From My Kitchen

Wave goodbye to those images in your head the word blancmange conjures up of luminous pink inedible stuff of nightmares from school dinners, and say hello to this smooth delicate milk pudding from Raymond Blanc’s new book ‘Simply Raymond’. Call it blancmange if you’re feeling French, panna cotta if you’re feeling Italian, or just do what I do and call it a delightful pudding that is as pretty to look at as it is delicious to eat. Served here with Raymond’s easy raspberry coulis, this is a pud that I will be making often, even if only to have teeny tiny wobbly puddings lined up in the fridge, because that makes me happy. Serves 4.

Ingredients

Blancmange:

4 leaves of gelatine (mine weighed 7g)

300ml semi skimmed or whole milk

60ml almond syrup/orgeat

200ml double cream

Raspberry coulis:

250g raspberries

30g caster sugar

Method: Blancmange

1. Pop the gelatine leaves into a bowl of cold water, one by one, and let them soak for around 5 minutes.
2. In the mean time, put the milk and syrup into a medium sized saucepan and heat gently until it starts to simmer – then remove the pan from the heat.
3. Grab a balloon whisk, squeeze the water from the gelatine leaves and drop them into the hot milk, and whisk until dissolved.
4. Pour the whole lot into a jug and leave it to cool. If you happen to have a kitchen thermometer you’re looking for it to be about 30 degrees C. This took about half an hour for me, so I made the raspberry compote (see below), completed step 5, and pootled around the house for a while.
5. In a clean bowl, whip the cream until it forms soft peaks when you pull the beaters out.
6. When the milk has cooled, gently stir the whipped cream into the milk mixture.
7. Pour into ramekins/pudding moulds, just about to the very top of each one.
8. Make some room in the fridge, leave the door open, then tiptoe across your kitchen to gently place the filled ramekins/moulds in there. Shut the door and leave them alone for 4 hours until set.
9. When its time to serve, put some tap-hot water in a small bowl, and sit each pud in there for 10 seconds or so, remove, place your service dish upside down on to the mould, flip it over and tap it a whole lot until the blancmange eventually falls out.

Method: Raspberry compote

1. Either use a blender or stick blender to whizz together HALF of the berries with the sugar.
2. Tip into a sieve over a bowl, and use a spoon to work as much of the coulis through as possible so all that’s left in the sieve is the seeds (discard them).
3. Gently mix the coulis with the rest of the berries and keep in the fridge until ready to serve.