Sunday bakes – Sea salt and rosemary chocolate truffles

I tried this recipe a few weeks ago but it needed a little refining. In my first version I chopped the rosemary finely and mixed it in with the truffle mixture, but the texture was a little off. 

Ingredients

300grams dark chocolate

300ml double cream

50grams butter

2 sprigs of fresh rosemary

Sea salt

Method

Melt the chocolate in a bowl over a pan of hot water, whilst heating the cream and butter in another saucepan.

Strip the rosemary and put it in a pestle and mortar, grind until it is as fine as you can get it, it will have strings in it. Put into the heating cream and wait until the chocolate is all melted and the cream has started to steam, but don’t let it boil. 

Use a sieve to strain out the rosemary bits as you pour the cream into the chocolate and mix until it is completely blended. Line a tin with baking paper and sprinkle sea salt over the paper. Don’t put too much salt down, although it depends how salty you like your chocolate.

Pour the truffle mix into the tin and sprinkle another very fine layer of salt over the top.

Set to one side or into the fridge to set.

I really like the woodiness of the rosemary, it makes the truffles taste more Christmassy, but I am not sure it would be to everyone’s taste. 

Beautiful Budapest

I’m back! Not that I mentioned I would be going away. My friend and I went on a wonderful jaunt to Budapest, which is an absolutely magical city. The whole place was just lovely, clean, friendly and, above all, beautiful. I have never been somewhere that I have liked so much straight away. We stayed in one of the 7seasons apartments right in the centre of the city and the location was perfect. Out balcony had a view of St Stephens Basilica and we were next to the main street, which was described by our taxi driver as we arrived as ‘Rodeo drive’.

At the other end of this impressively long street was Heroes' square and a park where one of the large baths could be found along with the Museum of fine art and the Museum of agriculture in the Vajdahunyad Castle.

On this road (Andrassy avenue) there are some of the most impressive buildings, such as the Opera house and just off it, inside a bookshop you can find the amazing bookshop café. The cakes are amazing and taste even better than they look on bake off, but be warned, the hot chocolate is what it says on the tin, melted chocolate so it is very rich. Even I couldn’t manage both cake and hot chocolate. 

Book Café - Lotz-terem

I don’t know whether it was the time of year but the streets were not at all busy and everyone around us was really friendly and helpful. Random people would stop in the street if they overheard you talking about which direction you think you should go and give you directions.

We climbed the 364 steps to the top of St Stephens dome and it was worth it for the view and the attempted conversation with a man, who may have been Serbian or Romanian or Spanish, he definitely mentioned all three of those places whilst pointing at himself. But since we didn’t speak a word of the language he was speaking and he didn’t speak a word of English it was rather impressive that we kept a conversation going around most of the dome. There may have been something about Rachel being an angel, or maybe he was just commenting on her knitted owl hat, we will never know. 

Rachel knew someone that lives out there and he very kindly showed us around in the evenings after he had finished work. I think he may have regretted introducing us to Hungarian red wine (which is lovely) and Soproni beer when he had to get up for meetings the next day and we could blow away the cobwebs with a bracing walk along the Danube. One of the places that Elliot took us was a ruin bar which apparently, are unique to Hungary. They’re bars that have been set up in abandoned buildings, so they are half inside, half outside and can sprawl across several floors. Despite it being a ruin bar, I was impressed that they had Dyson hand dryers and there was always soap and toilet paper, so they were doing better than most of the clubs in London. 

Hungarian is an incredibly difficult language for a rubbish foreign language speaker like myself, but despite Elliot’s repeated attempts to convince us that thank you is pronounced ‘CanooKayak’, Rachel and I were soon both making attempts at Köszönöm (pronounced Ku-su-noom) or Kusie for short. Inevitably we would chicken out about halfway through the word and probably end up saying something totally different, but we were trying.

The food there was very meat based but that is not a complaint, it was all beautifully cooked and I really enjoyed the layered cabbage thing that I had at http://www.maceszhuszar.hu/menu.html with the goose thigh. Apparently it’s a traditional Hungarian dish but quite tricky to cook. I might give making it a go, but I expect to waste a lot of food before I get it right. I would also recommend the venison here, I tasted a little and it was incredible.

The last day we were there was bitterly cold, about freezing point, but we didn’t let it slow us down. To be honest it may have sped us up a little, no dawdling on the bridge if you wanted to live. 

We crossed the bridge for the first time and managed to fit in Buda castle, with a spot of bow and arrow shooting, Fisherman’s bastion and St Matthias Church before we headed back down the hill to the parliament for our guided tour. The last thing we saw before going back to our apartments for our airport pick up. 

 Shoes on the Danube, a touching tribute to those who died.

It was a really great trip, there is so much to do and see there and the general atmosphere is so relaxed and friendly it would be nearly impossible to not have a good time there. I’m going back soon.