Plum & almond tart.

I know, I know... I've been pretty terrible at updating; I do apologise for that. However, in my 'absence' I have made a few things that will be making an appearance on the blog in due course.

To start, I have an adaptation of a recipe from Gregg Wallace, the jovial pudding-loving half of my favourite Masterchef UK judging duo. I found this recipe on BBC Good Food's website (one of my go-to sites for new recipes) and it seemed fairly straightforward.

The original recipe calls for peaches, but I couldn't find any good ones and so I decided to go with plums instead. It turned out alright and was well received by my test subjects, but I'm not entirely sure if perhaps I didn't slice them thinly enough or if plums are denser than peaches as I had a bit of a 'sinkage' issue when placing my plums on top of my almond filling.

Since I made this a couple of weeks ago when being attacked by a chest infection, I decided to be a little lazy and use the rather foolproof pate brisee recipe (see Blueberry Pie post) rather than making a more delicate pate sablee shortcrust pastry.

Anyway, here we go (and I also apologise for the minimal photos).

1 portion of pate brisee
2 eggs, beaten
140g ground almonds
100g caster sugar
140g butter
50g plain flour
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
4 plums, sliced

First, prepare your tart tin. I always grease my tin with a little butter and then place it in the freezer for about 15-30 minutes. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius (fan oven).

Once your tin has been prepared, line it with your thinly rolled out pate brisee. Line it with greaseproof paper or foil and weigh down the centre with baking beans (dried, uncooked rice or beans also work). Bake for 15 minutes then remove the foil/paper, brush the inside of the tart with an egg wash and bake for a further 15 minutes, until the pastry has begun to firm up to an almost biscuit-like, crisp texture.

While waiting for your pastry to cook, make the filling. Cream together your butter and sugar until the mixture has become fluffy and pale in colour. Beat in the eggs and your vanilla essence, then sift in your flour and fold in your ground almonds.

Spoon the mixture into your pastry case and arrange your plum slices in a pattern.

Return the tart to the oven for a further 30-40 minutes until golden and the almond filling has set and is fairly firm to the touch. The mixture shouldn't seem too wet, nor should it be too dry and hard- it should still have a little give.

Serve at room temperature or still warm with a dollop of creme fraiche or tangy Greek yoghurt (I definitely recommend the latter).

Guest-starring... Jaffa Cake Muffins.

So, I'm currently a little laid-up after an operation on my knees...so I've called upon the services of my dear boyfriend to provide me with a guest-post (read: he wanted to make muffins. I gave him a recipe. They turned out well. I preyed upon his love of Jaffa Cakes and muffins and bullied him from 10,000 kilometres away to give me a guest-post). Anyway, here we go!

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It’s a great honour to be invited to make a *guest post* on Alia’s food blog; the only logical next step is running a three Michelin-starred eatery in the Lake District, surely. 

Please be forewarned; I am not a very good cook. I’m not completely useless; if I had to sum up my culinary ability, it’d be “ham handed” (the joke is that Alia doesn’t eat ham DO YOU SEE). If Alia and I ever embark on a joint cooking project, I’ll usually be relegated to “De-shell these pistachios” or “Put this wine in this glass”; it’s humiliating, but ultimately it’s for the best. 

As such, I shall be presenting a recipe which has a very favourable risk-reward ratio. In other words, it’s foolproof (me being said fool). We’re making JAFFA CAKE MUFFINS HELL YEAH!

If you want to follow in my stumbling, incompetent footsteps, you’ll need the following:

·         125ml vegetable oil
·         Two eggs
·         Two 35g pots of chocolate mousse (I’m pretty confident that you could use chocolate custard instead, if that floats your boat)
·         250g of plain flour
·         Two teaspoons of baking powder
·         150g of caster sugar
·         75g of light brown sugar
·         One orange
·         JAFFA CAKES

                 Oh god, I should have emptied that grease tray before taking this photo. My grease is my shame.

Dump the “dry” ingredients (flour, both kinds of sugar and the baking powder) in a mixing bowl.

In a separate bowl, combine the eggs, oil and chocolate mousse.

                                                                           Appetising

Cut the orange in half and force-choke the juice out of that mofo.

                                                                          RAAAAARGH

Grate the skin of the orange to get your zest (previous, harsh words/beatings from Alia reminded me to STOP AT THE WHITE BIT), and add that to your bowl.

Now, attack it with a fork until it’s smooth, then pour the contents into your mixing bowl.

At this point, Alia would tell you to “fold” the wet ingredients into the dry ones. I’ll let you into a Kitchen Secret – I think that’s just a fancy way of saying “mix”. Together we will BREAK DOWN THE WALLS OF OPPRESSIVE COOKING JARGON, comrades.

