So I was really nervous about this, as a Masterchef fan i’ve seen many a fondant relegated into the realms of over cooked chocolate cake type thing. Being the (scatty-at-best) novice that I am, I figured if they couldn’t do it then what chance did I really have. Nonetheless I rolled my sleeves up, dug out the recipe that made it sound the simplest (courtesy of Donna Hay) and went into battle.
Melt chocolate into butter, okay seriously even amateur fools couldn’t mess this up, but I stood over it like a Hawk watching prey, stirring occasionally waiting for the inevitable, which in my case would’ve been the chocolate ‘seizing’ and creating that stiff grainy paste you get when you over heat it. But the Hawk-like stance i’d adopted in front of the cooker kept the ‘seizing’ at bay.
Whisk eggs, egg yolks and sugar until pale… Electric whisk, bish, bash, bosh… The bosh took a little longer to arrive then I expected and I was pretty certain I missed something out as the paleness was a long time coming, but we got there eventually.
Fold chocolate mixture into egg mixture adding flour… Panic set in as the flour formed small lumps which I convinced myself were the eggs scrambling from the heat of the chocolate, I was pretty close to binning the whole mixture and claiming defeat, when like a fairy liquid bubble one of them burst and the flour poofed out like fairy dust. Whey hey!! Back to folding; over, round, through, over, round, through…. Gently so as not to remove air or some such nonsense, and no stirring – not sure why, but i’m sure i’d heard it somewhere. I spooned the mixture into 4 (out of the hundreds that clutter my cupboard) gü ramekins and packed them up to bake later.
I also made Chocolate Cheesecake Brownies for the kids (also courtesy of Donna Hay) as I figured they wouldn’t appreciate the fine dining experience that my Dark Chocolate Fondants were sure to be *ahem*. Brownies, with a cream cheese mixture swirled through it, sounded like Hummingbirds Black Bottom cupcakes to me, so I was game. It all went to plan and was pretty straight forward until it came to the ‘swirling’. Brownie mixture was thick and cheesecake mixture was runny, so ended up sitting on top, creating more of a ‘topping’ than a ‘swirl’. Although they didn’t look as pretty as the cookbook picture they tasted pretty darned good!!
When the Fondants, left in the hands of the oven timings, came out we initially thought they were over cooked, but closer inspection (a knife to the heart – lol) produced oozing melted chocolate… Result!!! Masterchef contestants eat your hearts out!!
PR Xxx
