Pandan Panna Cotta with Mango Puree

At the end of last month, I went into hospital to have surgery on my foot. With a cast around my right leg from the knee down, I was put on strict orders to rest for the next six to seven weeks.

Cooking counts as rest, right?

For the first week, I lay in bed and watched Top Chef and played some video games but the urge to create things was quite high so naturally, I decided to listen to those urges. I didn't feel up to taking on the Daring Bakers/Cooks challenges for this month as that would require me to ask someone to help me purchase ingredients, so I decided to just play with some flavours on my own and make a panna cotta.

Mangoes are now coming in and they're as tasty as ever so who could resist making a slightly more asian inspired green panna cotta?

Photography is courtesy of a good friend of mine and you can see much more of his work right here.

So without much further ado, have the recipe and off you go. I hope you all enjoy.

Makes about 15 little jars of panna cotta.

Ingredients:
1L Pouring Cream (it will say 35% fat content on the bottle)
100g Sugar
2 tsp pandan essence (find this at any asian grocery store)
12 Gelatin leaves
1L cold water
2 mangoes

Method:
1. Soak the gelatin leaves in the cold water for about ten minutes. When done, squeeze gently to remove any excess water and put into a mixing bowl. While you're waiting for the soak, you can complete the rest of the cream steps.

2.  Place the cream and sugar into a pot and stir over a very low heat until the sugar has melted. In this step bring up the heat very gently until it's lukewarm. When I took the pot off the stove, I was able to hold the pot in my hands without any worries.

3. Pour pandan essence into the cream mixture and stir in a little. Don't need to be thorough here, there is much more stirring to be done.

4. Pour the cream mixture over the gelatin leaves and start stirring. Make sure all of the gelatin leaves dissolve and incorporate here. If you're finding it a bit difficult, put it back onto the stove on a very low heat, you don't want the cream to cook in any way so be very careful with the heat.

5. When that has all been mixed in, I strained the mixture into another bowl just to make sure all the gelatin was fully dissolved.

6. Spoon mixture out into individual jars and put in frige to set for a few hours or overnight.

7. Dice up the two mangoes and puree half of it. I also added two tablespoons (roughly) of cream in with the mangoes as I pureed it. This removed a little bit of the tartness of the mango but you can skip that if you want, a little tart flavour would compliment the sweet panna cotta very well if that's a flavour you enjoy.

8. Combine the mango with the puree and spoon over the set panna cotta.