Ok, now grab your jaffa cakes!

                                   PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE HALF-EATEN JAFFA CAKE BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Take your knife and let those tiny cakes Know True Suffering. It’s not exactly a precise science to work out how many jaffa cakes you’re going to want in your mixture as a whole (retrieve your jaws from the floor, dear readers), but I ended up using about seven. There was definitely room for more, though, so your mileage may vary. 

Anyway, get your jaffabits (patent pending) in your mixture, and baptise them in your Holy Batter (I don’t know; shut up).

From here, just spoon the mixture into muffin cases and whack them into your muffin tray. If you’re concerned that there isn’t enough sugar in this recipe (there is), feel free to sprinkle some light brown sugar on top. I won’t stop you, but your arteries might.

Bung it in the oven. At 200°C in a fan-assisted oven, they should take around twenty minutes. 

OMG THEY ROSE! YES WE CAN! YES WE CAN! Sure, one of them was clearly overfilled and spilled over the edge of the muffin tray, but rudimentary, delicious cosmetic surgery sorted it out.

So yeah, that’s it. Easy but rewarding stuff. The muffins were soft, with visible jaffabits inside; finding little bits of orange jelly inside brought tears of joy to my pathetic, engorged face. There’s obviously massive scope for varying this recipe, and with that in mind I’m currently drawing up a mental list of alternative fillings (early frontrunners: “Boost” bar, Jammy Dodgers, Malteasers, haggis).

If you’ve honestly learned something about baking from this post, consider me incredibly flattered. If you haven’t, congratulations: you’re a competent cook!

EPILOGUE: I’d totally forgotten that Jaffa Cake Muffins already exist!

Faced with almost certain copyright infringement (trust me, I’m a lawyer), I did what I would advise a client to do in the same circumstances: DESTROY THE EVIDENCE.

...No, not really – in actual fact I’d left the bowl on the hob and my flatmate’s girlfriend accidentally melted it. My story’s better, though.

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So there you go! Give the muffins a go and hope you enjoy them  :) 

Cheesecake Confession...

So, I decided to make an Oreo Cheesecake. After work. After a long day at work. I might have screwed it up. A little. Kind of. Hmmm.

I've actually never made a set cheesecake, but I figured "How hard can it be?" Apparently it can be pretty damn difficult when you're tired, misread the recipe and dissolve your gelatine in 5 times more water than you're meant to... Ahem.

However, I discovered that my triage skills are actually pretty good (and I'm now convinced that mascarpone has the power to fix everything and anything). Thankfully, despite my rather colossal slip up, it was nothing that a little extra gelatine powder and whopping great dollop of mascarpone couldn't fix.

In fact, it actually turned out pretty well. I was using a recipe which I'd found in a copy of The Australian Women's Weekly which my mum had lying around the house. It caught my eye thanks to the advertised feature of 'Our Best-ever Cheesecakes', so I felt fairly confident that the recipe should be pretty good. However, I liked the way my would-be mistake turned out, so I've adapted the recipe very slightly to incorporate my weirdly successful quick-fix methods and a couple of edits I made when I realised I happened to not have enough caster sugar... 

250g plain chocolate biscuits
130g melted butter
1 1/2 teaspoons of gelatine
1/4 cup (60ml) of water
200g softened cream cheese
150g thickened cream
250g mascarpone
250g good-quality white chocolate
1 teaspoon of vanilla extract
50g caster sugar
60g light brown sugar (I did this as I didn't have quite enough caster sugar, but if you do then 110g caster sugar would be fine. However, I thought that the brown sugar ended up adding a nice flavour to the mix and stopped it from being too sweet)
150g cream-filled chocolate biscuits (Oreos), broken into rough pieces
50g melted dark chocolate for decorating


First, grease and line the base and sides of a 22cm springform cake pan, then place the pan in the fridge to chill. I always do this whenever I'm making a cake or tart that has a 'base' (either pastry or biscuit crumb) as I find that keeping your tin chilled helps to make sure that once your tart is finished, it will come out of the tin easily (particularly when you're in a hot, humid country like I am).

Process the plain chocolate biscuits into a fine crumb, then stir in the melted butter until it is evenly mixed through. Press the biscuit mixture evenly over the base of your pre-greased tin, then press it evenly halfway up the side of the tin. Place the tin back into the refrigerator while you prepare the filling.

Sprinkle your gelatine over the water in a small heatproof jug or small saucepan, then place the jug or saucepan over a larger saucepan of simmering water. Stir the mixture until the gelatine fully dissolves, then let it cool for about 5 minutes.

