RUSTIC PEAR AND STRAWBERRY TART

I follow a blog called Belleau Kitchen and the writer, Dom, currently has something called a Random Recipe challenge.  Basically, you take a favourite cookbook, allow it to fall open at random page and cook or bake whatever is on the open page – the recipe was meant to be for a cake or dessert.

I thought this looked like fun so I decided to have a go.  It didn’t quite work out as I intended.

I do have a lot of cookbooks so first I had to decide whether to choose an old favourite or a new one that I had hardly explored yet.  I decided on the latter but the first book I chose fell open at a savoury tart so that was no good – it was meant to be a sweet baking challenge.

Then I cheated.  The second book fell open at an incredibly gooey, fancy pudding that was very fiddly to make and, quite frankly, we would never eat.  So I rejected that one.

I was lucky with the third attempt.  A marmalade polenta cake, baked with orange and lemon slices around the top and sides.  It looked delicious but required quite a lot of work, cooking the fruit and making a syrup as well as baking the cake. 

Then I ran out of time to do it before the challenge ends and we go on holiday.  Shame.

I diligently took my library books back as they were due to expire whilst we are away, but couldn’t resist a sneaky look if they had anything new in the baking section.  I spotted the absolutely scrummy book you see above.  It was fairly new in the library but already well used with sticky finger marks on the pages.  Always a good sign.

When I got it home I flipped through and it fell open at “rustic plum tart”.  Now there’s an idea I thought.  It looked delicious, yet simple and quick to make.  I could enter the challenge after all.

Except for one thing – I didn’t have any plums. 

The recipe said you could use any ripe fruit and suggested apples.  I didn’t have any apples either but did have some very ripe pears and an unopened punnet of strawberries so I used those.  It was WONDERFUL.

Basically, you make a simple batter and pour it into a lined cake tin, scatter the fruit on top and bake.

The finishing touch is to brush the tart with melted apricot jam.  I wouldn’t normally bother with this but as it was for a challenge I decided to do it – even had to make a special trip to the Spa shop to buy some jam, sliding in just before they closed at 4pm on Sunday.  (We had every other possible variety of jam in the house but no apricot.)  It gave the finished tart a “patisserie” appearance which was lovely.

So there we are, rustic pear and strawberry tart.  It doesn’t look much like a tart to me, more like a cake, but who’s complaining?  Not me, it was delicious.

Here’s what you need.

90g caster sugar

1 egg

40ml vegetable oil

55ml milk

140g plain flour

1tsp baking powder

2-3 drops vanilla extract

3  pears

half a punnet or a handful of strawberries

2tblsp apricot jam to glaze

Here’s what you do.

Preheat the oven to 180°C (fan), gas mk 4.  Grease and line a 20cm cake tin, preferably springform.

Using an electric whisk, beat the egg and sugar until light and creamy.  Add the all the other ingredients except the fruit and jam and beat again until combined.

Spoon the mixture into the tin and level the surface.

Peel and core the pears and cut into quarters.  Wash and hull the strawberries.  Arrange the fruit on top of the cake mixture.

Bake for about 30 minutes until golden brown, remove and leave to cool in the tin for a few minutes.

To glaze the tart, put the jam in a small pan and heat gently until runny.  Remove the tart from the tin and brush the glaze over the top and sides.  Cool slightly more before serving.

*The original recipe used 6 large plums, stoned and halved and arranged cut side up on top of the mixture.  I will definitely do this again, when I have some plums.

Cuts into 6 slices and leftovers are nice cold, served as a cake.

BLUEBERRY AND LEMON FRIANDS

I have only made friands once before and I was disappointed with how they turned out, because I left them in the oven for only a few minutes too long and some were scorched. 

So I decided to have another go.  This time they were perfect !!

I also decided to buy a friand tin, which makes the nice little oval cakes.  I used a muffin tin last time which was perfectly fine but I fancied doing the job properly.  In any case, a girl can never have too many cake tins (or shoes).

