Pete Fred

This is Tikvenik, a Bulgarian strudel/pie popular at Christmas... The filling is pumpkin, cinnamon and walnuts... I could have left it in the oven a little longer for better colour, but it had been in a fair while and I was worried the filling was drying out. It was OK but I can't see myself making another.

I don't bother much with Christmas, so I'm not sure why for the last three Christmas Days I've made a steamed Brigade Pudding... As far as I know it has no association with Christmas. But it does have a vaguely mince pie-type filling, so I think that's why it's seemingly become a tradition for me. This year I replaced half the apple chunks with grated quince from one of my trees... Accompanied by lashings of custard, as usual... Joyeux Noël à tous.

"We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Now bring us some figgy pudding, and bring it out here!"... Rather than a Christmas (or plum) pudding, this was an actual fig pudding. I've always thought of them as distinct, but it seems the internet now conflates the two (like in this article, but note the dissent from the Tudor historian.) I liked the presentation. This was old-fashioned, winter stodge at its finest, so custard was obligatory... The recipe is by Regula Ysewijn. I clicked through to her copper pudding basin. Two-hundred bucks! Dear Santa...

Caraway biscuits... I didn't much care for the texture of these. I only mention them because they were lemon and caraway flavoured. Not a combination I can recall having before, but it worked well. I think I'll try it with the almond cookies mentioned a little further up this page... errr, the previous page, it would seem. 🙄

Hmmmm, I think in a proper kitchen I'd probably get a saucepan chucked at my head for too much fussin' and wasting time. However... I still prefer doing it the old-fashioned way, i.e. rolling out a circle and lifting it into the ring, rather than cutting out strips and discs. I'm quite methodical about gradually easing the pastry down into the corners so that it doesn't stretch or introduce folds. Once there's a nice right-angle, I'll kinda work my way around, pulling the pastry away from the ring and pressing it back from the bottom to the top, trying not to trap any air pockets. The excess pastry is then trimmed away with a knife. Some days are better than others, but that's my routine for getting it as smooth as possible. After a rest in the fridge, the tart shell gets blind baked. Press together two or three large sheets of clingfilm (plastic wrap) and line the pastry right into the corners. Fill with rice up to the height of the ring; this is important because, as the pastry cooks it will stay tight against the ring and even grow upwards a little. I like to cook it long with the rice (~40 mins in a 170C/340F oven) until quite set. Carefully use the clingfilm to lift out the rice then return to the oven (150C/300F) for the base to take on some colour (still inside the ring). Remove from the oven and leave to cool fully. The rim of the tart shell will be overcooked, but if you place it on a flat surface (your baking sheet might be a bit wonky) you can trim it away with a microplane until it's perfectly level against the top of the ring. I adjust the blind bake as needed. The custard tart, for example, gets fully blind baked until deep brown and biscuity because the filling is cooked at 90C/190F so the pastry won't take on any more colour. But I held back with the pear tart because the pears were added then cooked at 180C/350F for another 25 minutes and I didn't want the pastry to over-brown (apart from the rim which got microplaned at the end). I've just read all that back and it sounds faintly ridiculous. Saucepans are no doubt bouncing off laptop screens at this very moment, quite rightly. I hope it wasn't too opaque, and there was something in there you found useful. 👍

Steamed Cranberry Pudding... For once, a blogger's hype actually delivered. I don't know what kind of diabolical alchemy is at play here, but it was delicious.

Dorie Greenspan's Pear Tart with Crunchy Almond Topping... I didn't like the look of her pastry so used my own with some ground hazelnuts. I also cooked the pears in more butter, and used Armagnac... because France. It was nice. Next time I'll increase the amount of pears so it fills the tart more generously.

Egg custard tart... This one is made with whole eggs, which means that it definitely tastes 'eggy'; a good thing in my book. I make another one that is really just a crème brûlée mixture in a tart shell; another good thing, just different. (Those striations on the custard, by the way, are where I hesitantly sliced with the knife. I really should be more bold for a clean cut when posting to eGullet!)

I hope I haven't oversold them. At the end of the day they're just a regional variant of amaretti. But they come together in seconds and I find them incredibly moreish. Original recipe here.

Lunch today was a plain cheesecake, zhuzhed up thanks to my stash of sour cherries... I just cooked down their syrup until thickened a little... Earlier in the week I made a gluten-free pain d'epices... After splashing out twenty-bucks a kilo for the chestnut flour I was hoping for more, but the result was decidedly meh. It was sprinkled with a generous quantity of pearl sugar going into the oven but, as you can see, most of it disappeared into the cake. When it comes to spice cakes, I'll be sticking with my beloved Parkin. Brown-butter Oatmeal Raisin Cookes were another bust... The butter was browned with extra milk powder, giving a flavour boost according to the recipe. I was not convinced. Infinitely better were a batch of an old favourite, Pasticcini di Mandorle... These Sicilian almond cookies are ridiculously easy to make and punch well above their weight.

Chocolate hazelnut cake... I made these as small 10cm (4-inch) cakes. The base was gf chocolate hazelnut , and then a baked milk chocolate ganache on top. I should've taken a bit more care with the ganache to avoid the bubbles. It was quite rich; half a cake was plenty for one.

