Il Diplomatico and Some Christmas Sweets

As ever I have been a little slow in posting pictures of my latest bakes, therefore my first blog post of 2012 features our Christmas day dessert. We are not fans of Christmas pudding in our house, so I plumped for one of my husband’s favourites instead. Il Diplomatico is something his mother makes and has always been popular with the family. The rich chocolate mousse is surrounded by coffee and rum soaked Madeira cake, then the whole thing is smothered in whipped cream. It is rich and delicious.

The recipe comes from my mother-in-law’s ‘Classic Italian Cookbook’ by Marcella Hazan. The accompanying blurb states that the ‘marvellous thing about this dessert is that it requires no baking’. That of course is only true if you buy your Madeira cake from the supermarket. For the purposes of the blog, that would be cheating, so I turned to Nigella’s ‘How to be a Domestic Goddess’ for her Madeira cake recipe. Luckily the recipe made a little more than I needed, as Nigella’s Madeira cake is very tasty in its unadulterated form. You have to work quickly when dipping the cake slices in the coffee/rum mix, to avoid them going soggy and falling apart, but generally speaking, the recipe was not as fiddly as I had imagined. It is definitely one I will be returning to.

When I was younger I used to make marzipan fruits for my Dad at Christmas, and chocolate covered candied orange peel for Grandad. Neither are with us now, and whilst no-one else in the family misses the orange peel, most of us are partial to a bit of marzipan at Christmas, so that tradition has continued. This year I had some lovely French marzipan to play with and made these stripey sweets, edged in dark chocolate. I also melted down some dark chocolate and studded it with dried cranberries and pistachios, to make these pretty chunks of chocolate. The idea had been to bag these up as gifts for the family, but in the end only a few made it out of the door.