This proved to be a challenge.  I looked in all the cookware shops locally and nobody had any or had even heard of them.  So I Googled it and sure enough the first names to come up were Amazon and Lakeland.

They didn’t have any either.  So I did a bit more digging and found one at siliconemoulds.com.  This company supplies silicone moulds in all shapes and sizes and Sarah-Jane, the manager, also writes a great baking blog, which  you can check out here.

Friands are made with ground almonds and icing sugar and hardly any flour.  You make a froth of egg white, stir it into the dry ingredients, pour into the greased moulds and sprinkle the fruit on top.

They are incredibly quick and easy to make.

I had never used a silicone baking “tin” before.  I always had the feeling that putting anything that thin and floppy in a hot oven just didn’t seem right, never mind entrusting  your precious cake mixture to it. 

In the recipe it said use a “generously buttered” tin so to make absolutely certain my friands were not going to stick, I melted some butter and brushed it into the moulds, giving a good coating.

The recipe also said it would make six cakes but the mould had eight holes so I buttered all of them, just in case.  I used my ice-cream scoop to fill the holes evenly and the mixture made seven exactly.  As the mould was floppy, my instinct told me to place it on a baking tray in the oven.

When they were in the oven I watched them like a hawk – I was determined not to burn them this time.  They turned out beautifully – in all ways.  They looked great, tasted delicious and I was most impressed with the silicone mould.  They all came out clean as a whistle.

Next time I need a new baking tin (there must be some shapes and sizes I haven’t got already) I will definitely consider a silicone one.

BLUEBERRY AND LEMON FRIANDS

Ingredients

100g unsalted butter, plus extra for greasing

125g icing sugar, plus extra for dusting

25g plain flour

85g ground almonds

3 medium egg whites

1 unwaxed lemon, grated rind only

85g blueberries

Method

Preheat the oven to 200ºC / 180ºfan.  Generously butter a six-hole friand or muffin tin.

Melt the butter and set aside to cool. 

Sift the flour and icing sugar into a large bowl.  Add the almonds and, using your fingers, mix everything together.

Whisk the egg whites until they make a light, floppy foam.  Make a well in the dry ingredients, tip in the egg whites and lemon rind.  Add the melted butter and lightly stir to make a soft batter.

Divide the mixture evenly between the tins and sprinkle the blueberries on top.

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

Cool in the tins for 5 minutes.  Then turn out and allow to cool completely on a wire rack.  Dust with icing sugar before serving.

Makes 6-7

MY FIRST BROWNIES

Earlier in the year a new face appeared with her own series of cooking programmes on the TV.

Lorraine Pascale is a trained pastry chef and she set about telling us how easy baking is – well she would, wouldn’t she !! If you see anything done by an expert it always looks easy.

Anyway, I liked the look of some of her recipes so I lashed out on the book that goes with the programme and decided to have a go.

I have never made brownies before and thought Lorraine’s recipe looked unusual so this is what I made :

Cookies and cream fudge brownies

The recipe uses lots of eggs, sugar, surprisingly little flour, chocolate and something I had never come across before, Oreo biscuits.

You can see the recipe on the BBC website here.

As it happens, I picked up the ones with the chocolate cream filling rather than the white filling by mistake, not realising there were two types.

You have to break the biscuits into pieces, mix some into the batter then sprinkle the rest on top before putting it into the oven.

The recipe said to put 1/3 of the biscuits in the mixture and 2/3 on top.  I decided to do half and half.

I was a bit concerned that the ones on top would bake dry and become too crunchy, but they didn’t.

My very first brownies, looking exactly like the ones on the telly and the picture in the book.  They were delicious and definitely very easy.

Cookies and cream fudge brownies

Ingredients

165g butter

200g good quality dark chocolate

3 eggs plus 2 egg yolks

2 tsp vanilla extract

165g light soft brown sugar

2 tbslp plain flour

1 tblsp cocoa powder

pinch of salt

1 pack of Oreo biscuits, dark with white cream filling

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°fan/gas mk 4.  Grease and line a 20cm square baking tin.  Leave some paper overlapping the sides.

