Easy peasy Pannacotta - 8th of August

I love having people over for food.... and i tend to plan and obsess for days in advance going through cook books, old food magazines etc.

We were going to have some friends over for lunch on the Sunday and after a lot of thinking i decided on doing a little pea and mint soup in a mug as a starter.. nice and simple and best of all: can be prepared and re-heated!

For Main i decided on pan fried cod on crushed new potatoes and sauce vierge.. loosely based on a recipe i found. It turned out ok but not great so i am not going to write down a recipe here.. my dessert on the other hand turned out great.. so i will focus on that :-)

I decided to make a pannacotta which is great since you can prepare it in advance (needs to set in the fridge for at least 4 hours) so i did that the evening prior. Here is the recipe for 5 to 6 portions:

Ingredients:

600 ml of Single cream
2 leaves of gelatin
50 grams of caster sugar
1 vanilla pod or a tsp of vanilla bean paste
1 tbsp of dark rum

Put the gelatin leaves in a bowl of cold water.

Heat the cream and the sugar in a pan with the scraped out vanilla pod seads, stir and bring to the boil briefly. Take of the heat and add the softened and squeezed out gelatin leaves and the rum. Stir and pour through a fine sieve into little ramekins. Put in the fridge for at least 4 hours or over night.

I also made a berry coulis through heating up mixed berries with a little sugar to taste, then putting them through a sieve to get rid of the little pips from the raspberries.

To serve i made some really simple little tuiles. You can have a lot of fun shaping these!

Ingredients:

50 gram softened butter
50 gram icing sugar
1 egg
50 gram plain flour

Cream the butter and sugar together well then add the egg, whisk and then fold in the flour.

Put a teaspoon of the mix on a nonstick oven tray/silicon paper then take a knife and spread out to a paperthin cookie shape. You can also put the mix in a piping bag and pipe out little shapes (like my hearts in the picture) it is then optional to add chopped nuts (i added pistachios) before baking for 4-5 min on 200 C. (makes about 15 - 20 depending on size)

To get the classic tuile shape you need to quickly put the still warm biscuits on a rolling pin since they harden very quickly.

I then used up the leftover pistachios and mixed them with melted sugar to make some pistachio brittle for texture and crunch.

Assembly:

Briefly dip the ramekins in hot water to loosen the pannacotta, then tip out on a plates. Decorate with some raspberries (i used red and yellow), the coulis (poured in a line from a bottle). Sprinkle some of the caremellised pistachios on the pannacotta and on the side of the plate. Place a tuile heart in the pannacotta and a tuile biscuit on the side... and voila! YUM