I Heart Hot Cocoa

We can of course enjoy appealing heart shapes all year round and not just on Valentine's Day. I plopped some frozen, whipped-cream hearts into hot cocoa, but eventually the remaining scraps of frozen cream will make our coffee a plebeian version of affogato.

Sweet violets abound in our garden at present

Spread whipped cream in a shallow, lidded plastic container to a height of 1.2 cm (1/2 inch) and freeze for about two hours. Fold some paper in half and on its fold, draw one half of a heart. Cut out and open. Voilà! You have your template. If you have a heart-shaped cookie cutter, you are already ahead of the game.

Prepare your hot cocoa. Briefly place the bottom of the container under running hot water and ease the frozen cream onto a cutting board. Place the template and cut only what is needed for the moment with a knife. Return the surplus if any to the freezer (any shapeless scraps are as tasty as the shaped ones). Place onto a cup/bowl of hot cocoa.

As it melts, the floating heart resembles in texture a simple semifreddo.

In the garden, everything is soaked through and through because of abundant rain. Heather along with . . .

. . . daffodils are providing flowers.  Roses are in the process of being pruned.

A thicket of calla lilies, pruned rose, heather, and daffodils

Garden gloves are essential. They protect hands from cold, thorns, dirt, cuts, and abrasions. My pruning pair are long, suede/leather, comfortable, and resistant enough to allow grasping of nettles and brambles plus their chocolate-brown and chartreuse colouring is beyond fashionable. The pair for weeding affords flexibility and easily can be cleaned daily by keeping them on as I wash my hands!

The pruning pair gets brushed as needed

Garlic/shallot/onion sets are waiting patiently for the rain to cease long enough so they can be planted into their beds which were happily prepared months ago.

Corno di Toro Rosso (horn of the bull) sweet red pepper seedlings are being pampered by keeping them in their warm incubator overnight and then placing them on a garden table in a mini-serre (greenhouse) during the day.

Flourishing in the lengthening daylight

Moroccan mint (Mentha spicata) is deeply textured and has a superb spearmint flavour and when summer arrives, will be tossed into tabbouleh, and not to mention, steeped in cream to make refreshing, pale-coloured, mint-chocolate-chip ice cream.

When the gloomy deluge dampens my spirit, I crush a leaf and inhale deeply

À la prochaine!

Be my Valentine: Triple Coeur à la Crème & Strawberry Coulis!

It was decades ago when I first read about coeur à la crème in my culinary bible, that is, Fannie Farmer Cookbook. I then became determined to find porcelain heart-shaped molds used in this classic dessert. Wherever The Calm One and I would find our itinerant selves, I went hunting for them to no avail as they were patiently waiting for me in a tiny, crammed-with-goods, British china shop in Gloucester. The Calm One might have decided not to accept the job offer in that town, but I did not reject the pair of dusty molds which the proprietor happily scrambled to find.

The strawberry coulis was made with berries frozen from our potager's summer harvest

But then there were always reasons why I couldn't make it despite having the molds such as I couldn't find cheesecloth or cream cheese which used to be hard to find in France or safe eggs or red berries, at least not all at the same time. Slow-forward many a year and c'est parti/let's begin! Though some may say that this triple coeur à la crème is sufficient to trigger a triple-bypass heart surgery, I am not one of them.

Substitution City

• Instead of the special molds, use a yogurt container reduced in height with holes punched in on the bottom. Just a double coeur would be possible, but it still will look and taste wonderful.
• Instead of cheesecloth, use a square of a well worn, thin dish towel or thick paper towels
• Instead of fresh berries, use frozen, after they are thawed of course
• Instead of regular eggs, get organic ones

Voila! Most people should be able to try their hand at this luscious dessert.

Ingredients
(enough for 2 heart-shaped special molds and some extra for experimenting. Recipe can be doubled.)

• Cream cheese, 118 ml/4 fluid ounces
• Cream, heavy, 118 ml/4 fluid ounces
• Sugar, 1 T
• Egg white, free-range, 1
• Strawberries, frozen or fresh, 473 ml/16 fluid ounces
• Powdered sugar (icing, confectioner's), to taste
• Lemon juice, fresh, to taste

The night before, prepare the molds. Gather the ingredients.

Stir the cream into the cream cheese with a fork.

Beat the mixture until it is smooth and thick which should take several minutes.

Using a balloon attachment on a processor or stick mixer, whip the egg white until stiff. (I separate the white from the yolk by cracking the egg into a clean hand and letting the white drip through my fingers into a bowl.) Fold in (placing a spoon under the mixture, bring it on itself, turn the bowl a quarter turn, and repeat) one half of the whites and the sugar until well blended.

Repeat with the remaining egg white and sugar. It will be an airy mass

Rinse out the molds, but do not dry them. Line with small pieces of paper towel and press down to moisten them. If needed, wet the towels with a moistened finger. The more neatly they fit inside the interior of the molds, the better will the finished coeur look.

Working in layers, smooth down the mixture with each addition with a small spoon to ensure solidity. Pack the filling flush with the top edge of the molds.

Put the molds in a covered dish and place in the fridge overnight. If using frozen berries, thaw in the fridge.

About a tablespoon of liquid oozed out from the molds, making the coeur's texture lighter though more compact

The next day, either in a blender/processor or via a stick mixer, puree the strawberries.

Work them in a sieve, with a bowl underneath to catch the juices.

Add lemon juice and powdered sugar to taste. Stir well. Let the coulis settle down for a few minutes so it will become a clear, brighter red.

