RASPBERRY AND PINK FIZZ DRIZZLE BUNDT CAKE

For our most recent meeting of Loire Valley CCC the theme was chosen by our host and was “What’s your tipple?”.  For this Nick had an urge to bake a champagne cake.  Then he remembered that as we were in the Loire Valley the best thing to use would be the local fizz.  Not far from where we live there are vineyards and wine growers that make the most delicious sparkling wines.  Very drinkable and a fraction of the price of real champagne.

Personally, I love champagne and believe you can tell the difference.  If anyone would like to challenge me to a blind tasting of a couple of champagnes and a couple of good sparkling wines, I would be happy to oblige.  As long as you buy!  Equally I love the Loire Valley sparkling wines and there are plenty of them around here to choose from.  If we have been drinking the local fizz for a week or two and then treat ourselves to opening a bottle of champagne, I always find myself saying, ah yes, champagne, it is different.

It’s also an excellent painkiller.  If you have back trouble a couple of glasses will make the pain and muscle spasm so much better – I know, I have researched it fully!

Nick adapted a recipe that he found on the internet to make his cake.  The only problem was that it stuck to the tin, in spite of a generous coating of cake release spray.  We think it was the raspberries that glued the cake to the tin where they were on the surface.  He carefully removed the pieces of cake that were left in the tin and placed them in the gaps in the cake.  With a strategic drizzling of pink fizz icing nobody could tell!

It tasted lovely.  The flavour of the raspberries was strong and you could definitely taste the fizz in the icing.

This month’s Love Cake Challenge from Jibber Jabber is “I’ll drink to that”.  You can see the details here.

This month’s Teatime Treats Challenge from Lavender and Lovage is “Regional and Local recipes and ingredients”.  You can see the details here.

Ingredients

For the cake

225g butter, softened, or Lurpak Spreadable

300g golden caster sugar

6 eggs

350g self raising flour

6 tblsp pink fizz

150g fresh raspberries (or frozen, thawed)

1 vanilla pod, seeds

For the drizzle

6 tblsp pink fizz

6 tblsp granulated sugar

For the icing

6 tblsp pink fizz

1 tblsp icing sugar

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease a large Bundt tin with cake release spray or melted butter.

Beat together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy.

Beat in the eggs, one at a time, adding a little flour if the mixture begins to curdle.  Add the pink fizz.

Fold in the flour, followed by the vanilla seeds and raspberries.

Transfer the mixture to the prepared tin and bake for 45-60 minutes until the cake looks browned, begins to pull away from the tin and passes the skewer test.

While the cake is cooking, prepare the drizzle by gentling heating the pink fizz and sugar in a small saucepan until the sugar is dissolved.

Leave to cool in the tin for 10 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.  Prick holes in the top of the cake using a skewer and pour the drizzle gently over the cake.  Leave to cool.

Mix the icing sugar with enough pink fizz to make a runny icing and drizzle over the cooled cake.  Add sprinkles and/or glitter if you like.

Cuts into 16-20 slices.

STRAWBERRY AND ORANGE FRIANDS

This is one of those recipes that I had forgotten about.  I went through a phase of making friands (or financiers, they’re really the same thing) regularly until a couple of years ago then for some reason forgot all about them.  Which is a pity because they’re dead easy to make, take hardly any time from mixing bowl to serving dish, are very versatile and perfectly delicious.

They’re a kind of frangipane style of little bun, made traditionally in the oval mould for friands or oblong moulds for financiers.  They also work perfectly well made in a muffin tin, as long as you don’t overfill the holes so that they remain fairly shallow.

I was looking at a few slightly tired strawberries in the fridge and a lonely orange in the fruit bowl and thinking about what I could do with them so as not to waste them and friands sprung to mind.  Very odd.

They’re a nice little mouthful or two – much like a modest slice of cake and less filling than a muffin – and they always go down well with visitors.  That might be because many people have never heard of them before and they’re curious to try them.  Once tasted, few people can resist the combination of almonds and fruit.

Of course, having used up the strawberries and the orange I was then left with three unused egg yolks so now I have to think of a way not to waste them!  Oh well, there’s always Lulu – she has cheesy egg most days for her breakfast!