Grate or chop the chocolate.  Gently melt the butter in a medium pan.  Then take it off the heat and add the chocolate, stirring until smooth.

In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks, eggs and vanilla using an electric mixer until light and fluffy.  Whisk in the sugar in two halves.  Whisk until the mixture starts to stiffen then pour in the chocolate and whisk again.

Add the flour, salt and cocoa powder and stir in.  Break the biscuits roughly into halves and add half of them to the mixture.

Tip the mixture into the tin and level the surface gently so as not to lose your whisked-in air.  Scatter the other half of the broken biscuits on top.  Bake for 25-30 minutes.  They should be just set but soft in the middle.

Leave the cake to cool in the tin.  It will sink and crack on top.  Remove from the tin and cut into squares.  Dust with icing sugar.

Makes 16 brownies, or thereabouts.

CRACKLE COOKIES

 

I spotted a recipe for CRACKLE COOKIES in a recipe book and thought I would like to have a go.  I haven’t made biscuits or cookies of any kind for decades.

You roll little balls of the dough in icing sugar before baking and they crack attractively.  Hmmm……how does that work, I thought.  Surely the sugar browns in the oven, doesn’t it?  However, I looked up crackle cookies on Google and all the entries had similar pictures so it obviously does work.  That was encouraging.

These days, most recipes seem to specify “softened butter”, except of course where you rub the butter in or melt it.  Now there’s a challenge.  I have tried putting the butter on top of the radiator, microwaving it, or just leaving it out of the fridge for a while, all with variable success.  Then I read somewhere recently that the best way is to grate the butter straight from the fridge and that softens it.  This seemed like a lot of faff but actually it only took a few moments and worked a treat.  I will do that every time from now on, as I prefer to use real butter rather than the spreadable stuff from a tub.

You make a fairly stiff mixture then put it in the fridge for a while.  The recipe said 3 hours or overnight.  That was going to be difficult as I had not planned for advance preparation of the mixture.  But then some other recipes on the internet said chill for only 15 minutes, so I chilled it for about 1½ hours.

My recipe then said take tablespoons of the dough, roll it into balls and it makes 60 cookies.  A tablespoonful seemed like an awful lot to me so I used dessert spoonfuls, about the size of a large walnut, and it made 40 !!

You roll the balls in icing sugar and place on greased baking trays without flattening them at all.

They turned out perfect – well, most of them did.  The interesting thing is that those that were baked on my  lovely Pampered Chef baking sheet spread out like biscuits.  I love this baking sheet as it is thick and almost bombproof, but obviously it cooks things differently.  The ones baked on my old cheap and nasty baking trays –( the type that goes ping in the oven within moments of putting it in as it twists and warps ) - stayed cookie-shaped and came out lovely.

Also the ones that had an unfeasibly thick coating of icing sugar retained their white crackled appearance the best.

I’m sure kids would love to make these, all that rolling and getting very sticky and making a mess of the kitchen !!

They were very nice – a slightly crunchy outside and softer inside and you could definitely taste the spice and the nuts.  They were just as good three days later, too. 

Here’s the recipe for CRACKLE COOKIES

Ingredients

125 g unsalted butter, softened

370 g soft light brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 eggs

60 g dark chocolate, melted

80 ml milk

340 g plain flour

2 tsp baking powder

2 tablesp cocoa powder

¼ tsp ground allspice (yes, only ¼)

90 g chopped pecan nuts

icing sugar to coat the cookies

Method

Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla until light and fluffy

Beat in the eggs, one at a time

Stir in the melted chocolate and milk

Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and spice, add a pinch of salt

Stir into the butter mixture, mix well then add the nuts

Chill in the fridge for anything from 1 to 12 hours, depending on how long you can wait !!

Preheat the oven to 180ºC.  Grease two or three baking sheets.

Take dessert spoonfuls of the mixture, roll into balls then roll in icing sugar to give a good coating.

Space well apart on the baking sheets and bake for 20-25 minutes until firm.

Leave on the tray for 3-4 minutes then cool on a rack.

