'How to cook like Heston' challenge: Preeti Brar

Preeti gets messy with the flower pot tiramisu from How To Cook Like Heston.

Over the years, I have drooled over many of Heston Blumenthal's programmes, and when the 'How To Cook Like Heston' series started I knew I would attempt one of the recipes. I decided to make the tiramisu disguised as a plant as I wanted to fool my family by serving them a plant pot for dessert.

As I have never attempted anything on this scale before I was very excited. So once I had all the ingredients and equipment I decided to start cooking, despite it being 9:30pm.

Crystallised dark chocolate (hiccup no. 1)

I began with the crystallised dark chocolate component of the soil, which uses white caster sugar to make the syrup. However, I misread it as unrefined golden caster sugar (I blame the pressure of trying to cook like Heston), so it meant I couldn’t tell when the syrup become darker as it was a lovely golden colour. Without a thermometer and not being able to tell if the syrup changed colour, it was a gamble on when to add the dark chocolate. 

After a few minutes (which felt like an hour) of boiling, I added the chocolate. To my disbelief, it turned into a shiny chocolate sauce. I panicked, and placed the chocolate on high heat praying that it would crystallise. Once the mixture had become quite thick, I removed it off the heat. It was then whisked with some elbow grease by my boyfriend. As the mixture cooled, thankfully it crystallised. First element was complete, hurray.

The soil

The caramelised grape nut and the rest of the soil were assembled with ease, and it looked like it did on TV. It was earthy, muddy, crunchy, and yummy like soil should be.

The chocolate layers (hiccup no. 2)

To make the chocolate, I had to melt it and spread it between two acetate sheets, then place it in the freezer for 10 minutes and create circular discs using pastry cutters. Melting the chocolate was the easy part; I poured it over the acetate and placed another sheet on top. This created one messy kitchen as the chocolate was too runny and went everywhere. I placed it in the freezer and cleaned the mess for the next 10 minutes. 

It was time to use the pastry cutters to create the circles. As I took the chocolate out of the freezer it was curvy, probably because I placed it on top of the frozen peas. I tried to flatten it, which made it worst as I had loads of very small pieces.

So I re-melted the chocolate and just used a spatula to create thin circles on baking paper with pre-drawn guidelines. To ensure they remained flat, I placed them in the fridge on a shelf. I waited patiently for about 30 minutes. It worked!

At this point it was 11:30pm and I decided to go to bed as the tiredness was probably contributing to the silly mistakes.

Putting it all together

The masala cream and sponge fingers didn’t take long to make. However, I'd never used gelatine before so wasn’t sure if the masala cream was the right consistency. Once I started to put the elements in the plant pots I was very excited. I started with the chocolate disc, then the sponge figure mixture, followed by masala cream and repeated the chocolate disc with masala cream layers a few times. I finished with the chocolate soil and placed some mint with chocolate brushed underneath in two of them with basil in the other two.

It looked and tasted amazing. I fooled nearly everyone, and had to convince them that it was edible. I was very happy with the outcome and would definitely create this again.

Just one bad point...

The only bad point was me and my boyfriend couldn’t stop "tasting" the chocolate soil as it was so good. Thankfully there was enough left over from the recipe but I would create more of the soil just as a snack. 

Want to join in? 

Thank you Preeti. If you want to join in and potentially win a tour of Heston's lab!, just register with lovefood, pick a recipe from the show, attempt it properly, and let us know how you got on by sending some pics and a few hundred words by email to contactus@lovefood.com

Terms

Our standard competition terms are here. You must be a registered user of lovefood.com to enter. The editor's decision is final. Closing date is 15th February.

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