Herb butter chicken and lemon syrup and ganache sponge cake

Chicken

I got a nice (expensive) organic chicken and made a nice herb butter from fresh basil, parsley and lemon zest to stuff under the skin (you use your fingers to open up a space at the neck end of the bird between the breast and the skin). Olive oil was rubbed into the skin with salt and pepper. Half and oinion went into the cavity and the rest was used as a bed for the chicken as it roasted for 2 hours (taking off the foil for the last 25 mins).

Once the chicken was done I removed it from the roasting tray and skimmed off some of the fat left in the tray, then put it back on the burner with a little chicken bouillon. I scraped the bottom of the tray with the spactula to tray and get all the nice crusty bits into the fray. Then I passed it through a sieve and returned it to the heat.

Cake

I still had some 72% cocoa chocolate left over from cheesecake weekend. So I decided to make a ganache, so to go with it I bought a cherry sponge loaf from the supermarket. I sliced the loaf in half, length ways, and layed it bottom to bottom. I used the juice from a lemon and a little water with golden caster suger (infused with the leftover vanilla pod [again see cheesecake recipe] to create the syrup. That was poured over the sponge.
In a bowl I placed the chocolate and a little cream to warm over boiling water (the water didn't touch the bowl). When they'd melted I stirred in a little butter and a little cocoa powder. I poured this over the cake a let a little drizzle over the side... very artistic I thought. It's at this point that I remembered I hadn't put any Courvoisier in either the syrup, ganache or on the sponge. D'oh!

Still it tasted OK ;-)