Beat the cream cheese in a bowl with an electric mixer until smooth. Then add the cream, mascarpone, vanilla, and sugar until combined. Once everything has been fully incorporated, add the gelatine mixture and continue beating until just combined. Fold in your melted and cooled white chocolate, then gently fold in your biscuits.

                                        Reason Why You Need to Make This #1: The left-over Oreos that you need to eat...

Once the biscuits have been folded into the mixture, pour the filling into the biscuit base in the pan. Place in the refrigerator until set, which should take at least 3 hours.

Just before serving, place your melted dark chocolate into a piping bag and drizzle the chocolate across the top to decorate (or, if you're like me, realise that your piping bag is pretty terrible and settle for odd-looking splodge-swirls...).

                                                            Strange splodge-swirls. Like so.

And voila! It's really rather easy (yes, I know I shouldn't say this when I was a total genius and screwed it up really... But it is), and you don't need to worry about baking it in a water-bath or anything. Just bung it in the fridge. And remember, you may find that you're left with extra Oreos, which you will have to eat immediately since you don't have an air-tight container to store them in...and you wouldn't want to waste them. So you should definitely eat them while patiently waiting for your cheesecake to set in the fridge.

Fruity Tart...

Hello!

Just a quick little update for you, with a quick little recipe to go with it - a simple fruit tart. The main component of the tart that might be a little tricky is the creme patissiere, or pastry cream, which you do need to keep an eye on.

For the actual tart case, use a portion of the pate brisee from the blueberry pie recipe (first post on this blog). That should give you more than enough pastry to line one tart tin, and I found that I actually had a bit left over. Quick note - do try to roll the pastry out as thin as you can manage, to make sure you have a really nice crisp pastry case (to leave space for oodles of pastry cream filling). Remember to bake the pastry case all the way through since you won't be baking it again after you've filled it.

The recipe stated below is for the creme patissiere.

4 egg yolks
100g caster sugar
25g plain flour, sifted
1 vanilla pod (scored down the side), or 1 teaspoon of good-quality vanilla extract
350ml full cream milk


In a bowl, whisk together your egg yolks and sugar until the mixture becomes thickened and pale. Stir in your flour until well combined.

If using a vanilla pod, place it in a saucepan with the milk and bring it slowly just up to the boil. Remove the vanilla pod and pour the hot milk over the egg mixture, whisking the entire time. It's important that you keep whisking throughout the process, to prevent lumps of cooked eggs forming and to let the mixture incorporate properly.

Once the mixture has fully mixed together, return it to the saucepan and stir over a low-medium heat until it comes up to a gentle boil. Be careful not to let the bottom of the mixture burn. It must boil in order to thicken.

Continue to cook the mixture for a further few minutes, stirring continuously until it has thickened and any lumps have disappeared. If it does appear lumpy, whisk until the lumps break up. You can also pass it through the sieve if the mixture goes too lumpy during the cooking process. If using vanilla essence instead of the vanilla pod, stir it in now.

Cover and place aside until the creme patissiere has cooled.


Now, once it has cooled properly, you could use it as a base filling for a simple fruit tart (which is what I did).

Just take your fully cooled and cooked through pastry case and fill it with your creme patissiere. Then grab some soft fruits to layer over the top.

I chose blueberries...  

And strawberries... 

To be honest, you can pretty much do this whatever way you like. Pile them up on top, or slice and arrange them. I'm usually a fan of just 'artfully' piling things into a heap, but decided to change things up and slice them. What can I say? Sometimes I just like to be a bit mental like that.

So yeah, in a moment of total madness, I halved the strawberries and then dotted the blueberries around...

 

And there you go. Tart. Oooeerr. The creme patissiere really doesn't take long to make, you do just have to keep an eye on it as I, ahem, might have learned the hard way. Nothing a quick passing through a sieve couldn't fix, thankfully, but a lesson learned!

 

Weekend Brunch.

I love brunch. And since it is the long weekend, I thought I'd try out a scrummy brunch recipe and share it with you guys.

I made another batch of gnocchi recently and had some ricotta left over from it, so thought I'd whip up a batch of lemon ricotta pancakes. I've really wanted to make these with blueberries, but we didn't have any in the house and I was too lazy/down with flu to go out and get some, so made do with some strawberries on the side.

The recipe below makes enough pancakes for about four people (or three really hungry people).


Lemon Ricotta Pancakes
4 eggs (separate the yolks and whites)
310g ricotta
190ml milk
225g plain flour
1tsp baking powder
pinch of salt
110g caster sugar
40g butter
Grated zest of 1 lemon

Place the egg yolks, lemon zest, ricotta and milk into a bowl and stir until combined.

