Green and Black's Lemon Tart

So, following a week of baking, what could be better than to spend the weekend baking?! 

Towards the end of the last year I went to the pub, and happily met someone else with the same passion for baking, and the same name! We decided therefore to do some experimental baking. Last time we met we successfully made swiss rolls and so decided to continue to expand our baking repertoire. Today we made lemon and chocolate tart from the Green & Blacks Organic Cookbook. We did our usual post-baking discussion and general analysis of our creation and decided that this was an interesting one.

It's an odd selection of tastes, and I think the mini one that we made with the leftover pastry probably tasted better. We used the same recipe, but there was less lemon as the edges of the pastry sank a bit and the middle rose a little when it was blind baked. As a result the bitterness of the lemon was more tempered by the sweetness of the chocolate and pastry. The larger tart is better at the edges where there is more pastry. Were I to make it again I think it would probably benefit from more sugar in the lemon. Somehow it got more bitter as it cooled, not sure why that would be though! 

So, here's the recipe (as far as I can remember, I must admit I didn't make a note of it). Due to time restraints (Hannah leaving for dancing) we only left the pastry for chill for a fairly short amount of time, and filled it while still warm. I'm not sure what difference it would make to leave it to cool completely but it seemed to work fine!

Chocolate pastry - quite tasty, needs the icing sugar though, otherwise it's quite bitter.

6oz plain flour

1oz cocoa

1oz icing sugar

4 1/2oz butter

1 egg yolk

2tbsp cold water

75g dark chocolate, grated.

1. Make breadcrumb-type mixture of cocoa, flour and icing sugar. 

2. Mix egg yolk and water and pour in to dry ingredients

3. Bring together to a dough, using that mixture, plus some extra water

4. Wrap in greaseproof paper and chill for 1 hour. 

5. Roll out and line tin, prick bottom and chill for 2 hours. 

6. Cover in foil and pour in beans, bake at 200C for 15 mins

7. Remove foil and cook for further 5 mins. 

8. Sprinkle 75g grated chocolate over base while still warm. 

9. Leave to cool.

Filling:

5oz caster sugar

3 lemons, zest and juice

4 eggs

150ml double cream

1. Finely grate zest, and squeeze lemons

2. Mix lemon zest and juice with caster sugar, whisk together until sugar dissolves

3. Add eggs and cream and mix until smooth. 

4. Pour into cooled pie crust and bake for 30-35 mins at 160C. 

5. Leave to cool, then sprinkle with icing sugar.

(Alternatively if making the mini version we blind baked the pastry with foil for 10 mins, then without for around 5 I think. Then sprinkle choc on as with larger version, leave to cool, pour in lemon filling and bake for 15 mins, and check is set firm)

And then, mmm, tasty goodness! 

Chocolate fairy cakes

This week has been rubbish! Which is probably why I've made langue du chat biscuits, bakewell tarts and an experimental set of chocolate fairy cakes. I've been reading some other baking blogs, and realising that they're very useful for tips etc, so I shall endeavour to follow their instructive example. 

The bakewell tarts worked ok (though apparently you can't call them that unless they're made in Bakewell - I don't think anyone will sue me though?!), though the pastry still needs improving. I suspect I might be trying to improve my pastry skills for a very long time! I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong - I'll write about it in detail at some point and perhaps someone will point out an obvious error. Langue du chat biscuits didn't work either - will post again once I make them again and succeed!

I got home from work this evening feeling that all I could do was eat chocolate and watch a film. I did, however, successfully eat some leftover bolognaise (particularly important after my lunch of a carrot and a creme egg…), and then decided that rather than just eating piles of chocolate I would instead make chocolate fairy cakes and then eat them!

So, here is my account of my not-altogether-successful fairy cake creations, as I grow ever more frustrated as I try to make a decent sponge cake. Having made sponge cakes fairly regularly from the age of 7 I appear to have suddenly lost the knack. What's that about? I beat the butter and sugar, then beat in the eggs one at a time and once again it CURDLED. I'm so annoyed! I am entirely determined that I shall at some point successfully make a sponge cake without it curdling. It never fully recovered to be honest, but the cakes taste good, as I was intending them to be a bit more squishy than normal. I decided to try using soft brown sugar instead of caster, and substituting ground almonds from 1 oz of flour.

