On the 6th October 2009 a Pie Party was circled on my social calender. I headed down to La Cocotte to show everyone how to make them. Lemon meringue, Banoffee, Apple & Cheddar and Pumpkin pie, plus a delicious pie crust were head lining the event. Recipes were all easy as pie

Special thanks to Djoukaze for the photos.

If you are on a picture and you want it to be removed, please send me an email.

No, I’m not referring to the band 3T from the nineties, although it would be quite fitting with the whole MJ saga going on. More to do with the fact the number 3 has been cropping up quite a lot recently.

I’m on the last leg of big events before the summer break with my debut on the Paris scene this Monday at the Chacha. After getting back from London with a great mash up dinner behind me and the 500 biscuits for the school of life event aswell. I was ready for a break, not a third event. Unfortunately that was not going to be an option. Recipes had to be tested and tasted for the dinner. A dj, photographer and assistants had to be found. PR and marketing malarky to do. Plus I’ve been running around all the vintage stores and markets looking for the perfect Jackie outfits for the three Kennedy hostesses.

———————–

Dust off your blonde wig, your Jackie 0 sunglasses or your ‘too cool for school’ J.F.K. sixties suit. Miss Khoo is taking over the Chacha for the tastiest event in town.
For Monday 13th July Rachel Khoo has created a 3 course dinner and a Kennedy cocktail to tantalize your tastebuds. Top that all off with a cupcake pimping session and some swinging sixties & fifties sounds spun by DJ Sylvania. The whole of Paris will be there and who knows maybe the Kennedy’s might pop by.

40€ Cocktail + 3 course dinner (starter + main + dessert/cupcake session)

RSVP chacha@chachaclub.fr

———————-

Enlevez vos lunettes de soleil Jackie O et vos costumes JFK années 60. Rachel Khoo va envahir le ChaCha pour la soirée le plus KHOOl de Paris.

Lundi 13 juillet, Mademoiselle Khoo va nous partager ses recettes chic et délicieuses lors d’un dîner – entrée, plat, dessert – et un “Kennedy cocktail” pour réveiller vos papilles. Tout ça avant un “cupcake pimping session” ou vous pouvez décorez vos propres cupcakes, le tout accompagné des sons des années 50 et 60 par DJ Sylvania.

Le tout Paris sera là, et, qui sait, même les Kennedys eux-même vont peut-être y faire un petit tour nous joindre.

40€ Cocktail + dîner [entrée, plat, dessert/ cupcakes]

RSVP  chacha@chachaclub.fr – réservation obligatoire

————————-

Tuesday night I invited the lovely ladies who will be assisting me on Monday night for a dress rehearsal. I found myself styling clothes, hats and hair instead of food.  For dinner I rustled up this tart which just involved me seeing what I had in my fridge.  I was loosely inspired by what I had read in the Guardian at the weekend. And it so happened that the filling used three types of vegetables: carrots, beetroots and red onions. I managed to get these amazing red onions which were a cross between a large spring onion and a red one which were perfect for this tart.

I will let those of you who are coming this Monday be the judge whether I should stick to my day job up or whether I might have a new career as a fashion stylist

3T Tarte (three tones tarte)

10 carrots, peeled and roughly sliced into sticks
3 beetroots (raw not the cooked ones), peeled and chopped roughly
3 red onions, peeled and roughly chopped into wedges or 6 red onions type spring onion
2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
Olive oil
salt & pepper
Handful of fresh parsley

1 packet of good quality puff pastry (yes, I do cheat. Can’t be a slave to your kitchen all the time)

Preheat the oven to 180°c. Mix together all the vegetables and garlic in a roasting tray. Season and drizzle generously with olive oil. Roast until tender (about 40minutes). Roll out the puff pastry and line the tart. Tip all the vegetables into the tart and bake for a further 30 minutes or until the puff pastry is puffed up. To serve drizzle with a little more olive oil and garnish with parsley. You could also crumble some feta or goat’s cheese on top to.

After muffins, teatime and cupcakes it was time for something a little bit more intergalactical: Mooncakes! Well actually they’re not from out of space but a chinese pâtisserie. Mooncake madness took place at La Cocotte, Paris on the 8th April and 30th June 2009.

Check out Elleadore.com for some more pics.

Special thanks to Jim Rosemberg for the photos.

If you are on a picture and you want it to be removed, please send me an email.

Recently my place has been turned into a test kitchen for all things mooncake related in preparation for my class this Wednesday. I had made them a while ago but I’m now trying to perfect my snowskin recipe, mooncake technique and find some flavoursome fillings. If you’ve never heard of snowskin mooncakes. Here’s a quick lowdown: Chinese pâtisserie made for the mid-autumn festival which is a festival celebrating the moon. Traditionally they are a baked cake with a thin pastry and very dense filling (lotus paste is a classic) but in the 80s a ‘non’ bake version emerged. The baking part is omitted with the use of Kao fen, a fried glutinous rice flour. I tried a dryer more crumbly filling with coconut and confit cherries (see picture below).

