If you’ve been following me on Instagram lately, you’ll have seen I’ve been cooking up a storm from Jamie Oliver’s latest cookbook, Quick and Easy Food (I reviewed it here). But I haven’t just been cooking at home, I’ve made a few recipes with my Petits Chefs (gnocchi, lemony courgette linguine) too, and my Cooking Basics club are using the book as a kind of textbook this term too!
This week, the Petits Chefs had their last session cooking with me before we move into more guest chefs and field trips and I thought I might surprise them with some sweet treats (we very rarely make desserts…). We’re working with two small toaster ovens right now so the choice of recipes was limited but I found three (because hey, why only make one recipe?) that I knew (hoped) would work in the time we had available…
I’ve made Chocolate Orange Shortbread many times before and because it’s basically a one-bowl affair (and no appliances requires -the dough is made entirely by hand!), it’s absolutely do-able in under an hour…
I’d been wanting to make the Chocolate Mousse for a while too so figured it would be easy for the boys to whip this up (no pun intended). I pretty much left them to their own devices (with many reminders to read the recipe) and they did a pretty great job…
We had a few issues, namely yolk in the egg white which meant it didn’t whip up as much as it should have. I let the whites sit for a bit so the unwhipped part would sink to the bottom and we just didn’t use it. So, while the mousse wasn’t as fluffy as it could have been, it was not bad!
I couldn’t find tinned cherries for the garnish but we “made do” with fresh berries… Noone complained!
The third group of boys made Chocolate Rye Cookies – intriguingly made by melting chocolate and butter and pouring it into a food processor with some rye bread crumbs, an egg and some sugar. So intriguing!
These are piped out, garnished with a little sea salt and baked. Such a brilliant use of rye bread!
All the boys took home a lovely plate of treats. Correction. Some of the boys did. Some of the plates were clean before they left the lab!
Not picture perfect but hey – 14 boys, 60 minutes? Not bad!
Get the recipe for Jamie Oliver’s Chocolate Orange Shortbread here.
Get the recipe for Jamie Oliver’s Chocolate Cherry Mousse here.
Get the recipe for Jamie Oliver’s Chocolate Rye Cookies here.
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Purchase Quick and Easy Food for yourselves on Amazon (this link should bring you to the Amazon store closest to you). Or for free worldwide shipping, buy from The Book Depository.
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Disclosure: I am a sometime contributor to JamieOliver.Com, and a Food Revolution “Super Ambassador” for Canada, though I was supporting Jamie’s cause well before I was doing any of those things. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll know how much of a Jamie fan I am and how strongly I believe in his message. I was not asked to write about this book, I purchased it myself.