Using a small brush poached from my water colour kit, I painted free hand the outline of a heart with the coulis. A cutout could be used instead:  fold a square of paper toweling in half, trace a semi-heart, cut out, and unfold. Place the template on the plate and paint around it.

Spooning a small amount of coulis onto the centre of a serving plate, I worked the sauce cleanly out to the template edges and repeated the process as needed to complete the outline. The coulis needs to be fairly thin so not only does it stay put but also not to cause displacement when the coeur is positioned. Extra sauce can be served on the side which I did in abundance!

The plate needs to have a flat diameter large enough for the coeur to be amply surrounded by the coulis. If the heart shape does not come out well, then a thicker circular pool of coulis can be done, perhaps on a smaller plate.

Tipping a mold onto my palm, the coeur neatly slipped out, and I carefully lifted off the wet paper towel.  Gingerly supporting the coeur with my fingers, it was placed off-centre with care onto the coulis. I first outlined an off-centre small heart with a tooth pick/skewer, and then carved it out with a teaspoon. The little heart was filled with coulis. I practiced all these steps with a test round.

The coeur à la crème turned out so stupendous that I decided nothing could be more wonderful than sitting on our sofa, spooning this buoyant cloud of creaminess dappled with tart/sweet coulis into my mouth all day long, day after day, for all eternity. Heavenly, my word!

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS
Strawberry heart scones

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Guidelines for using raw eggs safely

Strawberry Heart Scones

Though there are signs of incipient growth in the garden and my nursery order is expected to arrive any day with its blueberry bare-root plants and asparagus crowns among other goodies, winter's breath in still in the air.  And there remains in the freezer a lot of strawberries from the summer's harvest.  Also there seems to be a holiday, not a particularly holy one, though it does bear the name of a saint, but it's more holely, in the sense that celebrating it traditionally could put holes in your wallet via expensive purchases of red roses and chocolates.  All this has inspired me to warm up the house and cheer up the bread basket with strawberry scones, some of them in the shape of hearts.

I have adapted Smitten Kitchen's recipe.  Deb Perelman's focus is on using juicy, over-ripe, fresh berries which ooze their liquid innards and erupt from the scones while baking, giving forth to sticky, luscious goodness.  I had figured if I did not completely defrost my garden strawberries, perhaps my scones would spurt red lava also.

Alas, I got involved in something else and the berries completely defrosted while waiting for me.  I drained their juice which I then promptly drank, yum, which meant that the berries were way less juicy than fresh.  But still, these scones were lovely and some of the strawberry bits dried out enough to add a nice crunchy texture plus giving an intense burst of flavour resembling a mix of strawberry/dried red currant/raisin here and there.

Ingredients
(If dough is cut about 3/4 inch thick, recipe makes about eighteen 2 1/2 rounds)

• Flour, all-purpose, 2 1/4 cups*/280 grams
• Baking powder, 1 T/15 grams
• Sugar, 1/4 cup*/50 grams
• Salt, 1/2 tsp
• Butter, sweet, cold, 6 T/85 grams, cut small
• Sugar, confectioner's, as needed for dusting
• Strawberries, fresh or slightly thawed, hulled, washed, and chopped, 1 cup*/130 grams 
• Cream, heavy, 1 cup*/237 ml

*American measure, that is, 8 oz

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F/230 degrees C.  Mix well the flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a suitably sized bowl.

Using your fingertips, blend the butter into the mixture.

The goal is for the mixture to resemble coarse sand with some bits the size of peas.  It should take no more a minute.

Chop the strawberries.

Stir in the strawberries, making sure they are all well coated with the mixture.

Add the cream.

Mix/fold lightly and gently with a wooden spoon or a flexible spatula.  The less mixing and handling, the better the baked texture will be.

Dump contents onto a work surface.

Knead lightly a few times or just cup/pat into shape.  This should take about thirty seconds.

Flour the board, hands, and rolling pin well, especially if you are using fresh berries and roll out lightly and quickly or pat into shape about 3/4 inch thick.  Using a  floured 2 1/2-inch biscuit cutter or a glass, cut out using a straight down motion (gives a nice layered edge effect when baked) and place them well apart on cookie sheets lined with parchment paper.  I used half the dough to make rounds, and the other half to make three hearts--large, medium, and small.

Paper templates can be used to form heart-shaped scones of various sizes--just fold paper in half and then draw one half of a heart, cut along the outline, and then unfold.  Or if you pat the dough into square shapes, you can snip off bits with a pizza cutter or knife and mould by hand into the right shape.  Gather all scraps to make additional scones.

Bake the rounds for about 15 minutes until edges are well browned and they are wonderfully crusty. Larger shapes will take longer.  Cool on a wire rack.  They taste great warm for sure, but they are pretty good cold too.

To make powdered sugar hearts, fold paper in half, draw one half of a heart, and cut that half out and unfold.  Place the template where you want the confectioner's sugar heart to be and dust with the powdered sugar, pressing it through a small wire mesh.

The large heart developed a fissure, though superficial, right down the centre because it was cut quite thick and acted more like a bread loaf in the oven.  There will be no broken hearts, thank you very much, so I resorted to camouflage.

As for gardening, the major action is happening in my potting room.  I am sterilising pots and trays for preparation for sowing indoors, but also getting ready beds outside before my plant nursery order arrives if the almost constant rain lets me.  As for Dayo, he is mostly keeping indoors as he prefers to be dry.

Sentinel Kitchen Duty:  making sure no sweet butter will get by without testing it is safe for consumption.

Far, faraway, in Duvet Land...

If only the fireplace was lit then everything would be purrfect!

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS

Triple coeur à la crème & strawberry coulis