This is one of my favourite photos. It was taken awhile ago at a place I worked in. Laura is holding Mr. Marron aloft just before the inevitable happens. Sadly, we went through quite a few of his friends every day. But they were always lovingly split and cooked in clarified butter, before being tossed in a five-spice mixture and served with a little dish of aioli and a shaved fennel salad.

If there’s one thing better than chocolate, it’s chocolate icing. And lots of it. Not too long ago, I was inspired by a thread on eGullet to finally make use of my copy of Pierre Hermes’ Chocolate Desserts book. And decided to make this, a Faubourg Pave: chocolate cake layered with salted butter caramel ganache and little bits of poached dried apricots (flavoured with lemon and pepper). The star of this dessert is the ganache – the slight saltiness is unusual but really highlights the flavour of the chocolate. For this dessert, I used Lindt because Valrhona is a little harder to get at short notice.

The following is a condensed version of Pierre Hermes’ ganache recipe:

185g Valrhona Manjari, finely chopped
120g Valrhona Jivara, finely chopped
140g sugar
20g salted butter
275g heavy cream
335g unsalted butter, at room temperature.

1. Mix the chocolates together in a bowl.
2. Bring the sugar to a dark caramel in a pot. Stir in the salted butter, and then the cream. Bring to boil and then remove pot from heat.
3. Pour half the hot caramel over the chocolate and gently stir with a spatula until smooth. Pour in the rest of the caramel, stirring. Set the ganache aside to cool.
4. Soften the unsalted butter with a spatula. Gently stir the butter into the ganache. Use straight away, or chill and bring back to room temperature before using.

The first time I went to Bilsons was in November of 2005, with S and B. A great meal, served by a wonderful waiter with an equally wonderful name : Pierre Paris. This seemingly simple gratin of fresh raspberries that I had for dessert was a great way to end the meal. The generous scattering of perfect raspberries were snuggled under a pillow of sweet champagne sabayon. Under all of this, a surprise bed of sponge, holding all the flavours together.

Everyone loves a bit of a surprise find in a dish they have ordered (unless of course it’s a bit of a foreign object like hair, or wire, or a bug on a lettuce leaf) .. somehow it makes you feel as though you have been given a bonus extra. A head chef I once worked for, called this “Walking quietly with a big stick”. It was his way of not listing every component of a dish on the menu, so as to leave some of it to the imagination of the customer, and also to create that element of delightful surprise. This head chef had many other funny sayings, none of which I have forgotten even though I haven’t heard them in a long while.

Bilsons
Radisson Plaza Hotel
27 O’Connell Street
Sydney 2000.