Cheryl Marie Cordeiro

Cherry Heering flavoured Cherry Chocolate ice-cream served with a few drops of Kirsberry and one of our own dark cherries, straight form the tree.
Photo © J E Nilsson for CMC 2010

Having concentrated all my efforts on work during the week, come weekend, all I like to do is indulge in some food fantasies turned reality. This weekend’s indulgence project is homemade cherry chocolate ice-cream with skuggmoreller cherries from our garden and a touch of Cherry Heering.

Cherry Heering is a Danish cherry liqueur invented in the late 1700s or the early 1800s. What I appreciate about this liqueur is its rich flavour of black cherries that pours out in a luscious deep red colour into the glass. It isn’t overly sweet, so you can go ahead and add sugar to the ice-cream base when making this cherry chocolate ice-cream at home.

When last we visited one of the Swedish System Bolaget wine and spirits liquor stores it appeared as if Cherry Heering, which also happens to be a key ingredient in the Singapore Sling, will no longer be available in Sweden!

I believe for ice-cream purposes, most anything with a good dark cherry flavour could be used as a substitute. There is another Danish classic desert wine called Kirsberry that I’m pouring a few drops of, over the ice cream in the picture above, that might do just fine. In that case however I am more concerned about our Singapore Slings.
Continue reading “Cherry Chocolate ice-cream with Cherry Heering” →

English Morello Cherries is a fantastic cherry for pie making and cooking. This dark red to nearly black fruit can be used when making liqueurs and brandies, and its tart, dark juice lends itself to be made into a most fantastic syrup!
Photo: JE Nilsson for CMC © 2010

Admittedly early August can’t really be called autumn, not even in Sweden, in northern Europe. But still, at this time of the year it is harvest time and all nice things come in such abundances it is difficult to find ways of taking care of it all.

A cherry tree in the garden offered an easy enough target for our efforts and for the first time in many years, the berries made it all the way into the kitchen without being all eaten by the pickers straight from the branches.

Making home made syrup was highest on the wishing list about these strong flavored cherries whose name is skuggmoreller in Swedish.
Continue reading “The pleasures of autumn harvest” →

Homemade Rum Raisin ice-cream.
Photo © J E Nilsson and C M Cordeiro-Nilsson for CMC 2010

Clearly you’ve never been to Singapore.

~ Captain Jack Sparrow,
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).

While rummingly proud that Singapore was once a notorious pirate cove that helped wreck havoc on sea trade, that quote is sadly enough inaccurate, since Singapore would not have been founded for more than a century after the period in which the movie was set.

Still, rum and raisin is indeed a fantasy encouraging concept, with rum itself hailing from the Caribbean, where it was just as popular with the British Royal Navy after their colonization of Jamaica during the 1600s, as with the English privateers (some turned bucaneers / pirates) that traded (stole) it as a popular commodity. Rum soon became a favourite drink of seamen, Naval officers and pirates alike, straight or in a variation of rum made cocktails. The trade of commodity calls to mind Singapore as a free port of trade since the early 1800s, where therein intertwine the stories of rum, pirates and the continuing evolution of global trade.

Rum Raisin ice-cream, coffee, a newspaper – for that late afternoon wind down.

My first taste of Rum Raisin ice-cream was when growing up in Singapore, on one of the occasions visiting the American ice-cream parlour chain, Baskin Robbins 31 during the 1980s. Together with Rum Raisin ice-cream, I also recall a certain bubble gum ice-cream, the latter being a strange combination of ice-cream and gum so that that you can’t entirely swallow what you ate. But as a kid, you enjoyed almost all food tasting adventures, especially the sweeter ones, thinking little of the inconvenience of having to chew gum and swallow ice-cream at the same time!
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Apple banana crumble served with vanilla sauce.
Photo © J E Nilsson and C M Cordeiro-Nilsson for CMC 2010

With very hot weather in Sweden comes tropical rainstorms that makes headlines in the news, a raging wind and a pouring of warm luscious drops of water from the skies with which the Swedish westcoast borders on inability to cope. But that’s Sweden.

Being one of the few individuals now living here to have grown up in tropical rainstorms, I revel in such weather and thought this sticky, molten fruit dessert served with a thick vanilla cream sauce would put everyone at home back in their comfort zone again.

This apple and banana crumble or cobble, that had found its way both to Singapore and Sweden, has its roots in cottage country Britain, during WWII actually when pastry rations were restricted to make proper pies. Actually the word ‘cobble’ would be right at home in Sweden too in describing this dessert since it calls to mind the narrow cobblestoned pavements that once was carriageway for horses of both Gothenburg’s and Stockholm’s Gamlestan / Gamla Stan.

Apples and bananas, chopped, drizzled with dark syrup.

I started out making this dessert back in secondary school in my teens, with only flour and butter for the crumble on top, but these days, I make them with rolled oats in combination with flour and butter on top because the resulting texture of crisp, baked to a deep golden brown coupled with the smooth melt of warm caramelized fruit on the tongue eludes sensory description.
Continue reading “Apple banana crumble – a warm dessert for a cold day” →