ANNIE SMITHERS
The word fondant has multiple uses in the French cooking vernacular. In no particular order it could be a white icing, a gooey chocolate pudding or a way of cooking potatoes.
The icing version is what you often find atop fancy French vanilla slices: a mixture of icing sugar, glycerine, glucose syrup, gelatine and vanilla. Even listing the ingredients makes my teeth start to ache.
Fondant potatoes are another matter altogether. They are cut into a barrel shape, so they are flat at each end. Then the potatoes are put into a hot pan with plenty of melted butter and herbs and cooked until the ends are golden. Next, a little stock is added to the pan, the lid goes on and the potatoes are cooked for 30-odd minutes until tender. Unlike the icing fondant that sets my teeth on edge, the potato version makes me salivate. If you add a whole parsnip and a couple of leeks to the pan, it can become a meal on its own with a crisp green salad on the side.
Then there are chocolate fondants, gooey-centred chocolate desserts. I must confess that in my early years as a cook I just thought they were a type of chocolate pudding you took out of the oven before all the mixture had set. But no, the correct way to make this dessert is with a separate centre that melts as the cake mixture cooks around it. This makes the pudding a little more technical than making a simple self-saucing pudding with cocoa and self-raising flour, but the result is
• a richer, more restaurant-style dessert.