Pete Fred

Tarte au riz et aux amandes croustillantes (rice pudding and crunchy almond tart) from an old (errr... 90s) Christine Ferber recipe... Rice pudding is enriched with egg, egg yolk, crème fraîche and butter, then combined with almond cream; the flaked almonds are mixed with egg white and icing sugar and baked until golden and crunchy. It was fine but another one that's less than the sum of its parts. I'd have preferred the rice pudding on its own with an almond cake chaser, to be honest.

I rarely eat pasta but have recently been on a cacio e pepe trip after noticing that my local supermarket started carrying the bronze die pasta that @weinoo mentioned, with its starch enhancing benefits. A couple of Serious Eats articles I read are nothing new-new, but speak to this subject. And re-reading them just now, I'm curious to give the pre-soaking method a go. (The original Ideas in Food blog is now closed, but 1-minute pasta is discussed here, as well as a couple of other hacks.)

Possibly the buzziest pub restaurant in London at the moment is The Devonshire. I heard the chef owner on a podcast mention the sticky toffee pudding, and was curious to give it a go (recipe here)... Oops, forgot its bonnet... I wasn't sure what to make of the texture; very light and moist, and not really like a traditional STP sponge. I thought it was operator error on my part - the batter didn't look right - but I found a couple of instances online where you get a decent look at the crumb, and mine doesn't look too dissimilar, so maybe that's how it's supposed to be. I still can't decide if it's actually great, or just a bit weird. (Interestingly, a Tom Kerridge recipe I made a couple of years ago is remarkably similar but employs a different procedure and baking method, as well as having a bit less liquid and using suet as the fat rather than butter.) The toffee sauce was good, the gelatine giving it a really nice gloss and body. Purely for illustrative purposes I mocked up another plate but didn't eat it, obviously...

Lemon polenta cake... I forgot the baking powder but it didn't seem to make much of a difference. I like dense almond cakes drenched in syrup anyway, so this was a happy accident. I make this fairly regularly whenever life gives me lemons. It's a Nigella Lawson recipe, but I think she just added a soaking syrup to The River Cafe's version, and they got it from any one of a thousand nonnas back in the old country.

All purpose flour: ½ cup + 1 tablespoon + 1¼ teaspoons Oui, chef! Also, don't forget you can dilute 10⁄11 of a shaftment of fresh yeast in 1⁄32 of a pottle of water if you don't have instant yeast.

Some more waffles... These were yeast raised. The blobs, plum caramel.

I made some canelés yesterday for visitors... This afternoon's adventure in baking was a splendidly titled Gossiping Cake from the 17th Century... In these modern times, we'd think of it more as a spiced bread than a cake, similar to a hot cross bun. It was perfectly pleasant, but next time I'd use more fruit, and, rather than a round, do it as a loaf or as individual buns. But having said that, other than the charming name and backstory, there's no real reason to make it again.

@Smithy I've only made malva pudding once, and it was as little cupcakes (recipe). But now it's starting to turn chilly, a nice big one, warm and with plenty of hot custard could be in my future. Pudding pusher. 🫵

There was nothing actively wrong with it, but tossing apple wedges in butter and sugar (and cinnamon and booze!) to caramelise, and served with a nice crème anglaise, would've been the same amount of effort and achieved something similar... but better.

The Guardian recently ran an article where an American writer tried his hand at making some endangered British puddings (i.e. dessert rather than starch thickened custard). His favo(u)rite was Malvern pudding, which is simply apples and custard. My trees had three apples left on them - exactly what was needed, it turns out. So, having never made Malvern pudding before, I was compelled to give it a try... It was fine, but ultimately no alchemy ocurred to make it more than the sum of its parts.

@ElsieD Yes, delicately crispy on the outside, light and fluffy inside. (If holding, transfer to a wire rack to avoid soggyness. Refresh briefly in a toaster/grill if you like.) I'll let you judge the level of crispness here. You can watch him make them here.

@AAQuesada I'm by no means a seasoned waffle-ist, having only inherited a cheap 'n' cheerful machine last year. These are by François Perret and are what I make when I've an excess of egg whites. Here's a French/English video that's pretty straightforward, and the YouTube subtitles are fine. In my small machine for six waffles: 125g flour, 25g sugar, 3g salt, 150g milk, 75g butter, 140g egg whites (four).

I had a dozen egg whites in the fridge demanding to be used up rather than thrown away, so breakfast yesterday was waffles... With the machine still out on the counter come dinner time, and six whites left, I thought what the heck and made some more... ...this time accompanied by spiced fig compote and faisselle (fromage frais) sweetened with the poaching syrup from last week's pear tart. With multiple bags of egg whites already stashed in the freeer, I wisely put the waffle iron back in the cupboard to avoid further temptation. In between, were these sesame and spelt cookies... The inclusions were dried figs and white chocolate... It was a pleasant cookie. Rolling them in sesame seeds didn't add anything flavourwise, but seemed to make them spread more. Next time I'll use more chocolate, and bake a little longer for crisper edges.