Lemon tart... This is the tarte au citron that was popularised by the Roux brothers in the UK forty-odd years ago, and went on to grace the menus of many fancy restaurants in the following years. Rather than the lemon tarts made with curd (i.e. with butter) that you'll find in every patisserie and bakery in France, this one has a lemon custard that is ethereally light and intensely lemony. Because of the way it's made, there's always a residual bit of pale foam on the surface which looks a little unsightly. The Rouxs dusted theirs with icing sugar to cover it up, and then Marco Pierre White took to brûlée-ing it, which I think looks nicer... I have a neighbour whose favourite is tarte au citron. I'll be interested to see what she makes of this.

I should point out that this is perhaps more of a restaurant tart than the regular bakery kind. It's quite light and creamy. If your memory is of something a little more dense or sticky, then this might not be what you're looking for.

It's a Nathan Outlaw recipe. Be warned: the method is poorly written, but hopefully you can make sense of it. (I scaled up the filling by 1.3333... to fill a 20 x 3.5 cm tart shell.)

My bakes of late seem to be mostly... brown. Treacle tart. I'm not sure anything could be more brown... In an effort to lessen the overwhelming sense of brown, I thought a sprinkling of icing sugar might help... But it was still mostly brown.

Continuing to futz around with la tarte des demoiselles Tatin, I wondered how far I could push the caramelisation. The answer, it would seem, is "too far"... 😬 The lighting makes it look worse than it was, but not by much. It was pretty carbonised and some of the apples caught on the pan. I started this one on the hob, perhaps a little too aggressively... Lesson learned. So I reined myself in somewhat, and was a touch more conservative with the next one... No pan shaking this time; the apples held their shape and released nicely... The black flecks are from homemade vanilla sugar (caster sugar blitzed with spent vanilla pods) and this was an excellent addition. I'll be doing that again. So that's my Tatin curiosity satisfied for the time being. (Although I've never made one with a shortcrust pastry base, so I might see what that's like, just for giggles.)

I thought I was doing an OK job keeping mine clean(ish), but yours is spotless! 😮

It's about 33 (L) x 26 (W) cm (13" x 10"). I can only really do one thing at a time, otherwise the temperature drops too rapidly or the item is too close to the exposed elements for even cooking. So it's one tray of cookies or a 23 cm (9") cake, and no more. But despite its limitations, I'd heartily recommend one to anyone who thinks it might suit their needs.

I couldn't find one designed to fit a smaller oven, so I just took an angle grinder to a regular sized one... But it wasn't particularly successful. The oven's not that powerful so the stone took an age to get hot, and with the current energy prices in Europe I couldn't justify the additional expense of preheating it.

Circumstance dictated that I start using one. Fifty bucks from Lidl... Having never used one before, I thought it was gonna be rubbish. But I was wrong; it does the job admirably. You live and learn.

Staff note: This post and responses to it have been moved from the Your Daily Sweets: What Are You Making and Baking? (2017 – ) discussion, to maintain topic focus. My oven is just the small, tabletop toaster variety, so it's a constant battle of wills between me and it to get decent results. If you could come up with a theory of how I get a better one, that'd be great. 😉

I was reading a chef's feed recently and he said that when making Tarte Tatin they just assemble it uncooked in the pan and whack it in the oven. Ninety minutes later, job done. I've always started it on the hob first to get the caramel going, so I figured I'd give it a go and see if I could skip a step. There didn't seem much point in making my own puff pastry for a test, so I just used the stuff from the supermarket... I was encouraged. The apples held their shape nicely, but they were far too anaemic for my liking. With Tatins, I prefer mahogany over beechwood. So another trolley-dash for apples and puff, and a couple of oven and timing adjustments later... Better, but still not quite right. I was disappointed that the apples lost their shape in places and turned a bit mushy, but I think that was my fault. I was worried they might stick, so I regularly gave the pan a swirl and a shake to loosen. I think the jiggling made them collapse, and if I'd just left them alone they'd have been fine.

I made a couple of loaves of brioche the other day... One of them got turned into Bostock... It's similar to an almond croissant, a way for bakeries to use up unsold brioche: soak slices with a simple syrup (orange flower water in this instance), spread with almond cream, top with flaked almonds, and bake until golden. It's a combination of crispy, toasty edges, with a soft and cakey topping, and a moist, buttery inside... It's one of my favourite things to make and eat. I don't see it too often in French bakeries. Almond croissants, yes; bostock, no. I suppose I'll just have to carry on making my own.

I took my go-to Cherry Coconut Pistachio Cake to a lunch get-together at the weekend. It was a hit. I was hoping there'd be leftovers, but no such luck. Thankfully, I'd recently stockpiled enough cherries to ride out a nuclear winter... So I elected not to deprive myself... I give most of my bakes away, but this one earns its place in the freezer.

Hmmm, good question. I'm not sure. To me, a mousse contains eggs in some form. In this particular instance, Hervé This' original description of 'chocolate chantilly' seems correct. I think Heston called it a mousse because, as well as the mousse-like texture, English-speakers would know the term, whereas chantilly is a little less familiar.