So, in case you want to make them, here's the recipe:

6 oz soft brown sugar

6 oz marg

4 oz self raising flour

1 oz cocoa

1 oz ground almonds

3 eggs

Preheat oven to 180C

The instructions (that I seem incapable of following at the moment) are:

1. Cream together the marg and sugar until light and fluffy

2. Add eggs one at a time (using at room temp remember, not that that helped me!) following each with a spoonful of flour

3. Fold in the flour making sure mixture is nice, light and airy!

4. Spoon into fairy cake cases and bake for 15 mins at 180C

For the icing I mixed together some choc (that had a little bit of oil added as it was leftovers from a chocolate fountain), with a bit of butter. I believe it was supposed to go harder when left to cool, and therefore spreadable, but that didn't quite work (possibly due to aforementioned oil) so I sifted in some icing sugar. 

So, want to bet I'll be having another go soon? I dislike being beaten by sponge cakes, particularly, as I said, because I've been making them for about 18 years, so they really should behave themselves. 

Lemon Truffle Pie (and Rock Cakes)

Well, the tarts and sponge cake were all happily eaten by work colleagues, my small group and my brother's small group! I resolved to do less baking, but then I had a friend coming… So, come Friday night, in my typical party animal style, I cleaned my flat. Once I'd cleaned my flat, hoovered, dusted, done the washing up and cleaned the bathroom (aren't you proud ;)) rung my parents and my cousin, I suddenly realised there was no cake in the house and I had someone coming round. As it was heading for 10pm I decided that rock cakes were definitely the way to go. They're so easy to make and so tasty, unlike the other things I have no photos as they're just too run of the mill. I just use the recipe from Bero cook book:

Rock Cakes

8 oz Self raising flour

4 oz marg

1 pinch salt (that I never bother to add)

3 oz mixed dried fruit

1 oz mixed peel (I always add extra as it's my favourite bit)

2 oz caster sugar (granulated works pretty much as well though, just gives a different texture)

1 egg

Milk to mix

Heat oven to 200C/Gas Mark 6

1. Rub in fat to flour til breadcrumb-ish

2. Stir in dried fruit, mixed peel and sugar

3. Mix in egg and bit of milk till still dough

4. Put in blobs onto tray and cook for 10-15 mins (always check after 10 though!)

Happily the rock cakes have mostly been disposed of by me and my friend, and by sending some home with my lovely friend who had come to visit me from Oxford! We had a most pleasant day, catching up, drinking tea, having a wander around Warwick and then deciding to make pie. Now, this pie is a recipe (once again) that I found at work and copied down with some details missing…. So we had fun trying to understand them. I shall recreate them for you as clearly as possible here because the pie was TASTY. As we couldn't wait for it to cool completely we had to eat it when it was still a little bit runny but once it was refrigerated it worked very well, and provided a picturesque slice which I duly photographed!

So, I hadn't a previously cooked pie crust so I made it so we filled it while still warm, which didn't seem to make any difference in the end. I just used sweet shortcrust pastry (8oz flour, 4oz marg, 1 oz caster sugar, water to mix)

Now, the odd thing about this recipe is that you mix 6oz sugar with 2tbsp of cornflour (I had missed the flour out of the ingredients list so its in the instructions but I had no idea how much to put in so I just missed it out!) with 8 fl oz water. What happens is that you end up with a pale white mixture which you heat for ages and then suddenly globules of something jelly like appear in it. Then the rest of the mix suddenly almost solidifies, goes clear and jelly like. It's very, very weird but quite cool. I'd like to know the science behind it because I've never seen any other mixture do it. Anyway, that part of the mixture worked well. The egg yolks were added safely, once we'd mixed some of the freaky mix with them before adding it all back to the mix so they didn't scramble. Then the lemon juice and zest - I added the zest of a whole lemon, because I'm a fan of lemony stuff, and it tasted good in the end. 

Now I had no idea what the cream was for as this I'd left in the ingredients but NOT put in the method. So, when I made the choc mix, by taking some of the lemony, freaky mixture and adding the choc, I added some cream. I think it was probably unnecessary though, though next time I'd probably add a bit of milk to make it easier to melt the chocolate without burning it.. Still feeling extremely full as its moreish and light and lemony but then kinda suddenly hits the bottom of your stomach and you feel like you'll be full forever. Probably not helped by the yummy tea that we made of sliced potatoes with cream, milk, butter, bacon and cream cheese with brie on top. Our poor arteries….. Never mind, I'll be nice to them next week. So here's the recipe of the semi-complicated pie, which I have adjusted slightly due to my errors! I can't for the life of me remember where I got the recipe from - will have to start taking notes, otherwise I'll just be pinching people's recipes which was definitely not my intention!

