The Sacred Art of Eating

This being a year-long challenge, we will have two birthdays to see in Nigella Express style. The first of them went very well…

• Red Prawn and Mango Curry
• Ice Cream Cake

The curry felt a bit like cheating at cooking, in that I used pre-cubed butternut squash, sweet potato and mango, as well as shelled and cooked king prawns. In fact, all I had to slice was a spring onion although I did fry that in hand-made, slaved over wok oil (I then burnt the spring onions). The flavour came from curry paste (red thai) and coconut milk and really I did nothing. This was pretty gorgeous though, despite my managing to over cook it and the butternut melting away to nothing. Clearly it is an Express recipe seeing as most curries really do benefit from a good hour of bubbling away slowly.

As suggested in the preamble to the recipe I served this with noodles tossed in toasted unsalted peanuts. The peanuts were very hard to track down- not in the wholefoods section of the store but with the salted/dry roasted peanuts as a ‘healthy alternative’. I forgot to go to the chinese supermarket before it closed to sent D out on a wild goose chase for wide rice noodles which were not to be found but normal egg noodles did the trick just fine. Slurpily wonderful.

Pudding, however was the real icing on the cake, even though this cake had no icing at all. I felt my man deserved an all out pudding for his birthday so I went for the ice cream cake from the swanky Razzle Dazzle chapter. This was a cinch to make; I wouldn’t and couldn’t get the called for Nestle ‘peanut butter and chocolate chips’ so I used a mixture of white, milk and plain chocolate chips as well as butterscotch chips sourced from my pal Ariana’s Italian restaurant. Brill.

I made the cake up the night before and then at tea prepared the TWO sauces that were to go with it. Then, a quick bit of strewing the top with chocolatey rubble and a drizzle or two of sauce (more of a slick than a drizzle as the sauces could’ve done with cooling a bit more) and we were, collectively, in ice cream heaven.

The best bit about the ice cream cake might well have been that, unlike other cakes, we couldn’t give our Birthday Tea guests a slice each to take home with them….it just had to go back in our freezer, mwahahaha!

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