Occasional cooks: Pavlova, Hosting Tips & Ice Cream Pudding

Here is your weekly thread to talk anything and everything food. 

Share what you're cooking this week, ask for tips or recipes for a dish, tell us about your meals out.

Via Good Food

Yeah, I'm still talking about Christmas food!

Pavlova! It's a summer staple here, although I've only made it once. Never-the-less, I'm going to keep pushing it until someone reports making one.

Via Good Food

Here's a bunch of good tips for hosting Christmas.

If you've been following along with my Christmas planning, here's where things stand.

Via Good Food

For my dessert, I mentioned I was having trouble finding the freeze-dried raspberries and edible rose petals that my recipe (an ice-cream pudding) called for. Well, with a bit of experimentation, I've come up with a pretty good alternative, which was a little painstaking to do, but hopefully will come out great.

I'm gradually making my ice-cream pudding over this week, one layer at a time.

For the outside shell, first I crushed some plain chocolate biscuits and mixed them with melted butter, then pressed this in a thin layer over the inside of my mould (like a cheese-cake base). 

Then, I mixed melted chocolate with a little melted coconut oil and applied a thin layer on top of the biscuit layer.

Once filled with ice-cream, this should hold together solidly, but also should slide out of the mould, with a little bit of hot water on the outside, then crack delightfully when cut into! 

Next steps are to create a new layer each night - first chocolate ice-cream with some chopped chocolate and almonds, then vanilla with nougat, then strawberry with some frozen berries.

I am being very optimistic about this - it is going to work, and to look spectacular!

Via Great British Chefs

And I bought a piece of beef rump cap for the main meal - just need to determine the cooking time. This page suggests fifteen minutes in a pan to render the fat, then just ten minutes in the oven, but this recipe from the same site says 45 minutes in the oven!

I'll be marinading the meat, so don't want to render it on the stove-top, but maybe fifteen minutes fat-side down in a pre-heated dish, then flip it?

It's not a huge, thick cut, so that may well be more than adequate, but if anyone has better advice, please weigh in in the comments.