I hope that you are having a lovely Easter weekend - whatever you may believe.
I love Easter. Mostly because of the food. I know there are some that will say that sentence is sacrilegious, but it is the truth. Although Easter dinner is not as big as Thanksgiving, it is another feasting day and I love cooking for it. For some reason, maybe because it always involved new shoes and dresses, Easter Sunday memories stay in my mind a little bit more than other holidays - including Christmas. Or maybe its because Easter, in my family anyway, was a bit like Christmas and Thanksgiving combined but with a scavenger hunt thrown in the mix. But it was like Christmas and Thanksgiving - LITE. Let me explain what I mean.
On Christmas you wake up in the morning and you get gifts under the Christmas tree. In my house, you would wake up Easter morning and you would get an Easter Basket filled with toys and candy. So you get gifts, but only a basket full - thus LITE. Then you would go to church and you would wear your Easter dress, hat, and shoes. The dress and hat matched and were, usually in a pastel color, and the shoes were, almost always, white patent leather Mary Janes that you would wear with lace trimmed cuff socks. From there, the men folk would take you on an Easter egg hunt in the backyard/grandma's garden while the women cooked Easter dinner. (Scavenger Hunt)
And then, you would have Easter dinner. For Easter dinner we would have ham, some form of potato, green beans, deviled eggs (you have to do something with those eggs the children dyed and found), rolls and then dessert - a cake shaped like a lamb. (So think Thanksgiving, because you're all sitting together as a family, but LITE because there wasn't nearly as many dishes, nor as much stress for the meal to turn out perfect.)
Even as an adult, who is married but with no children, I like to try to celebrate these traditions. I am sad to say that I don't dye eggs nor do I go on egg hunts - those are something I outgrew. But my husband and I still exchange Easter baskets, I still like to get an Easter dress and hat (although I try to make it an outfit I can wear for more than one day a year), and I still like to have/prepare an Easter dinner. As I have posted in previous Easter posts, the Easter dinner can be a bit of a conundrum if there are just two of you. I have some recipes that I plan on trying this year, and - once I have them perfected - I will post the recipes here, but I felt I would be remiss if I didn't give you at least one Easter dish before Easter actually happened.
In this post, I am combining my love of food, my love of vintage, and my love of most things British, and giving you recipes on how to make two flavors of blancmange bunnies.
 |
| This seems to be your traditional British blancmange bunny. A pink bunny served on green grass made of jello. |
I first saw blancmange bunnies when I was watching a BBC documentary/reality show on YouTube called The Supersizers Go WWII. On it, the hosts Sue Perkins and Giles Coren lived the life of a British couple during WWII. In it, they showed what people wore, how they lived, and what they ate. Which, considering everyone was under rations was - not much. However, when peace was declared many towns, neighborhoods, and villages had victory celebration feasts. One of the items that they showed making as part of the menu of many of these dinners was blancmange bunnies. How delightful!
So I started reading up on blancmange bunnies. I thought they would be perfect for Easter and would give me yet another chance to use my bunny mold.
First, if you have never heard of a blancmange bunny, think of a cross between pudding and jello. Or like the French version of flan. The ones I saw were almost always pink - which is strange when you think that blanc means white in French and the dish was, originally, always white. But time, and cooks, added other ingredients, such as strawberries or, more popularly, raspberries and these fruits would make the blancmange pink.
They are, apparently, something that most British children grow up eating. From what I can gather, you can find mixes for these in the local grocery store and they are much like boxes of pudding when it comes to preparation. But, from the articles that I read, these boxed blancmange lacked something in taste and sensation being described as sweet, slightly grainy, and covered in a weird film. Right. So I would not be going to Amazon to order a box.
 |
| I did, however, go on Amazon to see if I could get a box, and you can, if you want to try the easy way for $15.98 plus shipping. |
But blancmange was around before these boxed mixes so I carried on and kept looking for some recipes. I found recipes, but most were in British measurements and called for ingredients that I could not get in the United States. (Cough, single cream, cough.)
So, gathering up several different recipes, I decided to make my own blancmange recipes one being the pink bunny that I had first seen and the other being an "original" white bunny.
Before we begin, here are my take-aways or what I learned about making blancmange.
1. Both of these recipes taste delicious - I wouldn't post anything that didn't- but they are a bit of a pain. At least when you are doing them in a mold.
2. When I do them again I will either use a larger bunny mold or use a different, larger, jello mold. The bunnies, because of their small size, had more trouble keeping their shape during their removal from the mold. Having said that, the pink bunnies in a larger mold would be gorgeous.
3. The white chocolate would probably best be chilled in a pretty glass rather than a mold, due to the white chocolate, it is a bit stickier and did not want to come out of the mold.
Armed with that knowledge, here are the recipes.
Rose Tea and Grand Marnier Blancmange
The first recipe is inspired by Downton Abbey and a blancmange that one of my friends had told me about that was rose flavored. Sounded like a good place to start to me. Below is what I came up with.
1- 2 tsp. Certified Organic Rosebud and Rose Hips (for steeping)
2 cups water (for steeping)
1 packet Knox unflavored gelatin
1/2 cup cold whole milk (for blooming gelatin)
1 1/4 cups whole milk (for heating)
2/3 cups sugar (You can do less sugar if you would like a less sweet more aromatic bunny.)
