Saturday lunch

Gooseberry crumble cakes

We had some people round to lunch on Saturday, one of whom is a pescatarian. I happened to have some langoustine and prawn shells in the freezer waiting for an occasion when something fishy and a bit special was required, so I made a shellfish and tomato bisque, to which I added some small chunks of salmon, some mussels and some squid rings, all gently simmered together to make a fish stew. I had intended to make some chunky bread rolls, or even some soda bread to go with it, but had run out of both bread flour and plain flour (an unhappy circumstance which has now been remedied!).  I did, however, have some OO flour.  So I made up a batch of pasta instead and made ravioli to go with the fishy stew.  Each bowl had a raviolo with a scallop, one with diced prawns and one with salmon and cream cheese hidden underneath the fish stew. It was really remarkably nice.

For dessert we had gooseberry crumble cakes with vanilla cream.  I made up half a standard cake mix (so 110g each of butter, sugar and SR flour and two eggs, although I only put 90g of sugar in the mix). Last year I bought some aluminium pudding cases from Lakeland. They proved to be smaller than I was anticipating so I have never used them.  But they are a good size for making muffin sized cakes in, so I divied up the cake mix between 4 lightly buttered cases, then put some caramelised gooseberries on top of that and then covered them with a handful of oaty crumble mix and cooked them in a moderate oven for about half an hour.  They too were remarkably delicious, and the cream, which I whipped with a little vanilla caster sugar was lovely.

I will certainly do both these things again. And together they made rather a nice lunch menu. Satisfying but not too heavy