Do you ever use a melon-baller? Well I do. It’s this fantastic thingamajig that makes the most pleasing little balls for your salad. The best thing is that you release whatever you’re carving from its original shape and render it open to reinterpretation – to the extent that when I served a melon/cucumber ball salad with chopped coriander last Friday, someone thought I had discovered a freakishly round kind of miniature potato. Anyhoot, the bad thing is, that you only get 20 odd balls from one whole melon (in this case a honeydew melon), leaving you with a good chunk of oddly shaped fruit leftovers to deal with afterwards. That’s when I got this brilliant idea: Why not blend it into a fine melon slush and add a splash of alcohol? Here’s what I did (and what I recommend that you don’t):

Honeydew Melon Cocktail (makes about four cocktails)

• 1 very ripe honeydew melon (to make sure, check if it has that honey-scent before you buy it – or leave it to ripen in the sun for a few days  - that helped in my case). Feel free to try out other types too. I bet this would also be great with a water melon. Found this instructional video for picking out the right melon at the shop.
• 3-4 generous splashes of alcohol (I used rum, but T and I agreed that a less sweet type of alcohol would suit the melon much better. Next time I am going to try vodka or gin. Let me know if you find the perfect match.)
• 3-4 squeezes of lemon juice
• Raspberries and lemon zest for serving

It’s dead simple. Obviously you don’t have to melon-ball it to use this recipe. Just cut the melon in halves and scoop out the flesh with a good spoon or slice it out with a knife, making sure to scrape off all of that beautiful juice on the inside of the skin. I ended up squeezing it like a lemon and it just kept on giving. Then add the melon bits and juice to a bowl and blend it into a fine slush. Finally add lemon juice and alcohol to your liking. Decorate with raspberries and lemon zest and serve as cold as possible. I am thinking it might even be good to freeze the melon flesh beforehand and blend it into an icy slush. Come to think of it, if you are having a party, try leaving your cocktail glasses in the freezer for about an hour ahead of serving. Enjoy!

Welcome to my 100th post! Yup, that’s what the countdown was for. Since I started posting odd tidbits back in July 2007 it has amounted to a whole lotta rambling about cooking and craziness. Today I’m celebrating my milestone with some great news and a wedding cake (or: a cake I made for a wedding – don’t expect any tiered white horrors with sugar flowers fit for a coffin).

But first, the news: On Wednesday I’m kicking off my new career as a Ph.D. student! Sweet, innit? I think so anyway. For the next three years I’ll actually be paid for studying public service and nation building in the early years of Danish national radio!

But sorry, let’s get to the truly important thing on today’s menu: The cake gallery. Here’s a short tour through my three evenings of labour with a home-spun cake that I made for my friend’s wedding. It’s a hazelnut-sponge cake (this part came from Mette Blomsterberg) with a filling of mascarpone and passionfruit cream and an “icing” of reduced and de-seeded raspberry compôte mixed with whipped cream. As decoration I made little “leaves” of dark chocolate sprinkled with cocoa nibs and just added some fresh berries. Enjoy the show and the following post-bonanza!

100 posts down, a million more to go. Weeee!

Whenever I’m travelling, this blog works as my cookbook. So imagine my surprise when I wanted to suggest a nice chocolate recipe for my niece’s baptism in Stockholm and I couldn’t find one single chocolate recipe here! And it’s not like I haven’t been yapping on about the endless pleasures of the cocoa persuasion, but somehow I’ve managed to avoid actually putting that into action. So sorry! Luckily I’ve found just the right recipe to make amends with on a very pretty sister blog called Cannelle et Vanille: French Chocolate Macaroons.

I have attempted to make macaroons before with mediocre results, as this mugshot shows. But when I found this recipe I instantly knew I had the key to perfection (with a few cracks and dents;-). There was just something about the details concerning the egg white and the fact that there are so many different delicious looking macaroons on that blog that made me trust the writer 100%. And it really paid off. I made the macaroons following the recipe as religiously as possible. The only change I made was in the ganache where I used dark chocolate (Lindt  70%) instead of milk chocolate and replaced the passion fruit with raspberries.

Raspberry Ganache (makes just the right amount for the macaroons)

• 100 grams dark chocolate (70%)
• 50 grams (frozen) raspberries
• 20 grams cream
• 15 grams butter
• A splash of rhum
• A blob or two of glucose
• A pinch of salt

Start by chopping the chocolate into nice little bits and set them aside in a bowl that can stand some heat and place a sieve on top. Then heat the cream and the whole raspberries in a saucepan while you mash the berries into the cream. When the berries have dissolved as much as possible and the mixture is slowly starting to boil, take the saucepan from the heat and pour the cream through the sieve and over the chocolate. You only want to get rid of the raspberry seeds, so make sure that when you have, you immediately start stirring the melting chocolate into the pink cream. When all of the chocolate has melted, add a splash of rhum and a pinch of salt to deepen the flavour and sweeten it with some glucose (or syrup). And that’s it. Now pour the mixture into a piping bag and leave it in the fridge for five minutes before squeezing it out onto your baked and cooled macaroons. I promise you, these are the best treats ever and you won’t believe you’ve actually made them yourself!

The texture and the flavour were spot on and the look very nice  if you like the rustic and not French-nazi-patisserie chef-style. But I would like to learn how to make all of the macaroons the same size and without cracks in the surface.

NOTE: I just attended a patisserie class last night (May 5th) at La Glace in Copenhagen. There we learnt, that the cracks can be avoided by, among other things, making sure the almond-cocoa-sugar mixture is completely even and mixed, before adding the meringue.