This month’s Alphabakes Challenge, organised by Ros, of The more than occasional baker, and Caroline, of Caroline Makes, is the letter “O”.  You can see the details here.

This month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, run by Karen of Lavender and Lovage, is “small cakes”.  You can see those details here.

Ingredients

100g unsalted butter

125g icing sugar

25g plain flour

85g ground almonds

3 medium egg whites

grated rind of one orange

4-5 strawberries, thickly sliced

Method

Preheat the oven to 200°C / 180° fan.  Butter an 8-hole friand or financier tin, or a muffin tin.

Melt the butter in a small pan and set aside to cool.

Sift the flour and icing sugar into a large bowl.  Stir in the ground almonds.

In another bowl, whisk the egg whites until you have a light, floppy foam.

Make a well in the flour mixture.  Add the egg whites, orange rind and melted butter and mix gently until well combined.

Divide evenly between the holes of the prepared tin or mould.  Drop a pair of strawberry slices on top of each one.

Bake for 15-20 minutes until light golden brown and firm to the touch.

Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.  Dust with icing sugar before serving.

Makes 8 friands.

PEAR AND CHOCOLATE BROWNIE CAKE - and two steps forward, one step back on the new kitchen.

 

Recently we stayed in a friend’s house in France while our kitchen floor in our own French home was being retiled.  Retiling has meant removing the old kitchen and the staircase, rendering the house uninhabitable. 

A ladder was in the place of the staircase for a while, until it came to the actual laying of the new floor, then that had to go as well.  Because we had no kitchen and couldn’t get upstairs, we decided to move out, and our friends Tim and Gaynor kindly offered us the use of their house while they were away on holiday.

Cooking in someone else’s house is a challenge.  Not an unpleasant one, I may add, but getting to grips with an unfamiliar oven and finding the right equipment makes for quite and adventure.

I found this very pretty plate in the cupboard with the dinner plates.

We were treading water for a while, with time on our hands, waiting for the building work to be finished, so I had the time to bake something nice.  I found a copy of Good Housekeeping “Great Cakes” on Gaynor’s bookshelf and as I have the same book myself I decided to bake something I had had my eye on for a while - “Sticky pear and chocolate brownie cake”.

The cake turned out slightly less squidgy and brownie like than I expected, possibly because I forgot to set the timer and guessed!  It was still delicious and definitely one I would make again.

The icing is simply made using icing sugar and coffee.  The picture in the book shows it as a thick drizzle over the cake but for reasons that now escape me, I decided to brush it over the cake in an even layer, which didn’t look quite so good.   In fact by the time the cake was cut it had crystallised slightly and looked even less attractive than when I took its picture above.  I think that next time I will pour the icing over the cake just before it is served.

As soon as the kitchen floor was finished we moved back in amongst the dust and chaos to begin the next phase, which was to board over the remaining walls and fit plumbing, gas and an electricity supply, ready for the imminent arrival of the kitchen units from the UK.  As soon as the lorry driver started unloading the pallets containing our beautiful brand new Magnet units I could see that something was wrong and my heart sank.

After everything we have done to the house so far – a new fosse septique, a new drive, a new kitchen floor, new walls, new doorway and, not least of all the choosing, designing and paying for a lovely new Magnet kitchen – you would think that simply getting the units shipped over here would be the easiest part.  All they had to do was to secure them on pallets, put them onto a van and drive them here.

Unfortunately whoever loaded the pallets did a thoroughly incompetent job which meant that several of the units arrived broken.  Cartons marked “fragile” and “this way up” had been laid on their side with other stuff piled on top of them.  Someone had clearly driven the forks of a fork lift into two of the base units, smashing them.  Then they rewrapped them in cling film so the damage was not apparent until the whole pallet was unpacked.  What kind of person would do that? 

Replacements have been ordered but I wouldn’t trust Europa Worldwide to arrange the delivery of anything I ever want to see in one piece again, so we are fetching them ourselves.  Which unfortunately means yet another unscheduled and costly twelve hour each way journey across the channel (fourteen hours in fact with a trailer) that we really didn’t want to have to make.  Thank you, Europa Worldwide.

