Four Foods on Friday

Posted by Ami-chan on July 11, 2008

It’s been a while since I’ve remembered to do the Four Foods on Friday meme. Here’s hoping this is the start of me remembering again and to keep up with these things.

Here are the questions:

#1. Cake. Buttercream, whipped cream or ice cream?
#2. When entertaining do you use real, paper, plastic or styrofoam dishes?
#3. When hosting a party do you cook, have it catered or go to a restaurant?
#4. Share a recipe that you frequently serve when having a party.

1. Oooh, with cake, whipped cream if it’s an or situation, but generally I have whipped cream and ice cream with cake. Maybe this is why I’m having problems with diet? LOL. But yes, especially if there’s chocolate involved with the cake, oh, and there’s that chocolate whipped cream! That I just found out about the other day, that is SINFUL.
2. When entertaining…mostly it is paper or styrofoam plates (if there’s a lot of people) because we don’t have that many dishes. If it’s just one friend or a couple I’ll use real stuff, although the munchkin still has plastic dishes.
3. If we’re hosting a party I try to cook, or our friends will bring dishes and we’ll do dishes, and make it like a “Jacob’s join” situation; but the last two parties we’ve hosted I’ve been able to make everything. I kinda stock up the energy for a few days or make little bits in advance, like the last time I did the wonton mix the day before, and then my friend and I made the wontons up the next day, after we made the dessert and put it in the fridge to set.
4. Recipes…hm…well, I make Helen’s Layer pudding fairly often, and I’m usually requested to make wontons, but the wontons are often a spur of the moment recipe. This last time I did cream cheese wontons and turkey wontons, but it was a bit of a hodge-podge of ingredients. The Helen’s Layer pudding…I think I may have written about that before, but I’m not sure so I’ll share it again:

Technically it’s called “Helen’s Layer” pudding, but I know from now on in our house it’s going to be chocolate stonehenge

Ingredients for basic recipe

4 Rounded tablespoons drinking Chocolate
1 Level tablespoon Coffee Powder
4 oz (100g) Demerara Sugar (Light brown sugar)
½ pint (330ml) Whipping Cream
4 oz (100g) Fresh White breadcrumbs (use 2-3 day old bread through grater if no Blender)
Chocolate Flake Bar (or grate regular chocolate)

Now, when I made it this in June for my friends I quadrupled the recipe because while that above says it’s feeds four…I don’t know how, probably because it’s my Gran’s recipe and she believed in small portions, like mouthfuls each. So, for us it was.

16 tablespoons of drinking chocolate and cocoa powder
4 level tablespoons of decaf coffee powder Folgers
16 oz of Demerara sugar
2 pints of heavy whipping cream
16 oz fresh white breadcrumbs (wound up being about 6/7 slices of bread).
2 small hershey bars and 1 small hershey dark chocolate bar (for henge)

And that fed 7 with enough leftover for K and I to have it for lunch the next day (LOL).

Now to make it. (This is the hard part LOL)

Crumb up the bread in the blender, and mix in a bowl with the coffee, drinking chocolate/cocoa, and sugar. Until thoroughly blended.

Whip up the cream until it’s fairly stiff but still fluffy. (I don’t put confectioner’s sugar in the cream. I hadn’t heard of that until my friend asked me if I was going to do it…and we still didn’t and agreed afterwards that the dessert would have been WAY too sweet if we had0.

Find a large serving bowl (preferably clear so you can see the strata effect Ooooh!). You can also make mini ones in short drinking glasses for individual portions.

Put a layer of chocolate mix, then a layer of cream, repeat until you use up all the chocolate mix and the top layer is cream. Keep a bit of cream back, and use it to stick the henges together in your stone henge.

Arrange the squares/rectangles of chocolate however you want into your henge, using leftover cream to stick pieces together to make arches and stuff like that.

Or you can just grate chocolate or use sprinkles or something if you want.

Refrigerate for at least 30 minutes before serving, although it can be in the fridge over night and be super yummy the next day.

Oh, and be sure to check out Fun Crafts and Recipes for her wrap up of the Four Foods meme that she’ll be posting some time tomorrow probably.