SMARTIES LASAGNE
Hello! Did you have a Christmas? Excellent.
The festive season is, of course, infamous for overindulgence and an inevitable temporary* weight gain. So before it's all over for another 359 days (2019 isn't a leap year - I checked), why not have one last blow out? After all it's a time for sharing, and no one said the things in question to be shared couldn't be type 2 diabetes and hypertension.
*I say temporary, but personally I'm backdating now to around the turn of the millennium.
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| Well at least the raspberries are healthy. Shame they're about to be immersed in sugar and an array of saturated fats. |
Anyway, brace yourself for the sugar rush/heart attack (delete as applicable depending on your overall health, and no I'm probably not even joking) and off we go!
Ingredients:
Proper cooking regrettably means more ingredients, so this week if you want to cook along with Nancy (and wow, that's a both dated and niche pun) you'll need to steal these out of the trolleys of the numerous maniacs who were in Tesco stocking up on everything not nailed down as if the shops were going to be shut for the next fortnight. Idiots.
400g caster sugar
100ml water
125g raspberries
300ml double cream
100g butter
250g marscapone
250g ricotta
A lime
4 tubes of smarties
A box of chocolate shreddies (or mini shredded wheat if you really hate yourself and/or whoever you're serving this to)
Some vanilla essence
A white and milk chocolate snowman you got from Santa and didn't want (or, I suppose, just some chocolate)
You'll also want a lot of bowls, some sort of square dish (as in a ceramic baking dish, not a domestic satellite receiver left over from the ill-fated BSB era), and a couple of measuring jugs.
Method:
First off, we're making some raspberry caramel. You could try scooping out the innards of any leftover Quality Street, but bear in mind the level of quality in question when we're talking about Quality Street is this: very low. So assuming you go the preferable home-made route, lob your raspers in a sieve and smoosh them through until you get some puree in the measuring jug below (oh, and don't forget to put a jug below, or it'll look like someone's nicked an artery on your worktop) and a load of seeds left in the sieve.
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| Just to note, my daughter helped me and that's her mitt holding the spoon - I don't have a tiny right hand instead of a left hand (and besides, purple nail varnish really isn't my colour). |
You then want to add enough double cream to bring the amount of seed-free goop up to about 140ml. Bonus points for making it look pretty while you do so (see below).
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| If I could animate this I reckon I'd have a passable stab at getting commissioned to do the next title sequence for Doctor Who. |
Stir all that up so it goes the same colour as that horrendous shade of pink they sell Fiat 500s in to morons who don't have any consideration of the resale value, and set it to one side. Now, it's time for the best sort of fun - the type that can result in third degree burns! Lob 300g of sugar and 75ml of the water into a pan, and heat gently. You can stir it at first to make sure all the sugar is mixed in, but don't even THINK about stirring it after that. Oh OK, you can think about it, but don't actually do it or it'll result in what's known as 'shite caramel', a.k.a. a big, crystallised lump.
Assuming you resist stirring, after about 5 mins your sugar/water mix will go clear/pale yellow and look like this (regrettably, a bit like hot wee):
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| At this stage, you can dip a pastry brush into the rest of the water and use it to shove any forming crystals back down into the scalding goo. Or, you can do what I did and push too far down, encasing the brush in molten sugar which then went rock hard when dipped back in the cold water, leaving me with essentially a tiny, crystal-topped walking cane. |
After about 5 mins it'll go much darker brown (i.e. hot wee the night after you've had far too much to drink - so as it's New Year's Eve at time of writing if you're off on the lash tonight tomorrow's ablutions may be a handy guide!). Then, about 3 mins after that take it off the heat and add your 100g of butter - ideally chopped up and not cold - and the raspberry/cream mix. Things might get a bit lively when you do this, so watch out for splashes of hot sugar as it'll still be about the temperature of the Earth's core at this point. Then it's back on the heat to mix everything in. When it starts boiling again, keep stirring constantly for another couple of minutes then take it off and put it in a bowl, jar or bucket (I'm not a fussy man) to cool.