Our temporary new kitchen.  The gaps are where the damaged units should have gone, thanks to the idiot with the fork lift.

We have fitted the items salvaged from the wreckage of the delivery, added some temporary cheap worktops to perch the sink and hob on top of, so that at least we can function for a week or two until the new items arrive.  Meanwhile we are claiming for the damage on Europa’s insurance.  In my opinion insurance should be against accidents, not negligence or incompetence, which is what caused the damage to our kitchen units.  No accident occurred other than being in the hands of some bonehead intent on wrecking our valuable property and then hiding the evidence.

C’est la vie. I’m linking this post to this month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, run by Karen at Lavender and Lovage, where the theme this month is, of course, chocolate!

It also qualifies for Dom’s Simply Eggcellent challenge at Bellau Kitchen, where the theme this month is eggs and chocolate.

To complete the trio of challenges this month, I’m also entering it into the Alphabakes Challenge where the theme this month is the letter B, organised by Caroline of Caroline Makes.

Ingredients.

275g plain chocolate

75g pecan nuts (or walnuts)

125g unsalted butter

2 eggs

75g caster sugar

½tsp vanilla extract

1tblsp strong black coffee

75g self raising flour

3 large ripe pears

For the icing

75g icing sugar

2tblsp strong black coffee

Method

Make yourself a cup of strong black coffee.  Don’t drink it – allow it to go cold.

Preheat the oven to 190°C / 170°fan / gas mk 5.  Grease and line the base of a 23cm round baking tin or dish with baking paper.

Chop the nuts and 75g of the chocolate and set aside.

Put the remaining 200g of chocolate with the butter into a large heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water.  Heat gently until melted, stirring occasionally and set aside to cool slightly.

In a separate bowl, beat together the eggs, sugar, vanilla extract and 1tblsp of the coffee.  Add the melted chocolate and beat again.  Fold in the flour, chopped nuts and chopped chocolate.

Peel, core and quarter the pears and arrange in the prepared dish or tin, laying the pears with the narrow end towards the centre.  Pour over the chocolate mixture.

Bake for 60 minutes, covering lightly with foil half way through.

Cool in the tin for a few minutes then invert onto a cake plate.  Remove the baking paper and leave to cool completely.

Before serving, sift the icing sugar into a bowl, add 2tblsp coffee and beat until smooth.  Add a little more coffee or water if necessary.  Drizzle over the cake.

Cuts into 8-10 slices.

GINGER CAKE

We moved house eight weeks ago and after three weeks abandoned ship and went to France to continue our house hunting adventures there.  Consequently we are not as far forward as we would have been if we had stayed here and continued diligently working our way through the mountain of cardboard boxes.

 

The kitchen is brand new and, although beautiful to look at, its size is a proving to be a challenge.  We have moved stuff from cupboard to cupboard over and again in order to find the sensible places to store things in a way that makes best use of the space.

I like my new larder unit but added a couple of extra shelves to get all my baking stuff in it. The new dining set arrived this week, which makes mealtimes much more comfortable than the old garden chairs.  The “dining area” is simply a space at the end of the kitchen next to the fridge, but it has a nice view over the garden.

The open view at the back of the house is one of the main reasons that we bought it.  Being able to sit outside and look at the view has been a real joy during the stressful process of downsizing and moving – which is exhausting, mentally, emotionally and physically.  Sitting outside with a glass of something nicely chilled at the end of the day has been great therapy!

However, as you can see, we’re not out of the woods yet! 

We are not very thrilled with the new oven.  In fact Nick absolutely hates it, and the hob.  Although brand new they are both very basic models and we have promised ourselves that once the dust settles, if there is enough left in the kitty, we will have new ones of our own choosing.

Anyway, I had been itching to bake a cake, new oven or not.  I had successfully made several crumbles and a rather delicious blackberry and apple sponge – a version of Eve’s pudding made using dessert apples and blackberry jam – so I thought it was time to bite the bullet and just do it.

Nick chose the recipe.  It’s called “preserved ginger cake” and he found it in my copy of “Delia’s Cakes”.  That in itself was another challenge.  Most of my cookbooks were still in cardboard boxes until a few days ago.  We couldn’t empty the boxes until we built some flatpack Ikea furniture to house other stuff that was in other boxes on top of the boxes they were in.  If you see what I mean.

