Has it been a while? A little while, I think. I hope you've a drink in your hand because tonight's dinner party is slow as the burn on a good scotch and smooth as a mink stole. The theme for this one is Mad Men, inspired by a recent outing on which my friends and I spent obscene amounts of money on dresses that made us look like Betty (season 1) and Joan (season 5 baby).
The Mad Men dinner is also the first time Husband and I have hosted a full-scale dinner at our place. The reason we've not done so before is simply that we live in a small suburban apartment and our table only seats 6. But with a toddler in tow and being sick of the enormous amounts of stuff we have to take with us to cook in friends' kitchens, we decided the time had come to host a party ourselves.
With some pretty major reshuffling of furniture (our coffee table had to go down to the garage!) we managed to get a trestle table into the apartment and comfortably seated 9 people. Fortunately for Mad Men enthusiasts, AMC post a complete listing of the soundtracks to each season on their blog and most of it is available from iTunes. We also created a bar with all the ingredients required for our guests to create their own cocktails and a recipe sheet also sourced from AMC. Each of our guests brought a bottle of spirits so that by the time everyone arrived, we had the ingredients for 8 classic cocktails.
Appetisers: Baked Cambert with Brown Sugar and Walnuts, Spicy Smoked Peanuts
Entree: French Onion Soup with Gruyere Baguette Toasts
Main: Beef Wellington
Sides: Waldorf Salad, Potatoes au Gratin
Dessert: Salted Caramel and Coffee Baked Alaska
So, the Baked Camembert isn't strictly 60s but it is American and also delicious and I've been waiting for an excuse to try it out. The recipe is easy: put brown sugar and crushed walnuts on top of a good quality wheel of camembert and bake for 10 minutes in a moderate oven. Serve hot with melba toast or bagel crisps. Next time you have people over, try it. It's amazing.
French Onion Soup is a Husband specialty and he makes it every couple of weeks. It was a star dish at the very first Big Dinner we ever hosted, way back when we lived with The Cowboy in a share house in The Heart Of The Shire (don't ask). Since then, Husband has practiced his technique and as it is a thoroughly authentic 60s dinner party favourite, it was the only choice for an entree. The recipe comes from Joanne Harris's The French Kitchen.
I've wanted to make Beef Wellington for a while, ever since I had Salmon Wellington at a restaurant once and loved it. I am firmly of the belief that Puff Pastry can improve anything - even a fresh, expensive fillet of prime beef. Husband disagreed with me on this last point however even he could see that it wasn't practical to make steaks for 11 people.
The upside of this dish was, the beef wellington was delicious. The downside is that it actually took a lot longer to cook than I had anticipated - to the point where we thought the meat thermometer was broken - and we had a reasonably large gap between the entree and main course. With good company in good cheer this isn't a great problem and I'm not sure whether any of the guests noticed the gap - certainly no-one commented - but it did throw my schedule out a fair bit. When we did decide to give up and serve the beef it was extremely rare (not the just-under-medium-rare I was going for). It was, however, delicious and fortunately all the guests were rare beef sort of people.
The star of the evening, however, was the Baked Alaska. Frozen on the inside and warm on the outside with three different textures, it was surprisingly easy to make and ideal for a busy dinner as most of it is do-ahead. I was quite worried about the ice cream melting in the oven but as it turned out, the meringue was quite cooked and the centre of the cake still frozen solid. A tip for serving: have a jug of hot water handy for dipping your knife in!
Recipe: Baked Alaska
Salted Caramel Ice Cream (you will need an ice cream maker for this. If you don't have one, buy some good quality ice cream in a flavour of your choosing and soften it to put inside the cake). This recipe comes from Sweet Cream and Sugar Cones, by Kris Hoogerhyde, Anne Walker and Dabney Gough, which I would highly recommend if you have an ice cream machine. The whole process should be done over at least three days - make the custard base first and refrigerate overnight, churn the ice cream and make the cake the next day, and freeze at least overnight before serving.
1 3/4 cups heavy cream
1/2 cup white sugar
1.4 cup caster sugar
3/4 cups light milk
1 teaspoon salt
5 free range egg yolks
Melt a couple of tablespoons of white sugar in the pan. When it starts to brown very slightly, mix in a little more sugar. Keep doing this until you have melted all the sugar.. Continue stirring until the sugar is a rich, dark brown colour. Remove from the heat immediately and slowly pour the cream into the pan. Keep stirring until all the caramel is combined (this could take a while - I think I gave up and removed my last lump of caramel after about 20 minutes). Stir the milk and salt through and return to the heat. Bring the mixture to simmer over medium heat.
Whisk the egg yolks and the caster sugar together. Slowly add about a cup of the hot cream mixture, gently whisking. Carefully pour the egg-and-cream mixture back into the pan and stir until you have reached a custardy consistency. Strain the custard into a container over an ice bath. Once it's cool, refrigerate overnight.
The next day, after you have made your cake, churn the ice cream in your ice cream machine. Put the freshly churned ice cream immediately into your cake mould and freeze (see below).
Coffee Cake (you will need an espresso machine for this. If you don't have one, substitute 1/2 cup milk for the coffee-milk mixture to make a standard butter cake. You can infuse the milk with a different flavouring - I use Japanese Matcha to make a green tea cake, for example - or substitute the vanilla essence for a different flavouring, such as rosewater essence)
125g butter, softened
3/4 cup caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla essence
2 eggs
1 1/2 cups self-raising flour
1 shot espresso
approx. 3 tbsp milk
Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius and line a 26-cm round cake tin with baking paper. Beat the butter, sugar and essence together until light and fluffy. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating lightly after each addition. Pour the espresso shot into a half-cup measure and fill the rest with milk. Add the coffee and flour to the batter and beat until smooth. Pour the batter into the cake tin and bake 45 minutes or until a knife inserted into the middle comes out clean. Remove from tin and allow to cool.
Assembly
Cut the cake horizontally into three slices. Carefully lift off the top slice and set aside. Re-line the cake tin and put the bottom slice back into the tin. Cut the centre slice into strips and use them to line the tin as shown below:
Fill the cake with freshly churned ice cream and replace the top slice. Put in the freezer until required.
To serve
6 egg whites
3/4 cup caster sugar
Preheat the oven to 210 degrees Celsius. Using clean beaters, beat the egg whites in a large metal bowl until stiff peaks form. Add the sugar. beating continuously, and beat until mixture is stiff and glossy.
Take the cake out of the freezer. Use a spatula to completely cover with meringue and bake 10-15 minutes or until meringue is golden. Serve immediately.
And no, I didn't wear the Joan dress. I dressed up as Megan instead. Zou bisou bisou!
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