Clotted Cream

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In our past travels, we spent quite a bit of time in the UK. We quickly learned to love the British countryside, the pubs, the cricket matches (along with a few pints) and of course afternoon tea. It is the latter that introduced our family to a real English culinary delicacy: clotted cream. Clotted cream is a "must" for scones and tea and yet is not readily available in North America.

This week, we decided to make our own...and it's the easiest thing to do (although a bit expensive when all things are considered).

Clotted Cream....where cream meets butter.

To start, we used 35% whipping cream which is readily commercially available here. It is really one of the highest fat content cream we could get our hands on.

We simply poured the cream into a shallow container so that we had as much surface area as possible and no more than 1 inch of cream in the container.

Pouring cream into a shallow container.

There is actually few steps to the recipe....you simply put this container into an oven (at 180 F) overnight. In our case, we let it sit in the oven overnight for 12 hours.

The result is a buttery crust that will form on the cream. At this point, you know things are done.

A buttery crust is formed after 12 hours.

All you need to do now is refrigerate the cream. It will solidify and then it is just a matter of scooping it all up. With our 35% cream, we still had some liquid left over.

Of course, having produced this clotted cream we had to make some of our very own Tea Room Raspberry Scones.

Clotted cream and Raspberry Scones....all that is missing is our farm's jam

Having clotted cream and scones is a natural....however, we wanted to take this a bit further and make something really special: a traditional Cornish Clotted Cream fudge with a twist: using our own farm Maple syrup (since we're already getting ready to tap our trees, hopefully next month).

To make this fudge, we simply combined:

225 g of our clotted cream
100 g of our Maple syrup
275 g of sugar
1 tsp of vanilla extract

Fudge ingredients are all combined in a saucepan.

All ingredients are combined in a saucepan and heated to a boil. At this point, a candy thermometer is essential. The idea is to bring the solution to 116 C.

Getting close to the magic 116 C

Once the desired temperature is achieved, the hard part begins. As the liquid fudge hardens, we continuously whisk away. We do this until almost impossible but to the point where we can still spread the fudge into a baking pan, lined with parchment paper.

Whisking the fudge as it cools

As the fudge solidifies it is just about ready to be transferred....

Spreading the fudge on parchment paper

Once it cools, the result is simply amazing.

We are not big fans of traditional fudge....it is usually much too sweet for our liking. This fudge however is just amazing. It does not taste as sweet as you would expect. On the other hand, it is incredibly creamy and simply melts in your mouth.

Cornish style Maple clotted cream fudge...well worth the effort

Finally, elsewhere on the farm, we are rapidly anticipating the coming Spring. Along with our growing waist lines :), we are also suffering from "cabin fever". The extreme cold and snow have prevented us from doing much on the land. We've even neglected our dome.

We decided to look into it this week, knowing that the temperatures in this greenhouse have gone to 0.

Our growing dome is looking like an igloo

Running the dome "off grid", we've now concluded that temperatures will always likely reach around 0 C in the Winter. This means that many crops will simply not survive. Our tomato plants for example are all  dead. There are a few things however that do seem to survive. In particular, cold hardy crops like Kale are still doing well.

In the Growing Dome, the Kale is still "alive"