A recipe from our Lois Daish archive that is win-win for a gift-giving cook.
Christmas sweetmeats, "salami" second, photo Belinda Pope
Chocolate and cherries, chocolate and raspberries, even chocolate and strawberries – all the tiny red fruits of early summer go beautifully with chocolate, especially dark chocolate. For a perfect miniature dessert, all you need is a scatter of ripe juicy berries and a few luscious chocolate sweetmeats. They don’t involve hours of work, and the risk of failure is small. I used “Lindt 70% cocoa dark chocolate” or “Nestlé cooking chocolate” and preferred the flavour of unsalted butter.
This recipe for chocolate “salami”, flavoured with rum, ginger and glacé cherries, was given to Alison Mudford, Listener deputy chief subeditor, by a friend, and then passed on to me. Serve thin slices of salami with a bunch of fresh cherries as a counterpoint to the glacé fruit. This also makes a lovely little gift for a festive host.
ELIZABETH’S CHOCOLATE “SALAMI”
- 250g packet gingernuts
- 2-4 tbsp dark rum
- 150g plain dark chocolate
- 50g unsalted butter
- 1 egg
- 150g packet glacé cherries
- icing sugar for rolling
Put the gingernuts in a processor and whiz until finely crushed. Tip into a bowl and sprinkle with the rum. Mix with a fork. Break the chocolate up into small pieces and put in a bowl placed over a saucepan of hot, but not boiling, water and leave to melt. Stir in the butter until melted. Remove the bowl from the saucepan and beat the egg into the warm mixture. Add the crushed gingernuts and whole cherries and mix well. Leave to cool, then form into 2 logs, each 5cm in diameter. Sift icing sugar onto a bench and roll each log in the sugar until well coated. Wrap in greaseproof paper and chill until firm. Store in a cool place. To serve, cut into thin slices. Makes 2 salamis.
This recipe first appeared in the Listener on December 6 2003.