World Cup Cooking Disaster!

The thing is, Heston made it look so easy. He uses fructose and dry ice (neither of which were freely available chez moi) to create a delicious looking raspberry sorbet and devised white chocolate tubes, coating them easily without sticky, chocolaty fingers that burn when the heated cocoa butter drips down the wrong side of the tube. I can’t find a cropped version of him just making the tubes, but you can find the episode it’s from here: Baked Alaska

 

 

I began by asking my Twitter friends if anyone had a good recipe for raspberry sorbet. Having left my brain in bed that morning, it soon became obvious that a sugar syrup and raspberries were all I would really need. Thanks go to goodshoeday and jorsodoni for that! I don’t have an ice-cream maker so after mixing fairly equal quantities of frozen ‘from the garden’ raspberries and sugar syrup, (I used 500g raspberries, 200g caster sugar, 150ml water and a good splosh of raspberry liqueur) I strained it though a sieve, pushing the pulpy bits through too, and popped into the freezer, mixing it every half an hour or so. It came out beautifully, if a little squidgy – perhaps I over mixed and didn’t give it enough standing time to actually chill properly – but it did taste delicious!

For the tubes, I simply melted white cooking chocolate over hot water (not boiling, and don’t let any water get in there or it’ll turn grainy very quickly!). I made some tubes from acetate plastic, then attempted to pour the chocolate inside each one…there are no photos of this stage, surprisingly, as my hands were covered in the mixture. It certainly wasn’t as easy as Heston made it look. They did, however, cool brilliantly in the fridge and look good when I unwrapped them, after filling with the raspberry sorbet: I spooned the sorbet into a freezer bag, cut the corner off and used this as a piping bag to fill each tube.

I wanted an England theme, it being the first of our matches, and all that, to them, so used a little of the raspberry sorbet mixture, unfrozen, to draw St George’s cross on the top.

We watched the match with friends and Angela kindly made a fantastic curry. All other guests obviously didn’t talk to each other as we each brought a pudding! I also made a Banoffee pie, while Alex made a scrummy pavlova and Jo opted for a chocolate, orange and chilli marble cake! Everyone’s looked and tasted good, and although my Raspberry Sorbet White Chocolate Tubes tasted good…well, you can see how they turned out! Messy, sticky and ugly! Looking like something from a vampire horror flick. So although not suitable for a posh dinner party, or indeed, after watching the match with friends, they would be perfect for Halloween!