A very busy birthday party

I approach this perticular time of year with a small sense of dread and excitement.

My darling wifes birthday is this weekend, and for the last couple of years for one reaosn and another has been a very low key affair, so this year I thought I would put in a bit more effort. well actually a couple of weeks ago she asked 'could I have some of those little tricks you do with food at my birthday dinner?'

'err birthday dinner?' I replied, I had thought of organising the babysitter, booking somewhere nice and letting someone else take care of the cooking. However she had been talking with one of her friends and had come up with the plan of us having dinner in our house, so as I said before time to put a little extra effort in and organised a menu of 5 courses with suitable 'tricks' for good measure, our other guests are blissfully unaware of restaurants such as Alinea and the Fat Duck so I could easily plagarise a few tricks without them being passe, sorry to Grant and Heston (oh and Ferran for my opening cocktail) for the odd blatant theft of recipe, but where needs must the devil drives.

Next day at work, I am thinking of her menu when I am checking the business for this week, and never have I had such a mental week at work, what am I going to do? loads of split shifts needed, when am I going to prep?!? but of course we always make time for the important things in our lives, the only true issue I have had all week is to stop adding courses.

here is the menu, in the next post I will follow up with the pictures of the dishes with comments from our guests (providing i don't forget with the stress of cooking on her birthday)

she also commented on the fact she never gets a cake for her birthday, so with the genius of G's baking skills at hand, can finally put an end to that issue too, (she is normally the one who makes the cakes in the family, so she does get short changed when it's her day)

anyway the menu

Opening cocktail

Whisky sour

(blatant robbery from el Bulli, saw him prepare it a few year ago at a demo in London)

Butternut squash risotto & Heart of palm

‘Cannelloni’

(risotto with squash fluid gel filling a palm heart)

Seafood Platter

Lemon & saffron pudding, olive oil ‘rocks’

(mix of prawns, mussels, calamari and a rocket salad, lemon fluid gel and olive oil compressed in vacuum with tapioca multidextrin)

Truffle & cipoline onion tartlet

Savoury frangipane

(puff paste, classic frangipane (using multidextrin instead of sugar) great finger food to save on the washing up)

Rack of Lamb cooked at low temperature

Melting potato, ratatouille, mint and redcurrant

(58 degrees for 2 hours, then fat rendered and browned, meth cel potato, mint espuma and redcurrants enveloped in a redcurrant gel sheet)

Flaming sorbet

Poached apple ‘on the bone’

(1st part ripped off from the big fat duck cookbook, 2nd part spawned from a post on Ideas in Food)

Love in the mist

Semolina, strawberry spheres (or caviar) and iced foam

(born from Sally's comment on her favourite dessert of all time (as usual a childhood memory as it often is) classic semolina, strawberry reverse spherification, strawberry juice and versa whip frozen)

Cheese cracker

Chutney transparency

(first saw this cracker on the madrid lab blog and thought it one of the most creative frugal ideas I had come accross in some time, as for the chutney, this is an evolution of G's agar filtered juice from an earlier post)

Bounty bars & balls

Nearly texture-free

(sitting watching the hells kitchen final the other day, munching through a box of Celebrations, well what can I say I need simple comfort sugar every now and then (usually now))

(we were discussing a scene in Zombieland where Woody Harrelson finds a hostess truck in his search for a twinky bar, only to find it full of snowballs, he said it was not the flavour that was a problem, just the texture. Sally completely related to this but loves the flavour of coconut, so I had no choice really for petit fours, but to try and re-create a texture-less bounty bar so she can savour the coconut without spitting out the dry dessicated at the end, did I succeed? I say nearly, the chocolate I have used to coast is dark so a little overpowering but the filling is exact, and with only 2 ingredients too! I have done some bars which are agar set, and filled some truffle shells with a coconut fluid gel.)

Anyway I guess only time will tell if I got it right, see you after the weekend!