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| Remember the bit when you weren't allowed to stir? This isn't that bit. Stir! Stir like the wind! Or at least like a gentle gust. |
Once in the bowl, give it a stir every 5 mins or so just to stop any crystallisation. Don't taste it though - it's still bloody hot and absolutely will burn your tongue in exactly the way you'd expect to happen if you're really stupid and attempt to taste it at this point even after blowing on the spoon a lot. Ahem.
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| Given how this looks, if you want to make this more like one of my 'deliberately horrible' recipes you could probably swap this out for a bowl of thick gravy, or dilute Bovril. 2 for the price of 1! |
At this point I should be telling you to make your cheesecake mix, but telling is literally what I'm going to have to do as I thought I took a photo of it but apparently didn't. Instead, I obviously got distracted and took a photo of my cat Simi drinking from the tap, so here's that instead:
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| We bought her a fancy cat drinking fountain a while back. Does she use that? Does she fuck. |
Anyway, put your 2 cheeses and the remaining 100g of sugar in a bowl and mix, then add the double cream and a decent slug of the lime juice and a teeny teeny bit of the vanilla essence (seriously, don't add a lot or it'll be sweeeeeeeeeeeeet), and crack out the electric whisk unless you fancy half an hour of cramp-inducing gyratory shenanigans. Once it's all thickened up, it's assembly time!
Your first job is to layer 2 tubes-worth of smarties in the bottom of a medium-sized dish.
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| You could use M&Ms, but given they taste shit I'd probably not. |
Then, cover these in the raspberry caramel - you don't want loads and loads or it'll be 'well claggy' - about enough to mostly immerse a smartie.
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| This, obviously, is your mince layer. I mean, it's more or less indistinguishable from the picture on a jar of Dolmio, really. |
After that, you need your 'pasta sheet' - and what could be more pasta like than a bunch of tiny brown waffle shapes? Probably many things, so in hindsight don't answer that.
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| Worst game of Tetris ever. |
Keep tiling away until your brown layer is covered, then spoon on a layer of cheesecake and smear it to the edges, being careful not to disturb the layers beneath.
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| I have to admit, I thought this bit would be a disaster and it'd all mix up horribly, but it actually worked! |
Then just lather, rinse and repeat - another layer of smarties & caramel, a layer of shreddies, and a final layer of cheesecake. And to top it all off, why not add some black pepper and grated cheese? I'll tell you why - it'd be awful. Instead, try some white chocolate and a bit of chocolate chocolate. Then it's into the fridge to firm up nice! The lasagne that is, not you. If you 'firm up nice' when in a fridge you're probably better off seeing some sort of therapist.
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| Nothing says 'Christmas treat' like an edible snowman who appears to have chronic rhinitis! Ho ho...oh. |
The results:
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| I actually managed to get it out with visible layers! |
Blimey. Well there are 2 surprising things here: quite how sweet it all is, and how filling shreddies in cheesecake are. For the latter that's probably why they don't have that as a serving suggestion on the box (that, and probably some sort of sop to healthy eating). For the former, it's a proper sweet tooth recipe and no mistaking - while delicious, I had to go for a walk afterwards to shift the genuine sugar buzz I had, and the last time I gave myself one of those was when I drank a coffee with 9 sugars in it for a bet. If I did this again - and I genuinely might - I reckon I'd leave out the vanilla altogether in the cheesecake and maybe have some sort of raspberry sauce as well. And also a large cup of tea to wash it down (not with 9 sugars in, either).
One thing I'd definitely suggest: don't eat it after a savoury lasagne, unless you live in a house with heavily reinforced floors. Which in that sense makes it an entirely legitimate Italian dish - after all, the most famous city in Italy is Rome, and they used to build everything there out of massive slabs of stone. Clearly, they knew this was coming!
Anyway, HAPPY NEW YEAR? YES.
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