I have a soft spot for white chocolate.
I remember the Easter Bunny bringing me a Milky Bar Egg one year when I was 6 or 7. I was a bit disappointed. Surely white chocolate didn’t really count.
I had also been given an audio tape of a story called, I believe, Beaver Towers, which sounds in retrospect even more unlikely than it did at the time. I can’t remember if there were either beavers or towers in the book, but I do remember there being an especially evil and terrifying witch. I sat up in bed, afraid to go to sleep until good had triumphed, listening to the tape into the small hours of the morning on my walkman.
The milky bar egg sustained me on that long, dark and frightening night. And I’ve loved white chocolate ever since.
Ingredients (these are really rich, so although the mixture would fill 4 – 6 ramekins, you might want to make the portions smaller and use shot glasses)
2 bars of good white chocolate ¾ cup of heavy (double) cream, and ¼ cup of milk 1 large organic fresh egg.- Break two bars of white chocolate into pieces in a bowl.
- Pour a ¾ cup of heavy cream (double cream) and ¼ cup of milk into a pan (It’s fine to eyeball it in a cup measure, though err on the side of generosity with the cream). Heat until it’s just about to boil.
- Tip the hot cream over the chocolate and count to 20.
- Whisk the melting chocolate into the cream until the color is uniform.
- Crack in the egg and whisk again. You’re not trying to whip up the mixture, just to really mix everything well.
- Pour the mixture into a jug, then from the jug into the little pots or shot glasses. Put the pots into the fridge and let them set for two hours.
(You can let them sit for longer – overnight, a day or so, not much longer than that because of the egg – but take them out of the fridge to allow them to warm up a little about 20 minutes before you plan to eat them.)
Do you want to make them fancier?
- Sprinkle the top with a teaspoon of sugar and either use a blow torch to brulee them or put them under a hot grill
- Grate some dark chocolate over the top.
- Or some coconut and a few slices of ripe mango
- Put a few raspberries into the bottom of the ramekin before pouring in the chocolate
- Or some sliced bananas and a sprinkling of brown sugar (this will turn into a sweet banana “fudge”)
- Scoop some coconut sorbet on top
- Or some dark chocolate sorbet
- Serve with stem-on strawberries and cherries for dipping
- Or biscotti
- Or ginger biscuits
- Or fresh or dried pineapple