Another challenge was getting all the ingredients ready.  It took me over half an hour to find all the bits and pieces and the right tin, but I have to say it was a tremendous success.  The cake was moist and light with an even crumb and a good ginger flavour.   I am very chuffed to have made my very first cake in my brand new kitchen in my new house. 

You can see the recipe here.  I decided not to put any icing on it as we were to be taking slabs of it as part of a packed lunch for a day out.  It’s a great picnic cake, tasty and easy to pick up and eat.  For that reason I am entering it into this month’s Teatime Treats, organised by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Jane of The Hedgecombers.  Karen is in charge this month, which is all about picnic food, and you can see the details here.

CUSTARD TART

The milk round on our road changed hands about ten years ago.  The old milk man was a genial kind of chap with a fascinating squint and a quirky sense of humour.  He would call on a Friday evening to suggest we might like to contribute to the ageing milk person’s retirement fund and was grovellingly apologetic if he had to put the price up.  The new one was grumpy and careless.  I had to cajole him into collecting his money and empty bottles.  I fell out with him a couple of times and then sacked him after he left nine empty bottles on our doorstep for a fortnight while we were away on holiday.

For five years or more we were obliged to buy milk from the supermarkets, something that I hated and regretted having to do.  Now our milk and eggs come from the local farm.  The eggs are free range and £1 for a box of six.  In that box there can be a variety of different sizes, the largest often being twice the size of the smallest, but generally averaging out at “large”.

The milk is from the cows in the fields that surround us and is pasteurised on the farm.  The farmer began pasteurising his own milk a few years ago and started selling it from a fridge in a shed, with an honesty box, by the farm gate.  Sales took off (it’s lovely milk) and he put up a solid building with vending machines.  As well as the eggs and milk he now sells his own cream and butter, bread, cakes and pastries from a local bakery, and potatoes.  In the summer there is also home made ice cream and local strawberries.  It’s a marvellous resource for the local people, especially as the goods on sale are far better quality and cheaper than the recently built huge supermarket not far away.

Then a neighbour offered to deliver the milk from the farm to residents in our road so we kind of got our milk round back.  However, it’s not quite like that.  He fetches the milk from the farm and delegates the delivery of it to his teenage kids, which is a great way to teach them that money doesn’t grow on trees but, kids being kids, deliveries are sometimes a little………irregular.

If we’re lucky it arrives at 8am before they go to school.  If we’re unlucky it arrives at 11pm when they remember that they’ve forgotten to bring it and if we’re very unlucky it doesn’t arrive at all.  But it’s tons better than having no milk round and I’m very happy with the service.

The upshot of all this is that sometimes I run out of milk and have to go to the farm to fetch some.  Other times the fridge is full of it, as happened one day last week when the non-delivery resulted in me fetching some then an 11pm delivery and a subsequent glut of milk.

I also had plenty of eggs and half a pack of ready-made pastry (my current weakness) so I looked at them and the idea of a custard tart suddenly became irresistible.  I made it the way my mum always made it, using just milk and eggs, no cream.  As a child the only cream we ever had was that from the top of the full-cream milk, or from a tin on Sundays.  So I made my custard tart using the Be-Ro book recipe and it was positively lovely, just like my mum used to make.

I am entering my custard tart into this month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, a monthly baking challenge run by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Jane of The Hedge Combers.  This month the theme is “open top tarts, pies and quiches” and you can see the details here.

Ingredients

½ pack of ready-made shortcrust pastry (or make your own with 100g flour)

2 large eggs

300ml (½ pint) milk

2 tblsp sugar

nutmeg (I used ready grated from a jar, just like my mum used to)

Method

Preheat the oven to 190°C / 170°fan / gas mk 5.  Grease a 20cm flan dish or tin.

Roll out the pastry and bake blind for 15-20 minutes until golden. 

While the pastry is baking, whisk the eggs in a jug or bowl.  Put the milk and sugar in a small saucepan and bring to the boil.  Pour onto the eggs and mix thoroughly.   Allow to cool.

