Winter Dinner Party

On Saturday night we had friends over for dinner. While it doesn’t get all that cold in Auckland, sometimes it is nice to have a real heart warming dinner, so that was my theme for the meal – a real winter warmer. For nibbles we had the gruyere gougeres that I mentioned earlier in the week, together with olives which I roasted with some orange peel, garlic and cumin and fennel seeds.

The main was a delicious beef casserole. I marinated the beef in red wine, garlic and bay leaves overnight, then slow cooked it, adding olives, thick carrot slices and baby onions in the last 45 minutes. We had it with agria potatoes, baked, smashed a little, drizzled with oil and balsamic vinegar and baked a little longer (idea from the Julie Le Clerc magazine) and green beans. I am not a huge red meat eater, but the little onions slow cooked in the red wine gravy were just delicious!

I am sorry about the dreadful photo of pudding, but it was just too good not to blog about. Pudding was a macadamia and golden syrup pudding with dulche de leuche ice-cream. The macadamia pudding recipe came from Dish magazine and the ice-cream is a Belinda Jeffrey recipe that was published in Delicious magazine. This was so good! I love steamed pudding and the macadamia slice had that steamed pudding taste but is conveniently baked in a cake tin. You make a caramel sauce, put it in the bottom of the cake tin, sprinkle with macadamias and then top with a golden syrup sponge. Yum!

The ice-cream was the first ice-cream I have made in my ice-cream maker that didn’t require an egg based custard. It is basically milk and cream with dulche de leuche stirred through, then processed and frozen. When a recipe calls for dulche de leuche I usually buy a can of caramelised condensed milk. This time the supermarket didn’t have any, so I boiled a tin of condensed milk for 2 hours – I forgot how much more delicious than the store bought stuff! The flavour of the ice-cream went perfectly with the pudding!

Macadamia Toffee Pudding (Dish magazine)

1 c demeara sugar
¼ c water
100g macadamia nuts, copped
115g butter
½ c sugar
½ c golden syrup
2 eggs
½ tsp vanilla
1 ½ c flour
1 tsp baking powder

· Combine demeara sugar and water over low heat, bring to the boil and simmer for 10 minutes
· Pour toffee over base of lined 24cm square cake tin and sprinkle with macadamia nuts
· Cream butter and sugar, then add golden syrup and eggs one at a time
· Stir in the vanilla and dry ingredients
· Spoon pudding over toffee and bake at 180c for 25 minutes or until cooked through
Invert plate over cake tin and gently lift pan from the cake as soon as it is out of the oven