Makes 40 cookies.  They keep for a few days in an airtight tin.

ALMOND AND STRAWBERRY FRIANDS

I have had this book for a few years and have often fancied making the almond and strawberry friands on the front cover – they look really sophisticated, I think.

 

 

 

 

 

 

They contain a lot of egg whites, ground almonds, a small amount of flour and something called “icing sugar mixture”.  I looked this up and apparently it is icing sugar with 3% cornflour added as an anticaking agent.  When I inspected the small print on a packet of regular icing sugar I saw that it had some other anticaking agent added so I just used ordinary icing sugar.

That’s the thing about baking these days.  Recipes come from different continents and often the ingredients are unavailable or you have to do some research.  Google to the rescue.   

They are very simple to make.  You simply mix all the ingredients together briefly as if making muffins.  This produces a very glurpy mixture which you pour into the tin and then scatter the fruit on top.

I didn’t have a friand tin, which produces slightly oval cakes, so I used a muffin tin.  I was a bit nervous about not using muffin cases, convinced that they would stick horribly to the tin and look a mess when I tried to turn them out. 

Then – disaster.  The recipe book suggested a moderately hot oven, which was listed in the glossary as being 200-210º C.  This seemed rather hot but having not made them before I decided to give it a go, making the usual adjustment for a fan oven and keeping my eye on them as they cooked.  Then something distracted me and I took my eye off them for 5 minutes and they were overdone.  Damn.  This was such a shame because they looked so pretty before they went in the oven !!

But, they came out of the tin perfectly.  Six out of the twelve looked fine so I dusted them with icing sugar and served them as planned.  The six that were slightly too dark made a very nice dessert, warmed in the microwave and served with some warm cooked strawberries and custard.

Apparently they are popular in Australia – the recipe was in an Australian Women’s Weekly cookbook – but originated in France as something called “financiers”.  They had a lovely grainy texture and almondy taste.  I will definitely make them again but cook them at a lower temperature and keep my eye on them properly.

I might even invest in a friand tin.

Here’s the recipe for ALMOND AND STRAWBERRY FRIANDS

Ingredients

185butter

125g ground almonds

6 egg whites, beaten lightly

240g icing sugar

75g plain flour

100g strawberries, sliced thinly

Method

Preheat the oven to “moderately hot”.

Melt the butter and allow to cool slightly.

Grease a 12-hole friand tin or muffin tin and stand it on an oven tray.

In a large bowl, mix together all the ingredients except for the strawberries until just combined.

Divide the mixture evenly among the prepared friand tin and arrange the strawberry slices on top.

Bake for 20-25 minutes until risen and golden. 

Cool in the tin for 5 minutes then turn out onto a wire rack.

Dust with icing sugar when completely cool.

CHOCOLATE FINGER CAKE

I decided to make a cake for my mother-in-law’s birthday and I remembered seeing this stunning cake on TV.

It’s from Lorraine Pascal’s TV series and book called “Baking Made Easy” and she made it with chocolate cigarillos around the outside.  I looked for these in the supermarkets and couldn’t find them.  When I looked them up on the internet they seemed very expensive so I decided I would probably never make this cake.  Then I read the bit about using Cadbury’s chocolate fingers instead of cigarillos – a much more affordable alternative.

Lorraine calls the cake “I Can’t Believe You Made That Cake”, saying it gets such a reaction from other people.  I’m going to call it CHOCOLATE FINGER CAKE.   

You make the cake in the usual way, then cut it in half, slice the rounded top off, turn it upside down so the top is perfectly flat.  Then sandwich the two halves together with a layer of buttercream, spread the rest of the buttercream over the top and sides.  Then fix the chocolate fingers (or cigarillos) to the side of the cake, simply by pushing them into the buttercream.  (It was Nick’s idea to use a mixture of milk and white chocolate fingers.)  Pile or arrange raspberries, strawberries or figs into the top of the cake.