Zest of 1/2 lemon
1 tsp. rose tea
2 tbsp. Grand Marnier
1 drop red food coloring
Instructions
1. Put the kettle on the stove and heat to a near boil at least two cups water.
2. Pour water into a cup and steep the organic rose buds and rose hips. (If you have the right thing, which is basically just dry rose buds and rose hips you are basically making rose water - although we call it tea. I felt this was the safest and most inexpensive way to get the rose water I needed for the recipe.)
3. Set the tea aside to steep.
4. While the tea is steeping, put a 1/2 cup milk in a medium size bowl and sprinkle the gelatin on top. Set the bowl aside.
5. In a medium size, heavy bottom sauce pan, over medium low/medium heat, combine 1 1/4 cups milk and sugar. Heat the mixture until the sugar dissolves - being careful not to scald the milk and stirring frequently.
6. Remove from heat and add the lemon zest. Let stand for ten minutes.
7. Strain the milk mixture and pour over the cold milk with the bloomed gelatin.
8. Add one teaspoon of the steeped rose "tea", the Grand Marnier, and the food coloring.
9. Pour mixture into molds and refrigerate until solid. (This will do three bunnies if you are using the same nordicware bunny mold that I am using.) I like to refrigerate for at least eight hours (over night) so that I know the gelatin has set.
10. To remove the gelatin, put bowl into a sink filled with warm water so that the water comes to right below the rim of the mold. (The entire bottom of the mold should be immersed, but the water should not be so high that the blancmange gets wet.)
11. Leave in the water for only a few seconds. You only want it to come "unglued" from the mold - you don't want to melt the blancmange. After removing from the water, gently shake the mold from side to side. If the gelatin does not separate from the edges of the mold, carefully run a knife around the edge.
12. Put a plate on top of the mold and flip over. (If gelatin does not come out, repeat steps ten and eleven.)
You should have cute little pink bunnies for your Easter dessert table!
White Chocolate Blancmange
 |
| As I warned you up above, this recipe did not take well to a mold. These little bunnies look like they are competing with the Wicked Witch of the West. "We're melting......melting! |
I adore white chocolate and every year, as a child, I would get a white chocolate bunny in my Easter basket. A tradition that my husband continues to this day. Using this as inspiration, I decided that I wanted a white chocolate blancmange bunny.
There were other recipes that I could find online, but all the ones that I found were in milligrams or had ingredients like 250ml of single cream. (No, you can't get that in the U.S.A., I checked, and there is not a U.S. equivalent.) So after much research, conversion tables, and combining of several recipes, I came up with this recipe.
Ingredients
1 package Knox unflavored gelatin
2 tbsp. cornstarch
1 1/4 cup whole milk (separated)
3 tbsp. powdered sugar
1 tsp. vanilla extract
3/4 cup heavy whipping cream
1 1/2 - 2 cups white chocolate chips (I got Ghiradeli white chocolate chips and used two thirds of the bag)
Instructions
1. In a medium size bowl pour a 1/2 cup milk and sprinkle the gelatin on top. Set the bowl aside.
2. In a medium size, heavy bottom, sauce pan, combine 1/2 cup milk and cornstarch - whisk until smooth.
3. Stir in the remaining 1/4 cup milk, powdered sugar, vanilla extract, and heavy whipping cream.
4. Place the saucepan over medium heat and heat slowly. Being careful not to scald the milk- but it does need to be warm enough to melt the white chocolate chips. Stir continuously.
5. Remove the warm milk mixture from heat and add the white chocolate chips, stirring until dissolved.
6. Pour the warm milk and white chocolate mixture over the cold milk with the bloomed gelatin.
7. Pour mixture into molds and refrigerate until solid. (This will make four bunnies if you are using the same Nordic Ware bunny mold that I am using.) I like to refrigerate for at least eight hours (over night) so that I know the gelatin has set. OR Skip the mold altogether and just put in pretty serving glasses and then refrigerate.
9. To remove the gelatin, put bowl into a sink filled with warm water so that the water comes to right below the rim of the mold. (The entire bottom of the mold should be immersed, but the water should not be so high that the blancmange gets wet.)
10. Leave in the water for only a few seconds. You only want it to come "unglued" from the mold - you don't want to melt the blancmange. After removing from the water, gently shake the mold from side to side. If the gelatin does not separate from the edges of the mold, carefully run a knife around the edge.
11. Put a plate on top of the mold and flip over. (If gelatin does not come out, repeat steps nine and ten.)
And there you have it - beautiful, white, bunnies. Okay, so, in my case, slightly melted looking bunny cakes.
Just a quick note here, if you use the same Nordic Ware bunny mold pan that I have, it is too big to use a plate as a bottom when flipping your mold. I use a serving platter instead.
Well, that's it for this post. I hope that you enjoyed that I finally posted a recipe. In case you wanted to see the Easter dinner that I posted a previous post, I have included the link below.
https://frugalfemmecarole.blogspot.com/2017/04/easter-dinner-for-two-spicy-sweet-ham.html
No comments:
Post a Comment