Chocolate Ricotta Tart with Almonds

If you have been following my blog long enough, you probably know my weakness for ricotta cheese. I’d eat it on toast with honey, or with banana, or with both and a sprinkle of cinnamon. Sometimes I’d eat it by itself with honey or banana. I just can’t have enough of it. It’s a perfect way to kick start a morning. I really liked ricotta on pumpkin sourdough bread.

Seeing that the big tub of ricotta I hadn’t managed to finish would go off, I searched for ricotta cheesecake recipes, but what I caught my eyes was this luscious looking tart. I was a bit hesitant to go ahead by the sound of ‘tart’, which requires working with dough and waiting, but above all, I didn’t have a tart mould. So, instead of going out and buying one, I decided to bake in a cake mould.

I may have forced my luck by baking a tart in a cake mould and infuriated the God of Tart because my mind got somewhat distracted and forgot to par bake the tart pastry before pouring in the ricotta filling. Bugger! So I ended up with the tart mould with the texture not crunch, but rather close to brownie. Except for what could be an unforgivable mistake by the law of a pâtissier, the tart-turned-to-brownie still managed to pass the judgement of the people on whom I force my baking.

The next time I try this recipe I would leave out the dark chocolate bits in the filling so that I can taste more of ricotta cheese, or replace chocolate with cherries – that might be nice…..:-D

Chocolate Ricotta Tart with Almonds

This amount is for a 22 cm round tart mould, flan-style
pastry:

• 160 g self-raising flour
• 20 g cocoa powder
• 80 g fine caster sugar
• pinch of salt
• 110 g butter, diced
• half of a small egg

filling:

• 250 g ricotta cheese
• 40 gr fine caster sugar
• grated rind of one orange or lemon
• 1 teasp vanilla essence
• 1 and a half egg
• 100 g dark chocolate, chopped
• 50 g chopped almonds

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Mix up the dark chocolate biscuit dough

Just put flour, cocoa, salt and sugar in a bowl and mix well using a fork. Add the diced butter. Rub it into crumbs. Then add half of an egg, slightly beaten, to moisten the dough. Keep it in the fridge for 30 mins. Put it on a floured surface, put a piece of baking paper on top and roll it out to a bigger-than-the-mould circle. Drape it over the mould, use a (blunt) knife to remove excess dough. I used the trimmings to make a lattice. Put the mould in the fridge for 30 mins.

Baking the tart mould

Bake in a pre-heated oven, 180°C, for about 25 minutes. Leave to cool  for 30 mins while making the filling.

And the light ricotta filling is next

Beat the ricotta with a spoon till it’s creamy. Mix in the sugar and the orange rind and the vanilla essence. Then beat in the eggs. When completely blended, stir in the pieces of chocolate. Spoon into the tart mould. Use up the leftover dough in any form you’d like. Scatter with almonds.

Baking

Bake for about 35 to 40 minutes, let it cook for at least an hour before unmoulding

Happy Lunar New Year!

Gong Xi Fa Cai -Mandarin (Kung Hei Fat Choi-Cantonese)

새해 복 많이 받으세요 (Se He Bok Ma Ni Ba Du Se Yo)

Yesterday we celebrated the lunar New Year’s Day with the New Year’s soup, so called, Rice cake soup (the logic is you eat the soup and you get one year older. What if you eat two bowls? ) and some other traditional Korean food. I hadn’t cooked Korean at home for so long that I needed to buy so many ingredients just for one meal. I wondered if I would have bothered to go through the preparation if it wasn’t for my blog, and the answer is ‘Probably Not’.

After finishing the lovely, nourishing soup, I called my family and proudly bragged how beautiful the soup tasted. Honestly, I was the best rice cake soup I’d ever had. What made it taste so so good? I wondered. I think the secret lies on the broth, which I made with shitaki mushrooms, but traditionally the beef stock is used. What goes into the soup varies depending on the regions and you might see clams or oysters in the soup in coastal regions, but my mum never put mushrooms in the soup as far as I remember.

