I do hope everyone has had and is still enjoying a good and healthy Christmas, wherever you are.
Within the spirit of the season, I decided to bake something for the big day. Inspired by this recipe, I decided to have a go at a ‘Christmas pudding’ but with a chocolate brownie twist… Tesco also produced a video, which first attracted me to the idea and you can find a link to that at the foot of this post.
So, I started off by baking the base of the cake, with a mix of flour, cocoa powder, sugar, eggs and mixed fruit thrown in among other things. It’s a lot like your typical brownie recipe at this stage and, at 160°C in the halogen oven for twenty-five minutes, it left the oven looking well.
I think they roll out a pack of ready-made marzipan in the video and I did buy a pack of ready-to-roll white icing… Then, I read about the alternative suggestion to use ganache – white chocolate ganache!! ;-)
Readind a few other recipes online, it seemed appropriate that you would need a ratio of approximately ‘2 parts chocolate to 1 part cream‘.
Sourcing the chocolate was easy enough but in both Lidl and Tesco, the shelf for ‘pure cream’ or ‘real cream) had been cleaned out by each time I’d arrived… I guess a lot of other people in the UK might be baking the same thing?!
I decided on a ratio of 150ml cream to three bars (300g) of white chocolate. Once the double cream [because I was short of options] was almost boiling, I poured it over and in to the bowl of chopped chocolate.
Finding leftover cake dough in a bowl is great in itself… But when you have extra ganache as well, it becomes heavenly! :-)
In their original recipe, Tesco use both real cherries [which I forgot to buy] and real leaves to help accomplish the Christmas pudding appearance. These leaves are inedible, not to mention sharp, which is why I decided to have a go at making my own from ready-mixed icing.
Using a bread knife, I cut a piece away from the end of the icing block and then cut that in to two, dividing at the line of one third. Using food clouring gel for the very first time, I was gradually able to create the effects of red cherries and green holly – both of which, would be entirely edible.
My efforts were anything but tidy and I had hoped the gel would give them a much daker tinge but they passed the taste test without complaint.
I ended up with a Christmas pudding-themed cake that tasted great and, in particular, like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange, with so much mixed fruit and orange rind inside.
Please click here to see their YouTube video.
