunted by the heat. The only thing lacking was seasoning - next time I'll add more salt to the ricotta and also season the courgettes while frying them.

I was really impressed with the flavour of the pastry - I could taste both the lemon and dill, but neither were overwhelming. The pastry didn't rise as much as I expected, but that might just be the recipe, not a problem with the pastry.

Hubs thought he would prefer a quiche, with it's deeper filling, but I really liked that the courgettes were the dominant flavour  here - I think they would have been lost buried in a deep custard.