A Masterclass with Gerard Coleman from Artisan du Chocolat

Irishman Gerard Coleman, together with his partner Anne Weyns are the genius behind couture chocolatier Artisan du Chocolat.  With stores in London and Toyko and a thriving online presence,a they don't just make chocolate - they create chocolate.  They conch and refine their own chocolate from cocoa beans (one of the few companies to do so) and then design luxury chocolate products with this exceptional raw material.  To Gerard, chocolate is about pushing the boundaries and introducing flavours not normally associated with the sweet end of the spectrum such as tobacco, cardamom and matcha.  Artisan du Chocolat is also renowned for presenting their caramels, chocolates, bars and designer creations in exquisite packaging, making it the most perfect gift.  I hear on the grapevine that a shop in Dublin 2 will be opening very soon - I can't wait!

London-based Gerard regularly comes to Ireland to conduct Chocolate Masterclasses in the Dublin Cookery School & places on this course are snapped up by eager fans wanting to learn more about the art of chocolate making.  Last November, I was the lucky winner of an Easy Food magazine competition and won a place on this course.  Here's how I got on.

Hidden on a quiet side street in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, the DCS is tardis-like with a simple entrance and magnificent kitchens and demonstration areas emerging as you walk through the building. Lynda Booth is the driving force behind the cookery school & acted as Gerard’s able assistant throughout the day.  After some excellent coffee and brioche, it was time to sit down, stop talking and watch the master at work. The overhead mirrors in the demonstration kitchen meant that everybody could see what Gerard was doing, no matter where they were seated. He kicked off proceedings by showing us how to make Ginger Nougatine. It’s a mix of almonds, candied ginger sugar & butter which is baked and then enrobed in chocolate when cool – the perfect petit fours.

Gerard & Lynda in action

Then it was Caramel time. Gerard showed us the various stages of making a sea salted caramel and how to get the perfect colour. This was the base for two recipes : Chocolate and Salted Caramel Tart, and Sea Salted Caramel Chocolates. As we were on a chocolate roll, we were shown how to make truffles from scratch. It’s much easier than you think and Gerard had plenty of willing volunteers to help melt, stir, pipe and enrobe the truffles. I was quite surprised at my new found piping skills – almost as good as the Master! More volunteers popped up to help Gerard make Chocolate Mousse which was to form part of our delicious lunch.

Temper, temper...

After a well-deserved break and a beautifully cooked lunch, it was time to go back to the kitchen where Gerard showed us how to temper chocolate. Now this is where the science part began… there is a distinct formula to tempering and it’s all about the temperature of the chocolate and how you treat it. It looked very scary as Gerard whizzed around the marble countertop with a scraper and palette knife with a supersonic bain marie at his side, but he really took time to show us that we could do this at home. Then it was time to make some chocolates.

Out come the chocolates...

Sets of sturdy polycarbonate moulds appeared on the countertop, volunteers raised their hands to help and it was full steam ahead… moulds were filled with molten chocolate, scraped with a palette knife to remove the excess and allowed to set. Then they were filled with the sea salted caramel, covered with more chocolate to seal, scraped again to make them neat and tidy, and allowed to set. Once the chocolate had hardened, a swift tap released them from the moulds and a pile of shiny chocolates emerged, ready to be devoured by us hungry helpers. We also helped to transform our messy truffle centres into cocoa dusted morsels with the aid of a huge vat of cocoa powder and a three pronged dipping fork.

Finally, we were rewarded for our labours with tastings of everything we helped to create during the day. It was all utterly delicious and we left with a folder of precious recipes and a reinforced love of all things chocolate.

Baby Berry Cheesecakes

Bite size cakes and bakes have been cropping up on some of my favourite blogger websites recently, including my friend Like Mam Used To Bake, telly god Donal Skehan and the lovely An American in Ireland.  So I really wanted to make some myself over the Bank Holiday weekend.  When I mentioned it to my work colleague Peggy (she knows who she is), she roared "I don't want one mini one, I want FIVE of them".  So that was me told...  I had bought a packet of dried blueberries in M&S a few days ago and they were begging to go into something sweet.  Combine them with some beautiful Irish strawberries and it just had to be cheesecake.