Reduce the oven temperature to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4. 

Pour the milk carefully through a sieve into the pastry case, sprinkle with nutmeg and bake for 20 minutes until set.  (When you take it out of the oven it might have a very slight wobble but will firm up as it cools.)

Serve warm or cold.  It slips down perfectly with no additions on the plate.

Serves up to six people.  Four would be more like it, or in our house, only two.

CHOCOLATE RUM CAKE (for serious chocoholics)

It was our local Clandestine Cake Club’s first birthday recently so I felt compelled to attend the meeting, even though I really haven’t got the time to bake!  (Any excuse!)

A quick shuffle of my last few unpacked cook books led me to a recipe in Mary Berry’s Baking Bible.  Chocolate and booze go well together at any time but are especially good for a birthday!

In the first chapter of her book Mary states that she rarely uses dark chocolate with a high cocoa solids content, believing it to be unnecessarily expensive and not always the best thing for baking.  Luckily I had two bars of Cadbury’s Bournville chocolate in the cupboard so with those in stock I had more or less everything I needed to make the cake.

Apart that is, from the apricot jam.  The recipe states that you should brush the cake with warm, sieved apricot jam before coating it with the chocolate icing.  As we are trying to run down our stocks of everything before we move house, the only thing I had in stock that might do was half a jar of morello cherry jam.  As cherries go really well with both rum and chocolate I decided to use that instead and I have to say, it was a really good choice.  The sweetness of the cherry jam contrasted will with the intensely chocolate flavour of the cake and icing.

 

I decorated the cake with the chocolate icing as given in the recipe and also added some crystallised violets, a sprinkle of chocolate vermicelli and a single candle.

This is not a cake for the faint hearted.  There are after all two whole large bars of Bournville chocolate in the cake and even though they’re not the 70% cocoa solids content of some chocolate, it still adds up to a very strong dark chocolate flavour.  One to which the cherry jam adds a welcome contrast.

You can see the recipe here but in the Baking Bible Mary also incredibly adds yet another almost whole bar of chocolate by making a ganache to pipe decorative swirls on the cake !!  It was already more than chocolatey enough for me so this would have made it inedible for my taste !!  Needless to say, I’m glad I omitted that step in the recipe.

Adding the cherry jam was a lucky alteration to the original recipe so consequently I feel entitled to submit this post to this month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, organised by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and Jane of the Hedge Combers.  The theme this time is “jam” and you can see the details here.

Ingredients

For the cake

200g plain chocolate, 39% cocoa solids, such as Bournville

100g unsalted butter, diced

3 large eggs, separated

100g dark muscovado sugar

50ml dark rum

75g self raising flour

50g ground almonds

For the filling and icing

225g Bournville chocolate

100g unsalted butter, diced

2 tbslp morello cherry jam

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C / 160° fan / gas mk 4.  Grease and a 20cm round springform cake tin and line the base with baking paper.

Melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water.  Set aside to cool.

Put the egg yolks and sugar in a large bowl and whisk together until pale and creamy.

Add the cooled chocolate and rum and mix together until combined.  Sift in the flour and fold in, along with the ground almonds.

Whisk the egg whites separately until stiff and fold into the mixture.

Transfer the mixture to the tin and bake for about 45 minutes until done.

Leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes then turn out, remove the paper and cool on a rack.

To make the filling, melt the chocolate as above, then add the butter and mix well together.  Put the jam in a small saucepan and heat gently, then push through a sieve to remove any lumps of fruit.

When the cake is cool, slice it in half horizontally using a bread knife.  Spread two tablespoons of the chocolate icing on the bottom half and put the two halves back together.

Brush the sieved jam over the top and sides of the cake and allow to set.  Then gently spread the remaining icing over the whole cake.  Decorate with sprinkles, candles or your choice of decorations.

Cuts into 10-12 slices as it is very rich.

LEMON DRIZZLE BIRTHDAY BUNDT CAKE

This is the last cake I will be baking for a while.  The house is sold so all my baking stuff will be packed up ready to be stored or moved before long.

I was pleased to be  making this cake, a birthday cake for my mother-in-law’s 90th birthday.  Her favourite cakes are lemon or fruit cake so I decided to go for a rather special lemon drizzle cake.

