Way Overdue Birthday Dinner

In January a good friend of mine, Nilam, celebrated her birthday. My gift to her was a lovely sit down dinner for her and her boyfriend Stephen. Unfortunately with our busy schedules it was almost impossible to pin down a date that worked for us...until last Saturday, 25 April. Yes, it may have been 3months overdue...but we had a lot of fun and I certainly enjoyed preparing the meal. I'll be posting up the recipes of most of what I made over the course of this week...but this post will mainly be an overview of the dinner with one recipe for a drink.

For the cocktail of the night I decided to make an original Alex concoction. A ginger blackcurrant vodka spritzer. I made a simple syrup by heating equal parts of sugar and water with roughly chopped pieces of ginger. Once the sugar melted I let the syrup simmer for a while and cool overnight with the ginger pieces. To assemble the drink I poured a shot of blackcurrant vodka into a glass with 1tablespoon of the syrup (this amount depends on how sweet you like your drink)...I then topped it off with spritzer water and dropped in 2 blackcurrant gummies for presentation and also as a fun thing to chew on once the drink is done.

As a starter I made a little phyllo dough stack topped with smoked salmon...fresh cream and dill...I served a balsamic mushroom salad on the side.

Smoked salmon...cream...and phyllo dough work very well together. I might even play around with this and in the future make little phyllo wonton parcels.

The main dish was a 40 garlic clove braised chicken with a white wine sauce and my special Quinoa Pilaf on the side with fresh figs.

It was my first time making this chicken dish and I must say it was very tasty...the chicken was slightly overcooked simply because I chose to work with fillet pieces rather than full chicken breasts...next time I won't cook it as long....but it's definitely a recipe I'll use again.

And for the dessert I made individual servings of a rich chocolate pannacotta with caramelised bananas...

This was as thick and rich as a ganache ...very creamy and chocolatey. I purposely made the rest of the dinner quite light and healthy because I knew that this dessert would be extremely sinful.

All in all the night was a success and I certainly hope Nilam enjoyed her overdue birthday dinner!