Summer sweets

Cuisine:

Course: Dessert

Serves:

Cooking Time:

AT THIS STAGE it should be pretty obvious that I’m not mad keen on baking or making desserts. Queen Elizabeth allegedly tells guests in Buckingham Palace, if they complain that it’s chilly, to go and put on a sweater. I am a bit the same when it comes to desserts. If anyone looks a bit longingly for something sweet after they’ve been fed dinner, they’re promptly told to go and find a piece of dark chocolate in the cupboard and to leave me alone. Am I a cruel person? Probably, but desserts for me have to be very easy and there has to be a guarantee that all sugar cravings will be satisfied.

I was looking at all the peaches and raspberries in the shops at the moment and thinking that a dessert with them would be lovely. Hence, I gave this Annie Bell spiced peach and raspberry crumble a go. The picture in her book made the crumble out to be a bit mean and shallow looking. But I was very impressed with it, and it was magical with a big blob of vanilla ice cream.

I know crumbles might seem a bit too wintry when the sun is shining, but I have to say it was lovely, and maybe because of the acidity of the raspberries and richness of the peaches, it felt perfectly fine to eat, even though it wasn’t lashing rain. Maybe it’s just an Irish thing, but we sure do love our crumbles. In all three of our restaurants, crumbles, on average, are the most popular desserts year round.

Banana bread is a very simple thing to make but often disappoints. I found a way to inject super-concentrated banana flavour into a loaf, by using frozen blackened bananas instead of nice yellow ones. The sugar content in speckled bananas is five times higher than perfectly, uniformly yellow ones.

I took them out of the freezer to defrost and peeled them an hour later. They were left to drain in a colander, over a bowl so I could collect about 150ml of banana “juice”. I boiled this gently for about 10 minutes, to reduce it and intensify the banana flavour, and ensure the addition of the juice wouldn’t affect the ratio of wet to dry ingredients.

A couple of hours later, the banana bread emerged from the oven with the most incredible banana flavour, but it had the texture of a WMD. So much for my experiment.

Then along comes our lovely pastry chef Áine Ní Ghaboid, who breezily whipped up a sample of her “dead simple recipe”, which tasted just as banana-ey as mine, but did not involve any of the other nonsense. A lesson, in other words, that sometimes, less really is more in cooking. She readily gave me the recipe to use and print, which is a rare act of kindness for a pastry chef. They would rather endure a spell in a gulag than hand over trade secrets.

SPICED PEACH AND RASPBERRY CRUMBLE

Ingredients:

6 peaches, stoned and thinly sliced

Juice of 1 lemon

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 tbsp caster sugar

Knob of butter

2 punnets of raspberries

100g plain flour

125g ground almonds

125g light muscavado sugar

½ tsp ground cinnamon

150g cold butter, cut into cubes

Method:

I used a large gratin dish that was approximately 34cm in length. Toss the sliced peaches, lemon juice, vanilla extract and caster sugar in a bowl until well coated. Butter the gratin dish and then chuck in the peaches. Arrange the raspberries on top, scattered all over the peaches and set aside.

Put the flour, almonds, sugar and cinnamon in a food processor and whizz until they are well mixed. Add in the butter cubes and pulse until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs.

Alternatively, you could do this by hand, mixing the butter with the tips of your fingers, rubbing it into the flour mixture, remembering to keep your hands high and lightly work with your fingers so that the pastry stays in the form of breadcrumbs. Top the fruit with the crumble topping and bake at 160 degrees for 50 minutes until golden brown. Cool slightly and serve. This was also delicious cold the next morning as a very decadent breakfast with a big blob of yoghurt.

BANANA BREAD

Ingredients:

2 large bananas

200g soft brown sugar

2 eggs, beaten

50ml milk

50ml sunflower oil

250g flour

2 tsp baking powder

Method:

It helps to use black, speckled ones. You’ll get much more banana bang for buck. My loaf tin was approximately 22cm x 10cm, which I lightly greased.

Peel the bananas and chuck into a food processor and whizz with the sugar until smooth. Alternatively, you could just mash the bananas very well and mix with the sugar. Add the eggs, milk and sunflower oil and mix again. Fold in the dry ingredients, then pour into the loaf tin and bake at 160 degrees for 45-50 minutes. I ended up putting some greased tin foil over the top of mine as I found it took quite a while in my oven. You can also sprinkle the top with some demerara sugar in order to get some extra crunch on top.

DOMINI RECOMMENDS

For Spanish sunshine in a bowl (even when it’s lashing), gazpacho from the Camden Kitchen in Dublin with toasted sourdough slathered in tapenade is the answer