I personally prefer a more creamier filling almost truffle like which I also tried out. If you’re in Paris this Wednesday why not join in the fun and have a go yourself. There are still a few places left. Click here to reserve.

Chocolate & sesame snowskin mooncakes

Ingredients for snowskin (the outside bit of the cake):
(I reduced the sugar since my last recipe)

120 g Kao fen – fried glutinous rice flour
80 g icing sugar
150 g coconut milk
50 g shortening, cold and cubed

Mix all the dried ingredients together. Add the shortening and rub into flour mixture until you have a “crumble/sand” like texture. Pour in the coconut milk and form into a dough. Wrap and chill for 10 minutes.

Ingredients for custard filling:
Recipe adapted from here. You will probably not need all the custard filling.

1 egg yolk
100g caster sugar
20g superfine flour
20g cornflour
15g custard powder
125ml coconut milk

Mix all the ingredients together and then place in a small heat proof bowl and steam for about 30 minutes or until it begins to set. Leave to cool and then refridgerate.

Ingredients for chocolate centre:

25g icing sugar
25g cacao powder
10g sesame seeds (a couple of tablespoons for garnish)
15g butter, unsalted and cubed

Mix all the dry ingredients together and then add the butter. Mix with a spoon and then use your hands to bring it together (it’s a bit like making crumble but you don’t stop at crumble stage).

You then need to make small balls out of the chocolate filling. Take a look here for a visual idea of what you need to do. The size will depend on your mould. Mine were about 5g. I then took the custard filling (about 8g) and flattened it out into a round and placed a chocolate centre into the middle. Repeat the same with the snowskin dough. Press into a mould. If you have enough moulds I suggest chilling it before unmolding as you’re less likely to damage the mooncake when you unmould it. Another tip: try and not handle the snowskin dough too much as it becomes too soft and makes it harder to unmould.

Chill at least 30 minutes before serving. Garnish with a sprinkle of sesame seeds (or sugar/chocolate sprinkles).

When I saw the recipe/photos for the sweet sushi in two books in the same week I thought they definetly must be worth making. We so happened to be launching the book “Humeur Gourmande” at La Cocotte two weeks ago which has this recipe. For the launch we served a La Cocotte adaptation of the recipe, made with dulce de leche. They went down a treat. I’m not much of a fan of dulce de leche since I bake all the biscuits at La Cocotte with it.

The other recipe appears in Sushi box which is very well illustrated by Hisayuki Takeuchi (founder of the nouvelle japanese cuisine in Paris) with photos showing every step. His recipe for sweet sushi is slightly more “haute cuisine/japanese” with the use of nori (dried seaweed) paper and plain sushi rice.

I’ve gone with the Humeur Gourmande recipe but used the traditional hand method of making the forms. I was also lazy and made the rice pudding with my rice cooker (I love my rice cooker, it’s so useful!). Once you have the rice pudding base which you could flavour with vanilla, almond essence, orange flower water, cinammon, cocoa powder…You can combine the rice base with any kind of fruit you fancy. Although mangoes, tinned peaches, apricots and pears look more “raw fish” like.

Sweet sushi

inspired by Bruno Viala from Humeur Gourmande – serves 6

250g sushi rice or short grain rice (risotto rice will work too)
500ml milk
100ml double cream
50g sugar
3 tsp almond essence (but you could whatever flavour you like)
selection of fruit – I used tinned apricots

Wash the rice well. Combine the rice, milk, cream, almond essence and sugar in a pot. Place on a medium heat and stir occasionally as the sugar may cause the rice to stick to the bottom and burn. This should take approx. 15 minutes. Leave the rice to cool slightly but keep it covered with a clean tea towel.

For the easier option:

Pour the rice into a rectangle dish/container which is 2/3cm deep and chill. When the rice has set solid, run a knife around the edge of the container and then turn it upside down onto a board. Cut into rectangles and place slices of fruit on top.

For the more traditional option:

Leave the rice until it’s cool enough to handle. Have a large bowl of cold water and a plate to place the sushi on next to you. Dip your hands into the water and take a small amount (a little less than the size of a golf ball) of rice and form into the sushi shape. It’s important that your hands are wet otherwise the rice will stick to them. Make sure you press the rice together well. Once you have all the sushi shapes made, add the fruit slices on top.

Oh so British teatime at La Cocotte on the 29th June 2008. Everyone had a hand on making their own scones, a demonstration on the Art of drinking tea (and how to drink it correctly) and of course a proper teatime with china cups, jam, clotted cream and scones fresh out of the oven.

If you are on a picture and you want it to be removed, please send me an email.

