Gifts (for myself) from the Kitchen

I’m not sure that this even counts as a recipe but I’m quite pleased with the results so am sharing it anyway. The cover of Annie Rigg’s ‘Gifts from the Kitchen’ has a box of rose and raspberry chocolate wafers on the cover (which I think are exactly the same thing as mendiants and which sounds more sophisticated to me than wafer despite meaning beggar). Freeze dried raspberries are impossible to find in Leicester at the moment but the vegetarian shop (Current Affairs) has promised to source some for me which I call excellent customer services.

Thwarted in my desire to follow the recipe faithfully I had to fall back on a collection of nuts, candied petals, and some vanilla finishing salt I got cheap at work because the label explaining what you do with it had fallen off. I still don’t know what to do with Vanilla finishing salt but I won’t add it to chocolate wafers/mendiants again, far too damn salty.

Anyway all you need to do to turn a large bar of top quality chocolate into a lot of small pieces of chocolate and some melted chocolate is heat it very gently ideally in a bowl over barely simmering water stirring it until it’s smooth and then let it cool slightly. Meanwhile get a baking sheet and cover it in grease proof paper then poor small spoonfuls of the chocolate onto the paper and sprinkle stuff on them. Leave the lot to solidify and store in the fridge in an air tight container where they should be happy for about five days. (I can’t see why they shouldn’t keep for longer but that’s what the book and the website’s all say, and as mine probably won’t last that long I have to believe it.)

They would make perfect fillers for Easter eggs and a dark chocolate Brazil nut combo would undoubtedly make my father a very happy man – but will it be possible to share...