Dessert party

Dessert, dessert and more dessert!

I had a wine and dessert party recently. Girls only. The idea was, bring a dessert, or a dessert wine, or both. Pot luck. We would then spend an evening indulging in deliciousness. What a plan!

We ended up with a mouth-watering array of desserts and dessert wines and had a fun evening.

I'll start with the wines.

We started with Italian sweet bubbles, what better start is there?

Next came the dessert wines.

Unsurprisingly, because the excellent Martinborough is so close, three of our wines came from Martinborough. I wish I had taken a photo of each wine, because they were all so different. So different and so delicious. The Brown Brothers wine was fruity and flowery, the Schubert was so thick and glossy, Margrain was sticky and luscious, and Ata Rangi was sweet and flavourful. We matched each wine with a dessert, but in no particular order. We just each took a turn grabbing a wine out of the fridge.

The desserts were such a mixture, and again so delicious.

We had a banana cake with white chocolate icing.

I made a chocolate mousse cake. The recipe is here. It was so super easy to make, and was the texture of a brownie on the outside, and an almost-gooey mousse on the inside. Delicious.

Another friend made the most adorable chocolate mousse cups. They were a bit-sized morsel, and packed an amazing chocolate punch. She made them from scratch, which I think was so very clever!

I also made a cheese platter. Turns out that the salty cheese and crackers were a welcome relief from the massive sugar hit of the desserts.

We had a chocolate chip biscuit pudding. If you have not had this before, you have to try it! Take Griffins chocolate chip biscuits and dunk them really quickly in either sherry or orange juice (or both!) and sandwich them together with cream. This dessert is best if left for a few hours so the biscuits become soggy. You have to try this to understand how delicious it is. It's seriously so good!

Finally, I experimented with an ice cream cake. I have never made one before, but wanted to give it a go. I decided on rocky road ice cream cake. I made a layer of chocolate cake for the base, and took a tub of vanilla ice cream. I split it in half and to half I added chopped chocolate and peanuts. To the other half I added chopped marshmallows and cherries. I put a layer of chocolate ganache in between each layer of ice cream - in hindsight this didn't work as well as I had hoped. It went very hard, so made cutting the cake quite difficult.

I made the cake, layer by layer, in my springform cake tin. This made it easy to make it even, and also made it easy to remove. After I added each layer, I popped it back in the freezer before adding the next layer.

I was pretty please with how it turned out, but there was way too much of it!

All up, we had a fabulously fun sugar-filled dessert party. I recommend it to anyone!