Addleston cider

This is a cheese course which was served during one of our first Tuesday wine dinners. We mixed iot up a bit this month and used local beers, ciders, sparkling wines and honeymead (which i will get my hands on soon as i have a pork dish marinated in honeymead on my mind). the cheese featured here is called Waterloo which is an unpasteurised cows milk cheese and is made by Anne Wigmore at her farm in Risely, near Reading.
The cheese is sitting on freshly baked gingerbread which is cooked to more of a sticky cake texture. The jelly is made with Addlestone cider. the cider is from Somerset and has a cloudy appearence due to is not being filtered. The cider is quite sweetwith sour notes.
This was nice to eat, and made me think about when i was young, as i have not really had gingerbread for years.

Here is the recipe:

1 kg honey

560g milk

1 lemon, zested

1 orange, zested

40g baking powder

480g plain flour

480g rye flour

60g ginger

15g nutmeg, freshly grated

30g star anise

200g caster sugar

12 eggs

METHOD

Gently warm the milk, honey and zests, just enough to melt the honey.

Sieve all the dry ingredients except the sugar into a large bowl.

Whisk the sugar and eggs in a food mixer until they reach a light and fluffy sabayon; this will take about 20 minutes.

Mix the milk and flour together to form a smooth paste, then fold in the sabayon. Don't be too gentle with the sabayon, as the end product doesn't want to be too light.

Split the mixture between 6 lined square tins about 20cm x 20cm and bake at 120C for 4 hours until a deep golden brown. The longer you leave them in the oven at this stage, the easier they will be to slice.

Remove from the tins and allow to go almost cold, then peel off the baking parchment.