Lemon Truffle Pie

1 baked pie crust, cooled

6 oz sugar

2tbsp cornflour

8fl oz water

2 yolks, beaten

1 tbsp marg

Grated lemon zest of 1 lemon

Juice of 1 lemon

6 oz white choc chips

8 oz light cream cheese

1. Combine sugar, cornflour and flour and mix well - mysterious flour that I left out the ingredients, I think it might be 2 tbsp flour too, might be completely wrong on that, but I can't think it would destroy the world to add it!

2. Stir in water till smooth. Cook over medium heat till boils, stir constantly. - at this point it goes suddenly freaky 

3. Reduce heat, cook for 2 mins, stirring constantly. 

4. Remove from heat, stir some of the mixture into the egg yolks, blend well. 

5. Add egg yolk mix back into pan. Cook over heat till mixture boils, cook for 2 mins, stirring constantly. 

6. Remove from heat, add marg, lemon peel and juice. 

7.Transfer 3fl oz of hot filling to a small saucepan. Add white choc chips (and a bit of cream or milk) and stir until melted. (leave the rest of the mixture to cool for 15 mins)

8. Beat cream cheese till fluffy, add melted chocolate mix, beat until blended. Spread over bottom of pie shell. Spoon lemon mix over cream cheese layer, refrigerate till set.

Chocolate and Mixed Berry Tarts

So, having made my start, here's the first post of my baking antics. I must admit straight off that I like working out and 'adjusting' and creating recipes, so I am sure that there will be numerous attempts at all of these recipes!

One of the things I've been meaning to do is a deeply geeky test of sponge cake methods. Make one the all-in-one method and the other by the 'proper' method with creaming butter and sugar etc. and then do a blind taste test! In this endeavour I started on Sunday by attempting to make a cake the proper way - but the eggs curdled! Apparently because the eggs weren't room temperature when used but straight from the fridge - and the result of curdled eggs is a heavier cake. So, as soon as that happened I just put everything else in and made it by the all-in-one method. So a slight failure, in making one half way between the two. The cake was good though, and the test shall happen again soon!

I spend most of my time at work looking at recipes - due to the intense tedium of my job, particularly if the systems are down so I can't do any work, which seems to happen more often than not! I find recipes, note them down - usually missing out vital parts it seems, and I found a recipe for chocolate tarts. 

Having watched 'The Waitress' recently (such a fun film, and definitely a film that'll make you want to bake!), there was a pie involving lots of chocolate and berries, so I thought I'd try and combine the two ideas. 

So, I went with the chocolate tart recipe for pastry:

4oz butter

8oz flour

2tbsp caster sugar

2tbsp ground almonds

1 egg

2-3 tbsp water

Made in the usual manner and left to rest in the fridge, something I've recently discovered seems to be necessary

The chocolate tart part:

10oz dark choc

3 eggs

1/2 oz caster sugar

2 1/2 fl oz double cream

You melt the choc. 

Beat eggs and sugar together until pale

Then stir everything together

I also bought some mixed frozen berries (Sainsbury's basics ftw), defrosted and crushed them, mixed some cornflour, added it to the berries and heated till the juices thickened.

So, I rolled and cut out the pastry, spooned a bit of the berry mix into each one and then spooned in the chocolate mixture. Now, the instructions I wrote down said to cook for 10-15 mins at 190C until just set. Now, at just over 10 mins, the edge ones were very slightly burnt and they'd risen a bit which I wasn't expecting. So, I think next attempt I must put in less mix and cook on a lower heat, maybe 170-180C. Possibly even pre-baking the pastry cases a bit too.

Anyway, they look quite picturesque so hopefully people at work will eat them (and the sponge cake) for me. They taste quite pleasant warm, so I'll have to see what they taste like in the morning. I'm quite intrigued as to how the pastry tastes, it seems somewhat overpowered by the berries and chocolate, but that normally seems the case, so I'm not sure how you tell what's good pastry and what's not! I do have plans to attempt yet another recipe, so I'll post that once I've done :)

So, here endeth the first baking post. Lets see what happens next…..

The Beginning.....

I have been meaning to start writing this blog for some time now. I spend so much of my life baking, and playing with recipes that I wanted to share some of the things I create and some of things I discover. So, despite having no internet connection (I regularly head round to my lovely brother's house in order to pinch his internet), I shall attempt to write my blog entries and then post them up from time to time.

Tomorrow, after work (annoyingly I have to work every other Saturday), I intend to make apple tarts, as I bought some new and exciting tart tins with my Christmas money. I'm also hoping to continue developing my recipe for chocolate and berry tarts. I'll post the results :) And I'm sure my work colleagues will assist me in eating them.