Blog

(part 3)

Meanwhile, Alex had started his garlic roasting, peeled a million garlic cloves, and started work on the garam marsala. All was going well.

I had now started on the next stage of the blueberry soup – the Dacquoise. First problem: We had NO CLUE what the hell a Dacquoise was when it was at home.

kamikazecookery Anyone know what a “Dacquoise” is?

http://twitter.com/kamikazecookery/status/2008533013

Our viewers soon put us right with the aid of Wikipedia – but unfortunately the description was a bit, erm, confusing (“A dacquoise is a dessert cake made with layers of nut meringue and whipped cream or buttercream” – but we didn’t have any whipped cream!), and we didn’t have time to look at the pictures. Nuts to it, said I, and plowed boldly onward.

Next, we needed to blend some almonds, sugar, and various other things. The only problem? You guessed it – no blender. However, we DID have a smoothie maker…

Amazingly, 100% success.

The same could not be said, sadly, for Alex and the Garam Marala, through no fault of his own. We’d simply underestimated the massive, massive quantities of spices Heston needed for the spice mix – 75 grams of pepper turned out to be about two jar’s worth, whilst 120 grams of Coriander Seeds would have cost about as much as an entire meal out. We were in serious trouble.

And then, Alex noticed the comment that we would have a bit of Garam Masala left over at the end of the recipe. Maybe we had hope. And a little while later, flicking through in a panic, he realised just how much “a bit” would actually be…

Meanwhile, I’d started whipping some eggs and adding in sugar. It may be noted that amongst the things I direly suck at, whipping eggs is high on the list, not helped by the subtlty of the tools I had to work with:

However, we knew that this wasn’t true of our viewers, so we started on a bold new experiment: egg whipping, directed by Internet.

I whipped. I stopped. I held up to the camera. From next door, our host/assistant Tina shouted through that there was a massive delay on the video, and I appeared to still be whipping. Eventually, the collective intelligence of the Internet came to a conclusion on the whippiness of my egg. I whipped a bit more. Repeat.

Remember, many eyes make eggs frothy.