It's The School Holidays And My Title Writers Are Still In Bed, Sorry (Confectionery)

Member Name: jillmurphy

Product:	Confectionery
Date:	25/03/02 (903 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Sweeties, sweeties.

Disadvantages: Stirring, sweeties.

Ooh. It's nearly Easter. For a heathen like me that means only one thing. With apologies to those of faith out there, it means chocolate. It means the lovely Leonidas Egg filled with truffles that my mother is just bound to buy me (I've hinted enough I'm sure), it means the Lindt Easter Bunnies Conor and Kieran will surely give me, bless them, and most of all it means an abundant supply of Cadbury's Crème Eggs. Woohoo! What a wonderful time of year this is. Oh, you know, it's not just Easter time. It's also Pesach, or Passover time, and it's also Vaisakhi time. I may not be a person of faith but I sure do like tradition and ritual and I sure do like festival time. It's the food you see. Everyone's nice food comes out on high days and holidays, doesn't it? In particular, lovely sweets come out. I bet I can eat sweets better than you. Any money you like. It's a cert. Sweets are good. Which paragraph of waffle brings me to my point: Conor and Kieran wanted have a try at homemade Easter Eggs. And when they suggested a session of kitchen fun they woke me from my lovely daydream of seasonal sweets. So, we decided to have a go at more than just Easter Eggs. Below you will find the three things we tried that worked the best.

Here you go then: Attempts At Sweets From Around The World by The Murphys

CINNAMON BALLS (with reference to the good old www)

2 egg whites
125g caster sugar
225g ground almonds
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
icing sugar to coat at the end

These are quite easy to make, even for culinary-challenged people like me. Honest. First of all you have to do that awful thing of separating the egg yolks from the egg whites. Nightmare. I wasted two eggs, so if you're as hopeless as me it'd be as well to have more than two in your list of ingredients, just in case. (Blossom and Sixer, our two cats, were happy to be given the accidents though, so no harm done). O
nce you've done that you need to put the egg whites in a bowl and whisk and whisk until they "form stiff peaks". We have one of those electric whisky things but I hate using it, it's just such a pain with the washing up. So my two assistants used our old hand whisk with the turny turny handle and had a super time. Once you have your stiff-peaked, glacial egg whites, you add the caster sugar, the almonds and the cinnamon into the bowl and stir gently, and for quite a long time, until you have a smooth, pale brown mixture. Then you just have fun taking little bits and rolling it around in your hands until you've made little balls. You should be able to get about twenty from this mixture, we did anyway, and if you've not two over-excited children helping you then perhaps yours will be of equal size. Ours weren't.

All that is left to do is to put the little balls on an oiled baking tray and shove them in the oven on a low gas at Mark 3 for about twenty minutes. When they've cooked you coat them in icing sugar. The recipe said to roll them in it, but I was nervous of burned impatient fingers, so we put some icing sugar in a tupperware box, added the cinnamon balls, put the lid on, and gave it a very gentle shake. And hey presto! They're done. Not so hard, eh? And if you like cinammon, which I do, then you'll love these. They are sweet, but not that sweet, the almonds and the cinammon combine to make a wonderfully sweet-spicy taste, and if it's possible, an even more wonderful smell. Yumptious! Do at least try to let them cool down before you eat them though, they're nicer cold than warm.

COCONUT BARFI (with reference and thanks to Sue At Work)

1 cup ghee or clarified butter
2 cups dessicated coconut
3 cups sugar
4 cups milk
2 or 3 cardamom pods (if you have them)

Right ok. This one's a bit more tricky, sorry. And I do hope Sue At Work doesn't read this ever, beca
use my recipe is rather bodged I'm afraid. It still tastes super though, despite my shortcuts, don't worry. And I'm sorry about the imprecise measurements ? despite much nagging for exact quantities from Sue all I got was, "I told you, it's one, two, three, four. Why do you English people want to weigh everything?" Sigh. So I used small mugs and called them cups because it sounded better with cups, more culinary, you know. Anyway. First of all you need some ghee. I didn't have any because I'd forgotten to buy some, but you'll find it at any Asian supermarket. If you don't have ghee though, just take half a packet of any butter and melt it slowly in a pan. When it's melted skim off all the grainy bits from the surface and what you're left with is clarified butter, or ghee.

Once you have your ghee, however you get it, you need a fairly large, and most definitely non-stick saucepan. Put all the ingredients in it, (I forgot the cardamom pods too, so my barfi were without them but I carried on regardless, don't tell Sue) and put the saucepan over a very low flame. Dig in. You'll be here for a while. Stir. Stir. Stir. Yawn. Stir again. Very very slowly, the milk will come to the boil, and you'll need to stir for every single minute. Once it's boiling you still need to stir. I stirred for about three quarters of an hour before my mixture was ready. Ready is a very thick consistency, thicker than condensed milk, thicker than golden syrup, ready is when, according to Sue, you wet your hands, take a teaspoon of the mixture, blow it a few times, let it cool for about a minute, and then see if you can roll it into a ball. I had trouble doing this and stirring at the same time, so Conor, Able Assistant Numero Uno, did the stirring then, you'll just have to manage. When you can roll a little ball, then it's ready.

All you need to do then is pour ? Sue said pour but it was more like scrapin
g really ? the mixture into a shallow, buttered baking tray and leave it to cool. Once it's cooled, cut it into squares, and you have your coconut barfi. Oh my, I don't know if you like Indian sweets but I really, really do. Barfi is best described as like fudge I think and it comes in all sorts of flavours and colours, but the coconut one is apparently the easiest, so that's what Sue said I should make. It's unbelievably sweet and sickly and sticky and gorgeous. If you think you can bear the stirring do make it, it's wonderful.

SHREDDED WHEAT NESTS FOR CRÈME EGGS (with reference and thanks to my mummy)

3 Shredded Wheat
220g peanut butter
175g milk chocolate
8 Cadbury's Crème Eggs

We did make some Easter Eggs (with the rest of the peanut butter, some Philadelphia and more chocolate) but they weren't as "cool" and "wicked" as these nests apparently, so it's the nests you're getting. They're fun. And easy too. You know how to melt chocolate, right? Even I know how to melt chocolate. You get a saucepan of water on the boil, and you perch a pyrex bowl with the chocolate in it on the top and you stir (more stirring, sorry!) until the chocolate is melted. For these nests you need to do that with both the chocolate and the peanut butter in the bowl. Once it's all melted and mixed together and nicely hot you take the bowl off the saucepan and crumble the Shredded Wheat into it, making the most gloriously gooey mixture.

Then you simply have great fun trying to mould it into nest shapes. We used tiny little custard bowls that haven't been out of the cupboard in years (rinsed, of course), eggcups, mugs, and a multitude of other things before just being silly and sculpting nesty shapes with our hands. Once you've made your nests you just put them on a tray on top of some grease proof paper and stick them in the fridge. When they're all nicely cooled and se
t you can unwrap a Crème Egg, pop it in and admire your handiwork before you greedily eat your share of two in under two minutes. I was a bit cross though, because the Able Assistants did most of the nest moulding while I was stuck barfi stirring. Bah. Shredded Wheat Nests are super fun and perfect for children to make. They'd be lovely little presents for grandparents to coo and aww over too. Be careful of the bain marie/pyrex bowl though. Don't let them burn their fingers.

And that's it for the Murphy Sweetie Opinion. Have a nice Easter, or Pesach, or Vaisakhi. And would anyone care to bet that they can eat more sweets at one sitting than I can? Because they're on!

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