Basically, the white colour of the rice cake, which is rolled into a long, thin shape, then cut  into thin slices for the soup means purity, peace, long life and prosperity. So by eating this, you cleans out any bad luck you might carry from the past year and wish a good start of the new year.

Rice cake&Dumpling Soup

My version of the soup has dumplings, which add a bit of Chinese twist to the dish, but it might have been a tradition in the northern part of Korea when Korea was one country since there has been a lot of cultural exchanges across the border throughout the history. I personally like the flavour of dumplings and I think when you cook with dumplings you don’t need any extra seasoning because they already have all the necessary flavours in them. The only problem I’ve always had in making dumpling soup is that the dumplings often pop and the stuffing leaks out and gets all messed up into the broth, so I was considering frying them separately this time and set them nicely on top so that they could be eaten individually keeping the crispiness. Then I decided against it just to save extra work, but I will definitely try that next time.

To make this healthy, tasty, good luck soup for 2 people

Ingredients

2-3 dried shitaki mushrooms- soaked in 300ml of water and save the liquid for the broth
1 cup beef, thinly sliced
dumplings- as many as you like- variety of dumplings sold at Korean shops, my favourites are veggie and kimchi.
rice cake, sliced&frozen, sold at Korean shop – soaked in water before use
1 egg – lightly beaten and seasoned with salt
1 onion- half diced for beef, half sliced for the soup
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 spring onion, thinly sliced
soy sauce – 1 Tbs for beef, 1 Tbs for soup
mirin or dry sherry
salt and pepper
toasted seaweed for garnish – but it does more than just as garnish. It completes the dish, so never skip it.
long red mild chilli, sliced (optional)

Step 1. Get all the garnishes ready to go because rice cake and dumpling only take less than 5 mins.

Cook the beef in a little garlic, diced onion, soy, mirin, a bit of salt and pepper. Set it aside.
Make the egg garnish spreading the egg into a thin layer like crepe in a fry pan and cut into strips or alternatively you can add the egg straight into the soup, but I think the former gives a better look.

Step 2. Making the soup

Boil the mushroom juice with extra 300ml water and sliced mushrooms, and add garlic, onion and soy sauce. Throw in the rice cake cook for 3-5 mins and add dumplings and cook for 2 mins. Season with salt and pepper to your taste.

Step 3. Serving

Serve it in a bowl and garnish with beef, egg strips, spring onion and shredded seaweed and sliced chilli for colour.

It’s a versatile soup, as is most of Asian cooking, so if  you are not cooking for a special occasion like New Year, you can replace rice cake with normal rice noodle, which you’d probably have better access to, or just use dumplings by themselves. If you’re not into beef, try other meat or even seafood.

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Finally, if you like dumplings and happen to be vegetarian, then make a trip to a nearby Korean shop, and there you will find an amazingly wide variety of dumplings available for vegetarians. They are quite different to Chinese ones, and I’d say they taste much better.   Why don’t you find it out yourself? *Good luck*

Crab Kebab

Last Saturday I was invited to a BBQ party for a triple celebration of Chinese New Year, Scottich Burns Night and Australia Day. The improvised crab skewer is what I took to the party. It is one of central dishes for every ritualistic ceremony and usually made with pork, but these days with hams or crab sticks. It’s very labour intensitve because, as you can see, you have to skewer several ingredients, usually par cooked carrot and spring onion, alternating them one by one. Worse to come, you have to coat it with flour and egg, and pan fry them slowly on the lower heat one by one again! Imagine making 50 of them by yourself. There was a saying, my mum used to say, that goes ‘A woman who makes good skewers makes a good wife. ‘ When my mum asked for help with the work, I would hide somewhere until the job had been done. My poor mum had to hunch over the stove making a several batches of the similar sorts for hours. It’s a party food in the end, and it might have been a less boring job when you had other people to chat and work with in the slavery of cooking.

Before I go, I’d like to present the picture of the first Haggis experience. It was such a special dish.

Haggis