11 December 2011

Glögg Party

December is the time of parties in Sweden - everyone does "Julbord" and "Glöggfest", so why should I be different?

So I sent out an invite to my dear friends and started planning on what to do.

Needless to say, I have been busy at work and had absolutely no inspiration whatsoever as to gingerbread houses and so did not do anything for the competition held every year by the Architecture Museum. Such a pity, this year the theme was actually a good one, "Pride and Prejudice".

But flicking through my notebook, I came across a recipe I must have found last year. For Mulled Wine with chocolate and chilli. Unfortunately I had not written down where I saw it, so I can't provide the source, sorry.

Ingredients
750 ml red wine
1 10 cm stick of cinnamon
1 large dried chilli
1 tsp ground allspice
5 whole cloves
100 g granulated sugar
50 g finely ground cocoa powder

Method
  1. Heat up the wine with all the spices on low heat and allow the flavours to develop.

  2. Add the sugar and let it dissolve.

  3. Finally stir in the cocoa.

  4. Sieve away all spices before serving


Unfortunately I had written down the recipe in Swedish and I don't know if it was my translation sloppiness, or just not thinking things through properly, but I interpreted the cocoa part as chocolate. This resulted in me grating finely 50 g of 86% dark chocolate, which took a while, as I didn't want to get it melting on my hands or everywhere in the kitchen for that matter. It also meant that it didn't dissolve properly in the mulled wine and I ended up with some sort of sludge, which I personally quite liked, but which no one else seemed to enjoy as much.

Bip bought a ready made version of this and said it had cocoa powder in it and had tasted very nice. So this recipe is one where I need to keep working on.

Besides, the chilli was barely noticeable, even if I used one of the ones we grow in our kitchen, which are very hot.

Just to be on the safe side, I also made traditional mulled wine, with a packet of spices. That was a lot more popular.

No photos unfortunately, I did take some, but they didn't look pretty at all.

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