Any chef will tell you that canapés are harder to make than normal-sized food. They are small and tricky. The effort is inverse to the time you take to eat them. Gone in a mouthful, but can take hours to make.
I had a recent commission (only two weeks in advance) to make canapés for the launch of the Diablo IV video game. I’m not a gamer myself, unless you count Wordle or Candy Crush. I looked at all the trailers for the game, and the Wiki page. The vibe is horror, goth, magic, hell, and horns. The main character, Lilith, has rams horns to frame her beautiful face.
When I conceive of dishes, I use my vast knowledge of ingredients. I’m an ingredients freak, always collecting new ideas from around the world. They wanted four canapés, including a vegan one and a dessert. I came up with:
Bat nuts, a Chinatown ingredient I’d once seen. They are small water chestnuts that look like black bats.
Pentagram rice crackers.
Vegan cheese skulls with diablo peppers.
Bloody Mary jellies (in communion cups) with a ram’s head ‘host’ on skewers.
Quail egg veiny eyeballs.
Cream horns.
I also ordered stag’s head and sword cocktail sticks and sprayed them black. I dyed the wooden skewers a bloody red.
Trouble is the Bat Nuts are very seasonal, available only in the autumn.
I tested the rice cracker recipe multiple times and wasn’t that happy with it, whether baked or fried. I even made the pentagram moulds from terracotta clay. Eventually I used Vietnamese black sesame rice crackers which I fried and broke into ‘horardric’ shards, seasoning with seaweed salt.
The quail egg eyeballs worked well. I hard-boiled them then after rinsing in cold water I cracked the shells and marinated them in red food colouring. Once you peel off the shell, the red ‘veins’ marbling the eggs were effective.
I tested the cream horns. Using strips of puff pastry, I wound them around the cream horn moulds (pretty cheap, 30 for less than £10) so that the horns would be ridged. I dyed the puff pastry with brown food colouring, dipped the ends in red chocolate and filled them with raspberry and Sorrento lemon cream.
The Bat Nuts were replaced with another weird ingredient: goose neck barnacles or percebes. These are considered a delicacy in France, Spain and Portugal. I saw one in a tapas bar near Jerez de la Frontera – the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen, like a tiny dinosaur’s foot. They are dangerous to collect as people die climbing up cliffs while foraging. They are also very expensive. I imported three kilos from France.
In a Chinese supermarket, I found liquorice watermelon seeds that looked suitably goth, and spicy seaweed.
Everything took hours to make. For the skulls I found a great silicone mould, and used Violife Epic ‘cheddar’, melted with some oat milk. But it was difficult to fill the moulds via the small hole at the back. It took me two days to make 40. However they tasted delicious, a bit like Dairylea processed cheese. The tiny pickled diablo red pepper were a spicy surprise in the middle.
A great resource for canapé supplies is Fine Foods, where you can get small black cornets. I filled them with blue cheese and topped them with an eyeball quail egg. I made a pupil using a black olive (bloody fiddly).
The cream horns took hours to make and bake. But the worst prep was the goose neck barnacles. They arrived stuck to rocks. I got my chef friend James Benson to prep them. I was too freaked out. They have to be removed from the rocks, separated from each other and the sand washed out. Usually you would remove the weird reptilian foot but I decided to retain it for the full horror aspect. Then they must be blanched for 45 seconds and the thick brown skin removed from the ‘neck’, which looks a bit like a penis. I would have to explain to people how to eat them. These would have to be heated up at the venue.
The venue in Soho was a small pop-up place with no kitchen, one small fridge and no room to prep. The thing about filled canapés is they go soggy if you fill them too far in advance. It was a warm evening so the jellies would only last five or ten minutes before collapsing.
The venue, a chocolate shop called Lilith & Co, had been redecorated in dark colours for the launch party. Made by celebrated chocolatier, Sarah Harding life-size white chocolate skulls, swords and weapons were in glass cases. A giant demonic head turned out to be made of milk chocolate, and a huge horizontal figure with its guts spilling out was also chocolate. They looked so realistic.
A woman stood there with two wolves on a lead. People got selfies with them.
You had to go through a confessional booth to get to the back. This caused problems when taking out the trays of canapés, it was pitch-black, with lots of steps and a narrow opening. I could hardly fit the trays through.
Past the booth, two monks in brown habits sat in a chapel filled with incense and candles.
Two guys made drinks: lurid bloody concoctions in plastic IV bags; syringes with ‘maggots pus’ that you inject into your mouth.
Many of the guests were dressed up, with full make-up, contact lenses and theatrical clothes.
Very few would try the goose neck barnacles, which I served with a garlic butter dip. People were quite nervous of the food, in fact.
I love doing themed and propped events where I have to use my imagination. This was hard work but a really fun job.
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