I used my new Bundt tin, the one that Nick gave me for Christmas, coated it well inside with cake release spray, and the cake slid out perfectly.  That was a relief!  After the previous disaster (here) I can safely say that the tin was not the culprit on that occasion.  I must remember not to put fudge into a Bundt cake again !!

I’m not into fancy icing so I decorated the cake with some pretty number candles and pink roses.  I used a small shot glass to act as a vase which I pushed into the hole in the middle of the cake.  I lengthened the stems of the candles by attaching them to wooden kebab sticks with sellotape so that they would stand up at the right height in the vase.

The recipe comes from the blog Delicious, Delicious, Delicious, which you can see here.  It worked perfectly, although I didn’t prick the cake to make holes for the drizzle to soak in as I didn’t want to spoil the lines of the cake.  I just kept pouring the syrup over, recollecting it as it ran off by putting the cake on a cooling rack over a dinner plate.  That resulted in a nice coating of sugar and some of it definitely soaked in through the crust.  To finish the cake I added a light sprinkling of edible glitter.

It looked very pretty in the centre of the table for my mother-in-law’s birthday tea.  The flavour was good and everybody enjoyed it.

So that’s it for a while.  I have no idea where my next post will come from, but I’ll be back as soon as we’re settled somewhere !!

In the meantime I am entering this cake into this month’s Teatime Treats, hosted by Karen of Lavender and Lovage and this month by Jane of the Hedge Combers.  The theme for March is “Decorative Cakes” and you can see the details here.

PEAR AND ALMOND TART

I have been baking quite a few frangipane creations lately and this is another one.  In fact I have made a pear and almond tart to Laura Washburn’s recipe quite happily many times ~ I wrote about it here.  Then I stumbled across a different version by Michel Roux which appeared in the Metro and you can see it here.  I liked the sound of it because you cook the pears in a vanilla and cinnamon flavoured syrup so I decided to have a go.

As usual, I didn’t stick exactly to his recipe!  I didn’t have a vanilla pod so omitted it.  I didn’t use his recipe for making the pastry as I am really happy with the Mary Berry sweet pastry that I have made several times recently and used that instead.  I also used Amaretto in the frangipane topping instead of rum.

I expected the step of poaching the pears to be a bit of a faff but it wasn’t.  While they’re cooking gently you can get on with the pastry and almond topping, which is no bother at all.

I used four large pears but that produced too much for the tart so I put the leftover slices in the fridge with the poaching syrup and served them separately.  They were yummy too and we had the last few slices with some yoghurt for dessert a couple of days after the tart had all gone.

I was convinced I had taken a photo of the finished tart but apparently not so this one of half of it will have to do!  I glazed it with apricot glaze but didn’t scatter any flaked almonds on the top ~ I thought it looked better without.

(Curiously, although this scattering of flaked almonds is mentioned in Michel’s recipe, you can see clearly from the photo in the article that he didn’t either.)

This is a stunningly good dessert and excellent served cold with a cup of tea too.  The almond topping is delicious and looks very chic with its shiny glaze.  I gave a slice to our French neighbour, Mme André and she loved it, which is always a good sign!

I am submitting this post to this month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and this month Janie at The Hedgcombers blog.  The theme this month is eggs, eggs, eggs!  As the almond topping does indeed contain three eggs it seems to fit the bill!

I am also dedicating it to my friend Elizabeth over at Braye-sous-Faye.  She has to have a gluten free diet and has always struggled with producing good pastry ~ until now!

This pear and almond tart could probably be easily adapted to a gluten free version because it has no flour in the topping, and if you follow Elizabeth’s instructions for the pastry, which you can see here.  I dare say you could even make a sweet pastry version by adding a little icing sugar to the flour and combining it with egg à la Mary Berry!  (It might be worth a try anyway!) 

