Buttermilk panna cotta & quinces

Buttermilk Panna cotta – Lighter and not as sweet as your traditional Panna cotta.

Ingredients:

50g Castor Sugar
200ml cream
1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped out
3 leaves Gelatine
500ml Buttermilk

Method:

1. Heat sugar with half the cream  and the vanilla bean and stir well.  Bring almost to the boil and remove from heat.  Cut Vanilla bean in half lengthwise and scrape out the seeds.  Put the seeds back into the hot cream and cover the saucepan with a lid to infuse for at least 10 minutes.
2. While you are waiting for that fill a large bowl full of cold water and soak the gelatine leaves.  They will go soft and invisible and only need to be squeezed out in your hand after about 5 minutes.  Add them to the warm cream/vanilla mixture, remove the vanilla pod and stir well to dissolve into the mixture.
3. Add the rest of the cream then the buttermilk and pour into 8 x 1/2 cup moulds that have been lightly brushed with a vegetable oil or lightly sprayed with a cooking spray.

Set aside in the refrigerator to set.  These can be made the day before.

To serve fill a small bowl with hot tap water and emerge them into the warm water carefully not allowing any to get over the top.  Shake them well and they should easily turn out onto your serving plate.

Slow baked Quinces with Verjuice

Ingredients:

3 Large Quince (early Winter is the best time of year for availability)
1/2 cup Verjuice
1/2 cup water
1 Lemon, juiced
3 tbsp. Sugar
1 tbsp. butter

Method:

1.   Fill a large bowl with cold water and add the juice of the lemon.

2.   Cut quinces into quarters and if large, cut again into eighths.  Remove all the pips and cores as these are tough and unpleasant to eat.  Be careful, they are very hard to cut and core.  There is no need to peel them.  Place them into the water as you work, the lemon will stop them turning brown.

3.   Drain completely.

4.   Lay into a flat dish in one layer, sprinkle with sugar, water and verjuice.  Toss to mix with your hands.

5.   Add small knobs of butter.

6.   Cover tightly with foil and bake at 130°C for 5 hours.

They now should be a dark rosy colour and the sugar slightly caramelised.  Test about half way through, sometimes when I decide to add some lemon juice they actually need a bit more sugar.  You can also add a cinnamon stick, some lemon peel and more water if you would like more syrup 🙂

Delicious served warm or at room temperature with Ice Cream or Custard.  They went very well with the Panna cotta which are not super rich or sweet.

A great thing to have baking in the oven whilst you are slow cooking some meat!

Gluten free Almond Tuiles

Ingredients:

1¼ cups Almond Meal
small pinch salt
1/2 tsp Baking Powder
113g Unsalted butter, softened
1/2 cup castor sugar – this is a reduced amount of sugar to the original recipe but they were still pretty sweet
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla

Method:

1. Beat softened butter with castor sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy.
2. Add egg beating well.
3. Preheat oven to 130°C Fan Forced
4. Mix in almond meal, baking powder and salt to form a soft but sticky mixture.
5. Form into balls the size of a walnut.
6. Cover baking tray with baking paper.  Put mixture onto paper and with the back of a warm teaspoon squash them into cookie size circles leaving lots of space for spreading. I did about 6 at a time.
7. Bake for 15-20 minutes until golden brown.  They must be golden all over otherwise the centre won’t be cooked and will stick.  Keep and eye on them in the oven from time to time so they don’t over cook.  It is tricky, you have to get them at just the right time.
8. Remove from oven and let them sit for a while on the tray until you can feel they firm up and can be lifted.  They should still be pliable enough to mould onto a rolling pin or bottle as you can see in the pic here.

Let them cool completely and store carefully in an air tight container.