As I work in an office, it's much easier to make individual servings of anything I bake - this means it's ready and waiting for the hungry hordes, which is why you'll see a lot of traybake-style photos on my blog.  I just cut them up, put them into The Tin of Happiness and head to work.  As these cheesecakes should be kept cold, I put The Tin into the fridge & forgot about it.  The first baby cheesecake vanished at 11am as it disappeared into somebody's office at top speed.  This person didn't share the location of the tin with their colleagues.  It's always the small, quiet ones you have to watch!

One thing I did discover when making these Baby Berry Cheesecakes is that the cases do stick to the tins after you bake the bases.  So... free the paper cases from the tin before you add the cheesecake filling to the crunchy biscuit base.  It will save you a lot of frustration & swear words later on.  On the upside, myself & The Hubs got to eat all the ones that didn't emerge from the muffin tins perfectly...  This quantity makes 24, so just halve the recipe if you only want to make a small batch.

Baby Berry Cheesecakes

120g Digestive Biscuits
120g Ginger Nut biscuits
120g Butter
300g Cream Cheese
120g Icing Sugar
180ml Cream
300g Strawberries
100g Dried Blueberries

Preheat your oven to 180c/Gas Mark 4.  Line 2 x 12-hole muffin cases with paper cases.

Crush your biscuits - as ginger nuts are fairly dense, it's probably easier to blitz them in a food processor.

Melt the butter gently, add the crushed biscuits & mix well.

 

Spoon about a tablespoon of the mixture into each paper case, flatten down with a spoon & bake for 10 minutes.  Remove from the oven & allow to cool while you prepare the filling.

Puree the strawberries and blueberries together & leave to one side.

Mix the cream cheese & icing sugar together.

Whisk the cream until very thick.

Now gently fold the cream cheese mix, cream and fruit together until well combined and spoon into the paper cases.  I used an ice-cream scoop for this as it is relatively mess-free.

Chill the baby berry cheesecakes in the fridge for as long as possible to allow them to firm up.  4 hours minimum, overnight is even better...

Chocolate Apricot Spice Cake

This recipe is a spin off of my original Chocolate Pear Gingerbread which I made a few months ago.  At the time it was absolutely devoured and barely a crumb remained.  This time around, I decided to use apricots from a tin as they are soft and succulent and don't need peeling and stoning unlike fresh apricots.  This makes this cake a perfect storecupboard recipe as chances are that you will have all the ingredients at home when the mood to cook strikes...

Chocolate Apricot Spice Cake

200g Golden Syrup
150g Butter
100g Caster Sugar
1 Egg
100ml Milk
2 tbsp Ground Ginger
2 tsp Cinnamon
200g Plain Flour
50g Cocoa Powder
1 tsp Bicarbonate of Soda
1 can Apricots, drained & roughly chopped


Preheat your oven to 160/Gas Mark 3.  Grease & line a 2lb loaf tin or deep cake tin with baking parchment.

Gently heat the golden syrup in a large pot until runny.  Add the butter and sugar and continue to heat until the butter melts and the sugar dissolves.  Now remove from the heat.

Beat the egg, milk & spices together and add to the golden syrup mixture using a whisk.
Pour in the flour. cocoa and bicarb and beat until fully mixed - this reminded me a bit of choux pastry, but without the intense arm workout!

Now add the chopped apricots, give it a final mix & pour into the tin.

Bake for 50-60 minutes until a skewer comes out clean (the cooking time will depend on the tin you use - longer for a loaf tin...)

 

Let the cake rest in the tin until cool, then remove and serve.