Hand me those cupcakes, I need my sugar fix! Well, it certainly feels like that there are a whole load of cupcake junkies out there at the moment. A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that everybody in Paris is cupcake crazy. Well the proof has definetly been in eating the pudding! So much so that I’m doing another “Pimp my cupcake” session. It’s already booked up with a waiting list. Wahey!

So next week my kitchen will become a cupcake factory with prepping to do for my class and an order of 500 cupcakes. I’ll probably be suffering from a repetitive cupcake making injury by the end of the week.

My “500 cupcakes” client is after a super fluffy icing (kind of cloud like). The classic buttercream icing just wasn’t fluffy enough for me. So off I went on the quest to find the fluffiest icing possible. I didn’t want to use cream as it has the risk of melting if the it gets too warm. I stumbled across the idea of doing a meringue based icing (sometimes called a 7 minute icing). What I didn’t understand though is that every recipe I came across seemed to contain enormous amount of sugar. Do you really need all that sugar (175g sugar to 1 eggwhite)? I tried mine with a little less and it worked perfectly fine. What’s nice about this icing is that after a couple of hours, it sets and becomes marshmallow-like. Miam miam! If you’re worried about the egg whites (which will be partially cooked) then use powdered egg whites instead.

You can flavour/colour your icing with anything you fancy. I used a rose syrup in this picture but will be using vanilla and pink colouring for the event. Yes, the cupcakes will be super girly with little pink and white heart decorations.

If you don’t hear from me next week it’s probably because I’m suffering from an overdose of cupcakes. I know I’ll end up having to make 520 cupcakes because at least 20 of those will end in my tummy. I mean how can you resist to a cupcake like that?

Fluffy cloud icing

1 egg white
50g sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence (if you’re using other flavouring start off with a tsp, taste and then add more if necessary)

Combine the egg white with the sugar in a heat proof bowl. Set the bowl over a pan with simmering water (=bain-marie) and whisk for 5 minutes. The icing should become thick and glossy. Take off the heat, add the flavouring and coloring (if you’re using any) and whisk for another 2 minutes (5 + 2 minutes = 7 that’s where 7 minute icing name comes from). Ice cupcakes, sprinkle with decorations and leave icing to set. Icing enough for 12 cupcakes.

For a plain vanilla cupcake recipe, click here.

Here’s my pick of cupcake books:

Cupcake pimping sessions at La Cocotte. First one started on the 15th May 2008. So popular that there were not 1, not 2 but 3 sessions!

If you are on a picture and you want it to be removed, please send me an email.

You say tomatoe (just imagine the yankee accent ) I say tomato (and a brit one here). The same could go for cupcakes or as us Brits call them fairy cakes. I was doing some research for my next cookery class. The theme is cupcakes which is all the rage in Paris and I found a few interesting titbits…

According to the “The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America”, cupcakes were originally just small cakes minus the icing, that came in the 1950s. The “cup” derived from two origins:
1. The switch from weighing to using cup measurements in the 19th century American households.
2. The practice of baking in small containers or cups. Large cakes were often burnt in the the hearth ovens.

Brits use the term “fairy cakes”, as you normally scoop out the top, fill that with buttercream and jam and then cut the top into two wings which you place on top. Hence them looking slightly fairy like. I would normally call those butterfly cakes and all the plain iced cakes, fairy cakes.

Anyway, at the end of the day they taste delicious and bring back memories of sticky little fingers at birthday parties (well, that is if you had an anglophone childhood).

By the way thanks a mil to all those who wished me luck for my muffin class. It went very well. We even had a waiting list for the class. Everyone seemed happy and went home with their little goody box of muffins and muffin secrets. If you’re on Facebook, you can check out the pictures on the La Cocotte group page.

Fairy cakes/cup cakes/small cake

recipe inspired by Donna Hay (my food styling hero )

125g butter, softened
1 tsp vanilla extract
150g caster sugar
3 eggs, beaten
200g self-raising flour
60ml milk
Preheat the oven to 180°c. Cream together the butter, sugar and vanilla essence. Beat in one egg at the time. Sift the flour into the mixture and then add the milk. Spoon the mixture into the cupcake cases and bake for 15 minutes or until the cakes bounce bake when touched or the skewer comes out clean. Leave to cool on a wire wrack.

Dulcheese frosting/icing

75g cream cheese
125g ricotta
200g dulce de leche

Sprinkles/decoration/chopped walnuts

Combine all the ingredients. Spoon into a piping bag. Pipe onto cupcake and sprinkle on decorations. Eat immediately or put in fridge (take out 10 minutes before consuming).

Here’s my pick of cupcake books:

My first cookery workshop at La Cocotte on the 24th April 2008. The students were in for a treat with a tips on how to make the perfect muffin. Muffins on the menu: very berry, dulcheese (dulce de leche & cream cheese), triple chocolate, sweetcorn & gucamole savoury muffin.

If you are on a picture and you want it to be removed, please send me an email.