A posset is thickened cream – thought to come from an old English verb for a baby regurgitating milk. Lovely! It started as a drink where it was mixed with alcohol and spices – an early version of something like Bailey’s Irish Cream. It goes really nicely with some biscuits, I’ve chosen to pair it with shortbread as Burns Night is coming up and I think of shprtbread as Scottish.
You’ll need a square tin about 21cm across to make this about 1cm thick
Method
Make the posset first because it has to set in the fridge.
Put the cream and sugar in a cold pan and heat it fairly gently stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Then turn the heat up a bit but keep stirring – you want to get to simmering point, but you don’t want it to catch.
Simmer gently for about a minute then take it off the heat.
Stir in the lemon juice and zest and leave to cool slightly. Pour into little cups or bowls, cover with clingfilm and refrigerate. It takes about 3 hours.
For the shortbread, mix the butter and flour together and rub like you would to make a crumble. When everything is combined rub in the sugar and the ground rice.
You’ll have a fairly dry but very buttery mixture. Mix the almonds through.
Press it into the tin so it’s fairly compact and bake for about 30 minutes at 160.
Let it cool in the tin. While it’s warm it’s a good idea to run a knife through it to make whatever shapes you want – rectangles or triangles then when it cools it will be easy to cut up
Ingredients
Posset (for 4 people):- 400ml double cream
- 130g golden caster sugar
- Zest and juice of 2 lemons
- 150g plain flour
- 150g diced cold butter (salted)
- 80g golden caster sugar
- 50g ground rice (or more flour if you don’t have it).
- 80g flaked almonds