Dinner at The Tannery, Dungarvan

After our delicious lunch at O'Brien Chop House in Lismore and checking into our tranquil room at The Tannery Townhouse, it was time to tidy ourselves up and make the epic trek across the road to The Tannery for dinner.  Owned by Paul & Maire Flynn, it's a disused leather warehouse (hence the name) and has been beautifully converted to create a contemporary and spacious restaurant.  The downstairs area is where you find the bar and where there's a bar, there's cocktails served at little round tables and very comfortable seats.  They were so good and so potent, that I've forgotten what they were called!

After a browse through the short but perfectly formed menu, we settled on who was ordering what for dinner.  As I let The Hubs have first choice at lunch, I put my size fives down and demanded the pick of the menu.  My starter choice was pre-determined : it had to be the crab creme brulee with pickled cucumber and melba toast.  The Hubs made a face at this which I took as a good omen i.e. I wouldn't have to share it.  He opted for the caramelised red onion tart with soft Dromana cheese.  Mains kept both of us happy - aged ribeye steak with a wild mushroom duxelle and creamed onions, and smoked Barbary duck with green beans, peaches, bacon & girolles.  In the interest of research, I also ordered the french fries with smoked paprika aioli (more about this later...)

We were led upstairs to the very bright and airy dining room where I had a perfect view of all the activity.  The restaurant was absolutely packed, with early bird diners leaving and being quickly replaced by the 8pm mob.  I was tweeting away merrily, uploading photos of the food and the very lovely local beer when I got a tweet from the brains behind the Dungarvan Brewing Company who were not just having dinner in The Tannery, but were sitting right beside us!  Here's a bottle of their Helvick Gold blonde ale which kept The Hubs happy during his meal...

Soon the crab and the tart showed up and we stopped talking.  Until somebody opposite piped up "do you want to try some of mine".  This isn't him being all nice and sharing.  It just means that he wants some of mine. I happily handed over some of my crab, complete with pickled cucumber on a shard of melba toast and happily accepted some of his red onion tart which reminded me of my favourite Portugese tart, Pasteis do Nata.  The Dromana cheese was soft and delicate which worked really well with the crispy pastry and melting red onion filling.  My crab creme brulee was gorgeous.  I actually would have been happy to eat a main course-sized portion of it with a trough of melba toast and a vat of pickled cucumber.  Sadly this was not to be as every 2 minutes, the offer of more food came from across the table.  In the end, I very politely told The Hubs to sod off and eat his own starter.  Sometimes, you just have to be direct...

Soon after clearing our plates, our main courses arrived.  The Hubs prefers his steak more well done that I do but it was still very tender and full of flavour.  My duck was a great surprise - very smoky and it worked beautifully with the peaches.  This is going to sound dreadful but the highlight of the main course for me were the chips!  These were not just any old chips though, they were ultra crunchy (so much so that I may have speared the roof of my mouth with one - entirely my own fault) and the smoked paprika aioli was incredible.  In fact, I am now demanding the recipe for the pickled cucumbers and the aioli.  Or I'll sue for the traumatic chip-related injury I sustained...

 

Eventually, we managed to look at the dessert menu and after yet again more negotiation, ordered the Lemon Curd Alaska and the Chocolate Honeycomb Tart. They both looked very impressive and were beautifully plated but I felt that there was something missing from both desserts. My Alaska was very pretty indeed but the meringue covering the lemon curd icecream was too soft and didn't have enough texture, although the almonds in the citrus sauce did give it a much needed crunch. The Hubs' tart was nice although I would have preferred a more bitter chocolate centre to counteract the sweet honeycomb. Again, purely my personal opinion.

And just when we thought we could eat no more, out came a little dish of caramel popcorn with my coffee.  It was truly a Mr. Creosote moment for The Hubs but I still had a tiny bit of room left.  It was the most perfect moreish snack I've had in years. The Tannery should sell this on its own, it's so good....

Oh, did I mention that The Tannery has the poshest wallpaper in the bathrooms ever?  Yes indeed, Vivienne Westwood no less.  Somebody certainly has an eye for the unusual in The Tannery and it adds to the unique charm of the restaurant.  The service is friendly, charming and professional and even though Paul and Maire were away on holiday, you wouldn't have known.  And that is the mark of a great restaurant.