Dinner for twenty

Feeding the masses

One seriously huge shepherds pie

A few weeks back I hosted a bonfire night dinner for friends which was a great success and needing to cook for twelve I made a huge amount of cassoulet to keep the hordes happy (see Sausage Cassoulet). Well at the weekend my in-laws hosted a party for twenty, and found themselves in the same predicament of thinking up a crowd pleaser that didn’t mean too much time stuck in the kitchen so they could entertain their guests. They decided to ‘do a Jeffrey Archer’ and have a shepherds pie and champagne evening, if I were to be a pedant I would point out that it was in fact cottage pie and sparkling white, but nobody likes a pedant.

Being known as the family 'foodie' I was tasked with chopping enough carrots and swede to feed the masses. I set to work, diligently chopping up the mountain of veggies, very neatly indeed I might add, only to have father-in-law point out ‘well, you’re hardly as fast as Jamie Oliver are you?’. I don’t know, do a man a favour! - and I got a rather sore blister on my index finger from all that chopping.

Tiramisu

My other task (apart from making sure everyone’s glasses were kept topped up) was to make a tiramisu for dessert. A nice simple recipe of sponge fingers dipped in coffee and Kahlua (which I couldn’t resist adding a splash of to my morning coffee) layered with a creamy mascarponey layer of decadence.

Genius coffee cooling!

Seeing how I had originally only come downstairs in the hunt for coffee and breakfast I wanted to make the dessert quickly, however the scalding hot coffee had other ideas. It simply refused to cool down, but lovely fiancé then proved most useful by running off with my bowl of coffee to return with it surrounded by snow from the garden. Silly though it looked, it most certainly worked!