Claire's Cake Bake & Other Foodiness

Last weekend we went round to my mum & dads for a Jamie Oliver curry, a kind of belated birthday dinner for my brother as he was poorly the first time round. I offered to make pudding and decided something palette cleansing was in order.

I hadn’t made or even eaten syllabub before but had been inspired after seeing the Tequila syllabub on Masterchef the other week (made by an online acquaintance). It was easy to make, though it started the evening before when I had to infuse some sugar, dessert white wine, lemon & lime juice. Served with some of the lovely Three Chimneys Shortbread it was quite pleasant. Though next time I’d put more lemon juice in as the sweetness took some of the flavour away.

Makes 6 servings
75g caster sugar
100ml sweet white wine
1 lemon
1 lime
300ml double cream, whipped

The night before – thinly pare the lemon and lime and squeeze out the juice. Put this in a bowl together with the wine and sugar. Leave to infuse overnight before straining into a bowl.

Fold in the cream and pour the syllabub into martini glasses or small pots.

Serve with homemade shortbread biscuits.

For Christmas I bought my mum & dad a recipe book called The Three Chimneys, Recipes & Reflections from the Isle of Skye’s World Famous Restaurant. Hubby & I came across the beautiful book when we were in the Spey Larder, Aberlour. My mum & dad where in the shop at the same time so we didn’t get long to look through it, but we instinctively knew (well, we hoped) it would make a great present.

To go with the book, I decided to make their recipe for Scottish Shortbread as an extra present and I am soooooooo glad I did. After trying to make vanilla shortbread a while back from a BBC GoodFood recipe which was nothing short of disappointing (they were vanilla biscuits, not shortbread). This new recipe was nothing short of fabulous. I think the main difference was that T3C recipe called for rice flour.

Now two days before Christmas (yes, it was a Sunday too), in a Tesco Extra the size of, erm, something very large with two floors I didn’t think this would cause me too much of a problem. After failing on my first visit, Hubby reluctantly came back with me after I got home & found out rice flour is gluten free. Disappointingly I still couldn’t find any. So we drove to Sainsbury’s. Nope, no rice flour. So we tried the larger Sainsbury’s – that had closed 5 minutes before we arrived. Gah.

Christmas Eve arrived and I was in work but Hubby had a list of things that we still needed to get so he tried a smaller (not small) Tesco in Chester & found me a packet of all that is light and crumbly, rice flour.

I made 3 trays full of biscuits on Christmas Eve and threw away a lot of dough. Everyone who tasted the biscuit the next day were very complimentary, even though they were made with Danish butter! A few biscuits were more golden than the others but here is a couple of wee photos…
My mum & dad seemed very happy with their new cookbook and after leafing through, my dad decided to tackle T3C famous Marmalade Pudding (which even has it’s own club) on New Years Day. It was simply fantastic…
I’d love to visit T3C restaurant one day soon and if we were ever to have a few hundred pounds to spare it would to be great to spend a night. Another thing to add to my A girl can dream To Do list!