Ingredients

For the poached pears

3-4 large pears, peeled, halved and cored

300ml water

1 cinnamon stick

1 vanilla pod, split (optional)

250g caster sugar

For the pastry

200g plain flour

100g cold butter, cubed

25g icing sugar

1 egg, beaten

For the almond topping

125g softened butter or spreadable butter such as Lurpak

125g caster sugar

125g ground almonds

3 eggs

2 tblsp Amaretto liqueur (or rum)

2tbslp sieved apricot jam (or use Sainsbury’s apricot glaze, which is essentially sieved jam)

Method

Put the pear halves in a large saucepan with the water, sugar, cinnamon stick and vanilla pod (if using).  Bring slowly to the boil and simmer gently for 20 minutes until the pears are tender.  Drain the pears and leave to cool.  (Discard the spices but reserve the liquid for another purpose if, like me you hate to waste it.)

Make the pastry by blitzing the flour, icing sugar and butter in a food processor.  Use the beaten egg to combine it then wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge while you make the almond topping.

Preheat the oven to 200°C / 180°fan / gas mk 6.  Grease a 23-25cm flan tin or dish.

Without washing the food processor bowl, put the butter and sugar into it and process to a cream.  Add the ground almonds and combine briefly.  Add the eggs and Amaretto and process again until well combined.

Roll out the pastry to fit the tin or dish, prick the base and blind bake for 20 minutes.

Spoon the almond mixture into the pastry case and level the top.

Cut each pear half into three slices and arrange the slices on top of the almond mixture, pointed end towards the middle.  Bake for about 40 minutes until the the filling is golden brown and passes the usual skewer test for a cake.

Warm the apricot jam in a small pan with a little water and brush over the finished tart. 

Serve warm with cream or crème fraîche.  Also nice served cold with a cup of tea.

Cuts into 8-10 slices.

TRIPLE CHOCOLATE CHRISTMAS CUPCAKE KIT

I spotted this recipe recently on the Good Food website and thought it was a great idea for an extra little Christmas present for an enthusiastic young baker in the family.

I managed to get everything into the jar apart from the bar of milk chocolate for the topping.  In order to keep the cake ingredients in the bottom of the jar and to prevent them from messing up the other bits and pieces I cut a circle of baking paper which was placed on top before putting in the cases and the rest of the kit.

I amended the ingredients very slightly by only putting in 100g white chocolate chips as 200g sounded like an awful lot.  I added a tiny pinch of ground cinnamon for a little extra touch of Christmas as well as sugar snowflake decorations.

Naturally I felt obliged to bake a batch for myself just to be sure the kit would work.  The cupcakes were delicious, very chocolaty and moist.

I hope they go down well with the person the gift is intended for.  I did something similar and gave away quite a few Christmas Muffin kits a few years ago.  They were very well received and you can read about them here.

I am entering this into this month’s Tea Time Treats Challenge, which is for Festive Foodie Gifts.  This month is organised by Kate of What Kate Baked and this is her final Tea Time Treat.  Looking at the number of posts already linked to the challenge she is certainly going out on a high!  Her co-host is Karen of Lavender and Lovage and you can read all about the challenge, and dip into some of the marvellous ideas already submitted, by clicking here.

For the kit you will need:

A suitable jar with a screw top or clip, about the size of a large pickle jar.

In the bottom put 100g caster sugar, 100g self-raising flour, 2 tblsp cocoa powder and a small pinch of cinnamon.

Next cut a circle of baking paper the same size as the jar and place it on top of the ingredients to keep them in the bottom of the jar.

Next add 12 cupcake cases and a few sprinkles tied in a twist of cellophane.  Then put 100g white chocolate chips enclosed in another twist of cellophane and close the lid.

Tie a wooden spoon to the jar and place it in a gift bag along with a 100g bar of milk chocolate and a card with these instructions handwritten on it:

“Heat the oven to 180°C/160°fan/gas mk 4.  Put the cupcake cases in a muffin tin.

Beat together 100g very soft butter, or spreadable butter such as Lurpak, or Stork tub margarine, with 2 eggs and the cupcake ingredients.  Add a little milk if the mixture is very stiff and mix in the white chocolate chips.

Divide between the cases and bake for 15-20 minutes.

When the cakes are cool, melt the milk chocolate in the microwave in 20-second bursts, stirring after each burst.  Spoon a little over each cupcake and decorate with the sprinkles.”

Makes 12 cupcakes.