A gelato in Rome

Gelato, or italian ice cream, at its best is rich, creamy and much softer than what we can buy in the UK. It's also about my favourite thing to eat in the world. I have, so far in the 3 months in Italy eaten it for breakfast (once) lunch (too many times to count) and dinner (shamefully often). 

Note I don't mean with dinner, I mean when I was out of the house at a dinner-ish sort of time, I deliberately ignored all the more normal, readily available and very cheap street food Rome has to offer and as my friends noshed down on pizza 'alla taglia' and arancini, I picked up a double or triple helping of the good stuff. Shameshameshame. 
I even worked out a system of sorts. Dinner = main meal of the day, therefore my cup must contain only the higher calorie, creamy flavours (no sorbet here) and ideally there will be chunks. 
I have a problem. Yes indeed.

My point is a) gelato is freaking incredible and b) I've eaten a fair bit, and got around little more over three months than the casual gelato munching tourist. So here are my top picks, both locations and flavours. 

Except where I've drawn your attention to it, all prices are essentially the same, around 2-3E for the satisfying medium sized cup in the picture. 

Things that astonish me (and chocolate chip tiramisu)

I've been in Rome for three weeks now and some things continue to astonish me every day. 

This is my view! My actual, genuine view from my bedroom if I go and stick my head out the window. Surely they reserve this sort of spectacle for actual residents, or the Pope, or something. It boggles me to the core every single time I wake up. 

I am the Queen of Choux

I promise I'll stop banging on about Portugal soon...

...But not before a little Port Wine.
Now, me and Tom are pretty into our Port, which is one of the reasons we went to Porto in the first place. And we drank cheap port, expensive port and mostly everything in between. The priciest glass we shared would have set us back over £100 to buy the bottle. Extravagent stuff, wine. 

We even splashed out on a vintage port tasting on our last night, where they gave you little chocolate to match to the different ages of port. Dark chocolate for the oldest and most honeyed, milk for the young and fruity ones. 
Oh, since you ask, I can be very boring for a very long time on the subject of port wine. 
 

But no, since you beg so nicely, I'll restrain myself here. 
Suffice to say that tawny port (my own favourite love!) is supposed to pair with chocolate and cream or egg based desserts. You have to love an alcohol that demands to be drank with pudding. And who am I to ignore the demands of such tasty drink?

 Chocolate Eclairs
Adapted from James Martin's "Desserts"

You see, the eclair is the perfect answer to the question- what is both creamy and eggy and chocolatey? The choux pastry is eggy; just underbake it if you don't believe me, you get a rich, eggy Yorkshire Pudding sort of affair. The cream, obviously, provides the creaminess and the topping is bitter dark chocolate, sweetened just enough to take the edge off.
I had a slight crisis of confidence when I realised that there was, per se, no eclair recipe in my James Martin bible of all things sweet. But then my brain woke up a little bit and I used the profiterole recipe, with my own chocolate sauce.

Minor piping imperfections make big knobbly buns. But they taste just as good!

1. Heat 125ml water, 120g butter and 125ml milk in a pan, don't boil it but do ignore it long enough to get 170g flour measured out. Also preheat the oven to 210 degrees C.
2. Take off the heat and  dump all the flour into the bowl at once. Mix like a woman posessed. (or man, I'm all for equal opportunities patisserie)
3. Go do something else for 5 minutes.  
4. When its nice and cool, add an egg and mix until it doesn't look gross anymore. Repeat. Then repeat. Finally, repeat. That's four eggs for the slower amongst us. 
5. Leave it for a sec and quietly congratulate yourself on not scrambling the eggs. 
6. Pipe big sausages onto a baking tray. Use baking paper if you're cool, like me. Use a wet finger to dab the little flicks where you stopped piping. 
Seriously, choux pastry is magic. Wet finger= no sticking. Dry finger= mixture stuck to anything you touch for the next couple of minutes. What is with that shizzle? 
7. Put them in the oven, and chuck a cupful of water on the floor of the oven. 
8. Five minutes later, open the over door up wide to let all that steam out. We don't want no steamy pastries. But seriously, the steam helps the rise, then we want it gone because it makes our choux soggy. 
9. After another 20 minutes or so they should look a nice brown. Or golden, if you'd like to sound nicer. Whack 'em out and snip them open down the middle. Then whack 'em back in the oven to dry the innards. Another 5 mins should do it. 
10. Let cool, whip cream to soft and peaky perfection (I added a little sugar and vanilla) and smother in chocolate sauce. Mine is 100g bitter dark chocolate, 50g caster sugar, 20g butter and about 20ml milk to stop it setting too hard on the eclairs. Obviously melt the chocolate before you do all the mixing.    
The chocolate sauce will look really dodgy when you add the milk at the end. Have faith though, it does come together with mixing. Again, let it cool before you slather it all over, becasuse hot sauce and cold cream makes a runny mess and no one likes unnecessary running. Not even Paula Radcliffe. 

