Come dine avec moi

A lot of my friends in London share my passion for cooking and baking and a couple of years ago, inspired by the high quality television series, we decided to set up our own 'Come Dine With Me'.  It differed in a few ways from its famous counterpart; firstly the participants were not picked big brother-style to deliberately wind each other up - in fact we are all such good friends we decided we couldn't actually bear to score each other (difference 2) - and no.3 the food is always amazing.

Last Sunday it was my turn to cook, I decided to do a 'Tour of Europe' inspired by a nice bottle of wine I bought in France over Easter and some lovely meat and cheese brought back from the same region.  I managed to slip some baking into my menu of course...

We started with the cheese and meats and bottle, and I baked some gougères; little french cheese choux buns - served hot, fluffy and buttery from the oven. Then after a starter of Italian fish stew and a main of Spanish pork tenderloin we went home to the UK (sort of) for a rhubarb and passion fruit pudding.  It's a recipe I came across in a magazine a few years ago and, with the thought that anything containing my 2 favourite fruits surely couldn't fail to be delicious, I gave it a go.  It was delicious and I praise the person who came up with the recipe!  I tweaked it a little this time to make it more dinner-party-y, making individual pots of the roasted rhubarb and passion fruit soufflé top and finishing each one with some homemade greek yoghurt ice cream and a painstakingly(!) crystallised freesia.

Then, to finish the evening, we returned to France for some petit fours; lemon macaroons, chocolate truffles and some rhubarb crisps.  

I was really pleased with all the food, my diners seemed to enjoy it - so totally worth all the time spent in the kitchen.  The only downside of an otherwise very enjoyable day was the by-product of all that time I spent in the kitchen; the mess! I'm not exactly renowned for being the tidiest of cooks, it took 9 of us several hours to clean up after me....thanks everyone! x