Nothing But Onions

There's a restaurant we sometimes go to - Los Pintores in Northampton - that has as one of its desserts "Chocolate and Chilli Cheesecake". Now this is just a fairly rich chocolate cheesecake with the addition of little pieces of chopped red chilli. The chillies aren't fiery hot, but they do add rather a tang and the whole thing is rather pleasant. The chillies aren't raw, and are sweet, so I speculated that they may have been candied in some way. A trawl through Google revealed a couple of mentions of restaurants serving dishes containing candied chillies, but not much else.

Well, candied orange peel isn't hard to make, and surely candied chillies can't be that much harder, so I thought I'd give it a go. I went to Waitrose and bought a pack of their Thai Chillies (a mixture of types and colours, mainly Birds Eye and Cayenne, I think).

The process was quite simple - I simply made a sugar syrup in a small saucepan, and simmered the chillies in it for about half an hour. at the end, I took the chillies out and left them to cool.

It wasn't really what I was hoping for - the chillies are still fiery hot (I guess the birds eye weren't really the right choice for this experiment) and the skins are very tough and leathery. I don't think the inside really got candied at all - I suspect the skins of the chillies acted as too much of a barrier to prevent the sugar syrup from soaking in. I'll certainly try it again, but I think next time I'll find some less hot chillies and probably slice them first so that the insides get exposed to the sugar syrup too.