Sieve the flour, baking powder and salt into the ricotta mixture, then add the sugar and mix well

In a separate, clean bowl whisk your egg whites until they form soft peaks. Add approximately a third of the egg whites to the ricotta mixture and gently stir in until the mixture has loosened a little. Gently fold the remaining egg whites into the mixture.

Melt the butter in a frying pan on a medium low heat and add a small ladle of the batter to the pan. Once the surface of the pancake begins to bubble a little (after approximately 2 minutes), turn the pancake over onto the other side and let it cook for a further 2 minutes until the pancake is firm. Repeat until you have used up all the batter.

Serve pancakes stacked on top of each other with a good drizzle of honey or maple syrup over them. Serve with berries on the side.

Note: If you do have blueberries at hand (about 100g for 4 people) then gently fold them into your batter after you have folded in all of your egg whites.

Enjoy your weekend brunch! 

Facing my fears...

Cookies and I have been locked in a terrifying battle for years now. It's a love-hate thing; I love them, they hate me. Without an ounce of exaggeration, it has actually been years since I've managed to make a successful cookie. Pastry? Sure, no problem. Cakes? Easy. Cookies? *hides* The boyfriend ever so helpfully reminded me that the last biscuits I made were so hard, they could have been used as ammunition. Not good.

I finally decided that enough was enough, and decided to face the Cookie Gods once again. It was time.

I thought that I should start with the innocuous chocolate chip cookie. Seemed harmless enough... And thankfully, it seemed as though the Cookie Gods have finally forgiven me. Huzzah! Lo and behold, I have conquered the chocolate chip cookie...


Ingredients:
150g soft unsalted butter
200g soft light brown sugar
25g caster sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 egg, fridge cold
1 egg yolk, fridge-cold
300g flour
1/2 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda
100g oats
225g semi-sweet chocolate chips


First, preheat your oven to 170 degrees Celsius on a fan oven and line a baking tray with non-stick baking paper.

Melt your butter, then set it aside and let it cool a little. Mix together your caster sugar and brown sugar, then pour the melted butter over them and beat them together.

Once combined, beat in your vanilla extract, the cold egg and the cold egg yolk until your mixture is light and creamy, like so...

Slowly mix in the flour and the bicarbonate of soda until they have just blended, then fold in the chocolate chips and the oats until you get a thick batter.

Once your batter has combined, scoop the cookie dough into balls and lay on your baking trays. I used a teaspoon measuring scoop for the cookies and found that the cookies came out at just the perfect size - big and chewy, but just small enough to let you have one, two, three cookies in a sitting.

                                                    Love. Like teeny little chocolate-oaty aliens.

Aren't they adorable? This really amused me more than it should have, and I honestly don't know why. They are just so cute...

You'll need to bake the cookies in batches (I found that I could fit about 11 cookies on each tray, and I made 3 trays of cookies). 

Bake for 15 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are lightly toasted. Leave them to cool on the baking sheet for about 5 minutes before transferring them to wire racks. 

They seem to firm up a little after they cool, so don't worry if they initially seem a little soft after baking. They are still chewy and soft after 15 minutes, but if you'd like them to be a little crisper then leave them to bake for 17 minutes instead.

Of course, I wouldn't be able to know if the Cookie Gods had truly forgiven me without a very quick little taste-test... You know, to make sure they weren't inedible or poisonous.... 

...And all was well. I survived. Cookies were successfully made. Chewy, soft, tasty cookies. So, grab a cup of milk (...or some ice-cream, as I might have done...), whip up some cookies and enjoy. They are really quick to whip up, so you could be enjoying warm cookies in 30 minutes.

Lime-Ginger Syrup Cake.

I know, I know... I've been a bad blogger. Unfortunately, 11 hour work days and 5 hours of sleep do not a good blogger make. However, in my attempt to appease the angry, pitchfork-bearing crowds demanding an update (i.e. my seven followers...ahem), I come bearing gifts. Delicious, cake-like gifts.

                                                                  See? Present! For you!

A couple of weeks ago at a girly dinner with friends, I had a slice of cake (shock horror!). It was a rather delicious (albeit it too crumbly) lime, ginger and coconut loaf cake. A little light-bulb went off over my head. "I can make this!" said the little light-bulb. (Yes, my light-bulbs speak. Yes, we shall swiftly move on from this mildly worrying confession of mine).

And thus, after a bit of rooting around our rather extensive collection of cookbooks, the lime-ginger syrup cake was born.