Carrot cake and cruising

As promised, one boat trip. A daring tale of men overboard, white water rushing over the side to claim idle tourists and sharks. Sharks I tell you...

...Nah, I lied.
It was pretty nice though to be out on a bright blue river in the midday sun. With a sun hat and nice thick lick of suncream on though, I listened to my mum when I was little. As well as being totally responsible for me being so pasty I have been known to frighten children when I crack out my blue-white limbs abroad, my mum was obviously frightening enough on the subject of sunlight that I STILL apply an emulsion paint-like layer to anything I expose at temperatures above, say, freezing point. Again, I jest, but you get the picture. The pale, pale picture. 

 As you can see, I got Tom in on the hat wearing party. Not the suncream party though because, being of sturdy (read, swarthy) gypsy stock, he has no need for such fripparies to block the rays. Lucky gent.

 This is totally exciting- pinhole camera mode on my lovely little compact camera. Its a Panasonic Lumix TZ8 and it really is very sweet. Look how it lets me be dramatic and artsy with me actually having to go through the bother of cultivating either of these personality traits/skills. 

 

Would you believe that this beautiful (cough, crumbling ruin) is for sale? You can't really see here but it is right on the river and it was majestic. It makes me sad in my heart that such a lovely building will probably just be left to slip into the River Douro, and no elderly yet fantastically rich gentleman will buy it to house his suit of armour collection. 

Life should be more unrealistic more often. True. 

Well, that's all folks. Ah, alright then, as you asked so sweetly, I'll give you my favourite photoshop (read:Picasa) effort of the holiday. Note that I will brook no criticism on this, I love it and it is mine. Also, it is garish and unrealistic, but it makes me feel artsy and those other things I felt earlier on. 

(Dramatic, if you're too lazy to scroll up, you slovenly bean.)

And to think I promised you carrot cake. What a tease I've turned out to be today. Here you go, don't eat it all at once. xx

Bom dia, Oporto!

  
A few weeks ago, me and Tom flew out to Porto, Portugal, and what was quite possibly the best holiday of my life so far. Our hotel was set right in the middle of the cities vast Avenida dos Aliados, which seemingly every street in Porto opens onto. 
This is the view from our 5th floor balcony (eek, a balcony!) and what greeted me on the first night after a few hours as the guest of the British and Portuguese public transport systems...

...Hotel Aliados beats Travelodge into a pulp any day.

 

There are far, far too many photos to put many of them here, so they'll be dotted all over the place in my next few posts, like some sort of international Where's Wally. Except with a river and some buildings instead of a bloke in a wooly pully and bobble hat. 

 

 A word of warning, I blooming love Photoshop. Or at least I would, if I owned it. I'll rephrase; I love my cheap (free, actually) knockoff of Photoshop, which does a fraction of the things at a fraction of the quality, with a fraction of the freedom that Photoshop does, but at a price (freeeeee) I can get on board with. Oh, Picasa, you beauty, you let me whomp up the saturation on my photos to my hearts content. You don't let me do much, but that you allow me this, and for that you are my one and only. 

Porto as a whole reminded me a little of London, a little of Prague. That combination of lived in, worn out and utterly disregarded beauty in the architecture and skyline is very reminiscent of both cities, but there's something missing from both examples too. 
It took me a while to put my finger on it but I think what Porto has that London lacks is colour, that opulence that can only come from a palette that encompasses, but isn't defined by, very old stone.  

It probably helps the comparison that all three cities are built straddling a river too.
  












I have the mighty hill that Porto is entirely built on to thank for the buns of steel I have come home with. Also, very sore legs, and a taste for ruinously expensive Port Wine. 
Next time; my daring tale of a death defying trip up the River Douro*. Plus more! 




*Death defying nature of River cruise may be exaggerated for entertainment purposes :P
xx