Zing

Last week was one of those weeks when you’re constantly running around being busy, but when you look back you can’t see any result, and can’t actually remember what you were doing (apart from playing with microfibre cloths ).

We had friends in for supper on Saturday, and I was badly prepared. In fact I wasn’t prepared at all and at mid-day hadn’t even decided what we were going to eat. So I set myself the challenge of putting together a three-course meal using only ingredients that I had in the house, and it worked pretty well, if I say so myself.

For a starter we had goat cheese and mint tart, followed by Glamorgan sausages with red pepper jelly and parsnip and potato mash.

I don’t know about you, but regardless of how large or splendid a meal, I never feel that it’s complete without a dessert of some kind, and I always serve one. Didn’t have any eggs or fruit, so after a bit of head-scratching I settled on crazy chocolate cake. Just to give it a little something extra, I added 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper to the mix. The result was a deliciously sticky, rich chocolate cake, served with some double cream, and a fleeting, tantalising zing that followed every mouthful. We all had a very small slice to begin, having declared that we were too full to eat more, but all ended up having two more large slices each. So I think we can say that it was a success.

[Via http://nodamnblog.wordpress.com]