FOOD: Chocolate pots with whisky cream.
To me, a chocolate pot de crème is the best part of a chocolate tart without all the hassle of pastry-making – resting, rolling, blind baking, blah, blah, blah. If, however, you did want to go to the effort of making a tart – and I don’t judge – the chocolate custard in this recipe would work a treat for the filling.
This is quite a delicate recipe on a number of levels. In the restaurant we would bake these only a few hours before we serve them and leave them at room temperature in their barely set state. When they’re eaten, the texture is quite silken. If they hit the fridge, they set to a thick ganache and the whole impact is lost.
This is also a great example of a recipe that can really highlight the quality of chocolate. Too often, chocolate gets piled up with other flavours. Here you really taste the nuance – the different notes in the chocolate. Because it’s cooked at a lower temperature, these flavours are not damaged.
Other flavours can be added, if you need. You might infuse some vanilla, cardamom or orange into the cream and let it rest before the baking. But if quality chocolate is involved, leave it well alone.
The type of sugar used can also influence the flavour. I’ve experimented all the way from a muscovado to a standard raw sugar. The muscovado brings a treaclelike quality to the chocolate, which rounds off nicely with the whisky cream. The raw sugar is more subtle, which is fine.
The only thing to mention about the whisky cream is that you can be generous with the whisky but not so generous as to not have a finger or two left to drink after
• dinner.