I decided against using coconut, to avoid an overly-crumbly texture, and also decided on a syrup cake in the hopes of getting a flavourful, light cake. I think it turned out rather well, and it was very well received by my guinea-pigs, but I'll let you be the judge of that. This recipe is actually adapted from Nigella's lemon syrup cake in "How to be a Domestic Goddess".


Lime-ginger Syrup Cake.
Ingredients

For the cake:
125g unsalted butter
175g caster sugar
2 large eggs
zest of two large limes
Juice of four limes
Pinch of salt
Two tablespoons of milk.

For the syrup:
Juice of two limes
Finger of young ginger
100g of caster sugar
Approximately 100ml of water


Before you get started, preheat your oven to 175 degrees Celsius (fan oven). Butter and line your loaf tin well, making sure you really get into the corners. Few things distress me more than cake getting stuck in the tin (this may or may not be true).

Next, step back and admire the sparkling emerald gems that are going to make this cake extra special. Then frown and figure out how on earth you're going to make their knobbly-looking friend look photogenic.

                                For an amateur photographer like me, apparently there is no way...

The first step, as with any basic cake, is creaming together your butter and sugar. It really is important to make sure you cream your butter for long enough as the friction of the sugar beating against the butter helps to create a fluffier, lighter cake. You want to cream the butter and sugar until the butter begins to turn pale, rather than a bright yellow. 

I very recently acquired a new toy, so very much enjoyed this part of the baking process. I've always wanted a stand mixer (especially since I make a lot of meringue/pavlova and it just makes life that much simpler), and I managed to nick this rather nifty Kenwood Chef off my grandmother, who just doesn't really use it. It's not quite a Kitchenaid, but it'll do for now and I'll just have to keep lusting over Apple Red Kitchenaid mixers online instead... 

                                                                      My New Friend.

Anyway, back on track... Once your butter has started to turn pale, add in the eggs, lime juice and zest, makig sure to beat them in well. Don't worry if the lime juice makes the mixture curdle slightly - it will sort itself out once you add your flour and so far I haven't found that slight curdling affects the taste or texture of the end product. 

                                                              Pretty, pretty zest. Love zest.

This is probably a good time to note that the amount of juice and zest suggested here is very much to my personal taste. I really wanted quite a tangy flavour to the cake, but if you aren't too keen on overly zingy cakes then reduce the quantity of juice. The zest adds a nice aroma to the cake rather than actually contributing to the tanginess, so you can omit the juice and just keep the zest if you are not looking for a very 'limey' flavour. 

Once your eggs and zest have been well combined into the mixture, sift in your flour and salt. Fold the flour into the mixture thoroughly, but gently, and then add in your milk. 

When the batter has been thoroughly combined, spoon it into your prepared cake tin and step back and marvel at the tiny little green flecks of zest peeping through the batter. 

  
Place your cake into the oven and bake for 45 minutes or until it is golden and has risen in the middle. It is ready when an inserted cake-tester comes out clean and without any batter sticking to it. 

While your cake is baking, this is a good opportunity to make your lime-ginger syrup. Take your finger of ginger and give it a quick rinse/scrub to clean it. Roughly chop it up into slivers and then place it in a small saucepan with your caster sugar, lime juice and water. Bring the mixture up to a gentle simmer, stirring constantly; you do not want the mixture to boil. After a few minutes you should be able to really smell the ginger beginning to infuse in the syrup. Again, the quantities suggested are very much to my own personal taste - if you are not a fan of ginger, you can certainly leave it out and make a simple lime syrup instead. Once the syrup has thickened slightly but is still runny enough to pour freely, strain the mixture so that you have only the liquid syrup. 

You should pour the syrup quite liberally over the whole cake. As soon as the cake comes out of the oven, puncture it with a cake-tester (or whatever you have that is suitable - you don't want to gouge big chunks of cake out, but you do want to puncture holes right down into the bottom of the cake without breaking through the other side). When you have thoroughly punctured holes all over your cake, pour the syrup over the cake. Make sure to let the middle part of the cake absorb the syrup as well as the sides, then leave the cake aside to soak up the liquid. 

It is important that you don't try to take the cake out of the tin until it has cooled completely as it will be sodden with syrup and will crumble if you try to remove it from the tin too early. Once the cake reaches room temperature, you could clingfilm the top and leave it in the fridge overnight to really let the syrup do its work. Otherwise, wait until it is completely cooled then carefully turn it out of the tin, grab a fork, and enjoy! 

Definitely try this out - it is a really great tea cake, or a rather light but more-ish dessert. I'm sure it would taste great topped with a little whipped cream on the side if you were feeling naughty, but it tastes lovely on its own. I brought it as a light dessert to our friend's house, and between 8 of us we managed to polish off the lot in one sitting...