A delicious festive dessert 23 Dec

Steven Bennett is head chef at the Comfy Duck and recently cooked up a storm in the Lincolnshire Kitchen at our annual Lincolnshire Food and Gift Fair.

"We regularly include a pana cotta on our dessert menu and give it a twist by using a seasonal ingredient that ramps up the flavour and adds textures to this delicious creamy dessert. It’s super simple to make and can be flavoured to suit all tastes. We often make different variations using unrefined sugars for a healthier option and use honey, maple syrup or even coconut sugar and raw chocolate to alter the flavours and texture slightly. We make ours using the best local cream and milk giving it a luxurious silky texture. A tip if you’re cooking at home, is to make sure you don’t overload on the gelatine as you’ll end up with something that’s rubbery and unpalatable.

This recipe isn’t one we’ve served in the kitchen, but I regularly serve at dinner parties, the pomegranate helps to cut through the sugary vanilla cream and is an ingredient that’s used in a lot of wintery dishes."

You'll need

250ml cream
85ml milk
1 ¼½3 tbsp condensed milk
1pint pomegranate juice
3 tbsp Lincolnshire honey
1 pomegranate

What to do

Boil the cream, milk, condensed milk and vanilla in a heavy based sauce pan. In a separate bowl soak the gelatine in water until it’s a jelly-like consistency. Once the cream mixture has come to the boil, remove from the heat before removing the gelatine from the water, squeezing out any excess and whisking into the cream mixture and pouring straight into 4 serving glasses and placing into the fridge (5-6 hours)

Whilst the pana cotta’s are in the fridge, place the pomegranate juice and honey into a sauce pan, bring to the boil and reduce the heat, simmering this delicious juicy topping until it’s a quarter of its original volume, making a syrup like consistency. Leave to cool until you’re ready to serve.

To serve, drizzle over the delicious sweet pomegranate syrup over each of the pana cotta’s and sprinkle over the jewel like ruby coloured sacs of pomegranate seeds before diving straight in and enjoying this creamy dessert.