Hey @Pete Fred, this is you calling yourself from the future with the answer. It turns out you couldn't detect any difference, apart from colour... As you now know, that's your regular canelé up top, and the same recipe with the different sugar and flour below. So what have we learned? Not much really, except that canelés are damn tasty. But you already knew that, didn't we?

Another addition to my unending list of plain brown cakes: Rose Levy Beranbaum's Whipped Cream Cake (YouTube)... This is the third WCC I've tried, after Richard Sax and King Arthur. They all have slightly different methods, and the RLB has about 1.5x the cream. I'm a fan of WCC, and this was pleasant, but the Sax one is the best of the bunch. I had it with some figs, and caramelised apple purée whipped into strained fromage blanc...

Fergus Henderson's Apple and Calvados Cake has been sitting in my to-do folder for literally years. Instead of watching my apples rot on the ground, I decided today was the day to finally cross it off the list. Rather than make his comically giant version, I scaled things down somewhat and made a couple of 10 cm (4-inch) ones... It was pleasant, reminding me of other French apple cakes which are mostly apple bound by a small amount of batter, although this was a bit more more cakey. The apples kept it nice and moist, but the dominant flavour was the spicing (cinnamon and cloves). In the restaurant, they give it a cider and Calvados soak, so maybe that's what I was missing.

I have an old pear tree that somehow manages to spit out a handful of gnarly looking specimens every year, which inevitably end up in a Tarte Bourdaloue... The pears were poached with star anise and tonka, the almond cream punched up with some mahleb.

Sourdough Chocolate Chip Cookies by Edd Kimber... They were fine. A way of using up sourdough discard, I suppose, but I'm not sure it brings anything to the party.

I made a couple of brioche, one to give away, and one so that I could make fig leaf bostock... I toasted a bunch of fig leaves; some got blitzed into a powder and added to the almond cream, the rest were used to flavour the syrup for the brioche. It was good. I'll make some more powder and syrup for future use.

On the previous page I linked to a video of the Cassonade cannelé shop in Bordeaux who make theirs with T80 flour (less refined) and cassonade sugar (also less refined). I was curious how this would compare to my regular recipe (adapted from Pierre Hermé). So, Cassonade at the back, Hermé in front... The Cassonade ones took a little longer to colour evenly (5-10 mins). There wasn't much difference in appearance outwardly, except the Hermé were ever so slightly taller... The Cassonade were a shade more beige inside, presumably from the sugar... The Hermé were a touch more yellow, presumably helped by the extra yolk... Flavour-wise, it wasn't a huge difference. The Cassonade tasted 'browner' somehow, but I doubt in a blind test I'd be able to put my finger on the specific flour or sugar. Texture was where things got interesting. The Cassonade had a crisper shell, but the inside was more dense and not as soft and creamy as the Hermé. I don't think the crispness was down to the slightly extended cooking time, because that tends to make the shells thicker and crunchier rather than pleasingly crisper (hard to explain!). Overall, I still preferred the Hermé textural contrast between inside and out, but the Cassonade shell was good, so maybe I'll punch T80 and brown sugar into Hermé's recipe and see if I get the benefit.

Salted butter caramel macarons... There was a bunch of meringue left over so I baked that off and folded it through some mascarpone whipped cream for a peach and sumac Eton Mess (inspiration here)... Lemon and Poppy Seed Bars by Melissa Clark (YouTube)... There were highs and lows with this one. They smelled and tasted absolutely divine, but I was not enamoured of the texture and mouthfeel. She describes it as a pound cake/cookie-bar hybrid, but for me it fell into a weird no man's land between the two, kinda like an underbaked shortbread crossed with an overmixed cake. However, all was not lost. I stuck 'em in the fridge for a few hours, which transformed them from claggy and cloying to something with a bit of bite. Not bad at all; in fact, pretty good. Judging by the comments in the NYT article, the texture thing doesn't seem to be an issue for others, so don't let me put you off.

@AAQuesada I listened yesterday evening while on stage 32 of Botrytis Cinerea. I'm struck by how 'different' he sounds these days. He's made several appearances in UK media recently discussing his mental health problems, and seems noticably medicated at times. Hopefully he's back on track after some dark times.

@Dr. Teeth This guy has been to many of London's higher-end Chinese restaurants multiple times. Something in his timeline might catch your eye.

Spiced crumble plum cake... The plums were reine claude (greengages) from a nearby tree, and the crumble spices were cardamom, all spice, and sumac. Served with a healthy dollop of mahleb whipped mascarpone cream, it was a big hit.

@Smithy For the pastry cream, I infused the milk overnight with toasted fig leaves (~50g for 500g milk). I was first turned on to it by Nicola Lamb's Substack, and Edd Kimber has recently done a post on it, too. Edited to add: It's the toasting of the fig leaves that takes it over the top for me, giving a grassy, coconutty flavour that is totally unexpected.