Stuff yer bake

I have seen quite a few recipes for panna cotta recently and since I have never tried to make it, I wanted to give it a go. I found this recipe and thought it looked nice and simple and now that the strawberries in my garden were starting to blush into a vibrant red colour, I wanted to serve them with it.

I first of all made the lemon thyme sugar. I bought a bunch of lemon thyme the other day to go with squid but I don’t actually like it much in savoury things as I think it tastes a bit soapy so I wondered whether I could make something sweet with it. Basil sugar seems to be very fashionable at the minute so I thought I would try and do the same with lemon thyme.

Pick the leaves off a small bunch of lemon thyme and blitz in a blender with about 6 tablespoons of caster sugar. It should go a nice green colour but will also be a bit damp so spread it out on a baking sheet and put in a very low oven for about 10-15 minutes until it has dried out. You can then keep your sugar in a sealed container and use it whenever you like. 

I made the panna cotta next and left it to cool in the fridge for an hour or so. 

Next take a couple of handfuls of fresh ripe strawberries (you can pretty much use any fruit you like here) hull and halve them and put into a saucepan with a tablespoon of icing sugar and about half a tablespoon of Limoncello liqueur. Warm the berries until the juices start to run but don’t let the strawberries go too soft. Take off the heat and leave to cool. 

Once the panna cotta is set, loosen it from it’s mould and turn out onto a plate, scatter the strawberries around and garnish with the lemon thyme sugar.

The texture and taste of the panna cotta was lovely but the only thing I didn’t like was that all the vanilla seeds sunk to the bottom of the mould and made the panna cotta look burnt and I also need to work on getting them cleanly out of the mould. I think my blowtorch may have to be used. I will definitely have another go at making panna cotta and might try a few different flavours too. 

Well not really tropical, but it has been really warm here all of a sudden so, having remembered that I had loads of egg whites in the freezer, I decided to do a tropical tasting pavlova. I tend to use this recipe from the BBC food web site and it works really well, giving a nice marshmallowy meringue. 

After making the meringue and allowing to cool, toast a handful of desiccated coconut in a dry frying pan and leave to cool. Take 250g of mascarpone and the same of yoghurt and put into a bowl. It doesn’t matter what yoghurt, but nothing too thick as the mascarpone is very thick. Add the zest of a lime a couple of tablespoons of icing sugar and about 50ml of dark rum (or malibu would also be nice to give an extra coconut flavour) and mix well. Spread the mixture evenly all over the meringue and top with 1 ripe mango cut into chunks and finally the toasted coconut. Then sit out in the sun with a fork and a large wedge of meringue on your plate.