It made a very nice 87th birthday tea for my mother-in-law, Sheila.   Also on the table is a delicious honey, date and banana loaf and some flapjacks made by my sister-in-law, Kathy.  Also a batch of my coconut macaroons, with glacé cherries this time and some almond and strawberry friands.  More about those later.

CHOCOLATE FINGER CAKE

Ingredients

200g softened butter

200g caster sugar

4 eggs

140g plain flour

60g cocoa powder

pinch of salt

2 tsp baking powder

2 boxes of chocolate fingers

2 punnets of raspberries or strawberries

For the buttercream

250g softened butter

500g icing sugar

100g 70% cocoa solids dark chocolate, melted and slightly cooled

Method

Grease and line a 20  cm cake tin with baking paper and brush or spray with oil.

Preheat the oven to 180ºC

In an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until creamy. 

Add the eggs and flour in two halves, beating well, until the mixture is light and fluffy. 

Spoon the mixture into the prepared tin and level the top.  

Bake for 30-40 minutes until firm and cooked.  Cool in the tin.

Whilst the cake is baking, start the buttercream.  Melt the chocolate, either in a microwave, in a bowl over a pan of simmering water, or in a small saucepan (if you are very careful).  Allow to cool.

Whilst the chocolate is cooling, beat the butter and icing sugar together until light and fluffy.  Then mix in the melted chocolate. 

To finish the cake, remove the sponge from the tin and split into two.  Slice off the top then turn the cake upside down so the top is the flattest surface.  Sandwich the two halves together with a layer of butter cream.

Spread half of the remaining buttercream on the top and sides of the cake then refrigerate for an hour.  Spread the rest of the buttercream over the first layer.  It doesn’t have to be too smooth and even because it will be hidden by the chocolate fingers and the fruit. 

Fix chocolate fingers to the sides of the cake just by pushing them gently into the buttercream so that they sit at the bottom of the cake and stand up above the top, a bit like a garden fence, to make a well for the fruit.

Either tumble fruit into the well or arrange them prettily, as you like.  Raspberries and strawberries look great.  Sliced peaches would also work - or anything that goes with chocolate.

If you can bring yourself to destroy the beauty of the cake, cut it into 10-12 slices !!

If you would like to see Lorraine’s original recipe, click here.

BANANA AND BLUEBERRY LOAF (and that sinking feeling)

I hate wasting anything and the sight of a couple of elderly bananas in the fruit bowl makes me feel guilty. If they’re past the eating stage then something has to be done with them. A browse through some of my cookbooks produced a Mary Berry recipe for BANANA LOAF from a book called “Simple cakes”.  (The recipe also appears in here more recent book, the Baking Bible.”)

The recipe didn’t have any blueberries in it, just bananas, but as they were also looking slightly tired I decided to put a handful into the mixture to make a banana and blueberry loaf.

It was definitely simple to make and it turned out looking exactly like the picture in the book – which always makes me feel slightly chuffed.

I drizzled some icing onto it and scattered a few gold sprinkles on top just to jazz it up a bit. However, when I cut the first slice I was disappointed to find that most of the blueberries had sunk to the bottom.

Ah well, that will teach me to be so clever.  Perhaps next time I’ll leave the blueberries out, but it tasted lovely anyway. Here’s the recipe for

BANANA AND BLUEBERRY LOAF 

Ingredients

100g softened butter (I used spreadable butter from a tub)

175g caster sugar

2 eggs

2 ripe bananas

a handful of blueberries

225g self-raising flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 tablespoons milk

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°C. Grease and line a loaf tin.

Mash the bananas then put all the ingredients except the blueberries in a large bowl and mix together for about 2 minutes until well blended – an electric whisk or mixer is best for this. You can beat with a wooden spoon but for a little longer.

Add the blueberries and combine until evenly distributed.

Spoon the mixture into the loaf tin, level the top and bake for about one hour until well risen and golden.

Cool in the tin for a few minutes, then remove and peel away the paper. Leave on a wire rack to cool completely.

Decorate with icing and sprinkles if you feel frivolous.  Otherwise just cut a large slice and enjoy with a cup of tea !!

Cuts into 10-12 slices.