Pete Fred

I made some Singin' Hinnies, mainly out of historical curiosity and the cute name... They were unremarkable. I'll stick with Welsh Cakes for this type of griddlecake (similar, but spiced and sweetened).

I've had a jar of store-bought stuff hanging around for several months... Yesterday I saw a recipe for Preserved Lemon Bars and thought I'd give it a go. Seeing as I was only curious about the lemony bit I just made a small dish of the cream... Possibly because of trying to blitz one lemon with a stick blender, the cream retained some texture rather than being smooth... I've only just noticed that I omitted the flour, so mine was a softer set, but I quite liked the taste, lemon curd-y but 'different'. If you read the comments, however, it seems to have polarised opinion.

A couple of cookies from Jesse Szewczyk's Cookies: The New Classics... Lemon Poppyseed Tea Cookies and Vanilla Sumac Cookies. Both were a bit 'meh'. I like the lemon poppyseed combo but didn't much care for his shortbread so I'll just transfer that profile into one of my regular shortbreads. The sumac cookies didn't pop, spicewise, despite using more than the recipe called for; it was just a basic sugar cookie tasting mainly of vanilla. The vast majority of his recipes seem to contain a tablespoon of vanilla extract. He explains, "I believe it's difficult to overdo it with vanilla". I'm all for using vanilla as a seasoning in most cookies, but if I make anything else from this book I'll be a little more circumspect with the quantity.

It's simply an egg-white baked custard. I mentioned it here a few months back. There's additional info in the article linked in that post. Anna Higham's original recipe employs a water bath but I don't bother, just going with 90C/195F until set. I guess that might result in a slightly more noticable 'crust' but I quite like the clotted cream feel to it. (BTW, if you have a combi/steam oven she recommends 90C with 60% moisture at fan 3). I go with a ratio of around 20% egg whites to cream (30-35% fat), sweetened with a finger-scoop of sugar (or maple syrup, honey, etc.). So typically that'd be: 70g egg white (2 whites), 375g cream, 20g sugar. I like the smooth texture and cream-forward flavour, but often it's just a way of using up a couple surplus of egg whites!

Strawberry spoon cake... This was featured on a recent list of NYT reader favourites. I wasn't expecting much, given the basic ingredients, but it turned out to be more than the sum of its parts. The strawberries turned a little jammy, and the crusty edges contrasted nicely with the soft sponge. (Even the truly awful frozen strawberries I was forced to use didn't seem to spoil the party.) I had some vanilla baked cream in the fridge so paired it with that... Warm cake, cold cream, job done. But I'm now kicking myself having just looked back at the article accompanying the recipe and it mentions a drizzle of balsamic syrup. This would've been an ideal candidate for the real deal that I picked up earlier this summer. Didn't even cross my mind. 🤬 (Having said that, I'll be waiting until next year for much better strawberries.)

Not in English, but I'm sure your browser can lend a hand. Recipe here. Substitute a strong flour. Cassonade is brown sugar. I modified the method slightly, weighing out 80g of the chilled dough and rolling with a pin. Bon chance!

I'm continuing experimenting with my recently gifted waffle maker. This time, Liège waffles... It's a Pierre Hermé recipe, basically a brioche dough with lots of added pearl sugar. Crispy and caramelised outside, buttery and chewy inside. Rather good.

Circling back to a couple of regulars in my repertoire. Tarte au Citron... And gâteau Basque... This was a departure from my usual recipe (which itself is not exactly traditional). I met a friend of a friend who turned out to be Basque herself, and she gave me her amatxi's (grandmother's) recipe, or at least as best she could remember it. I'm not entirely sure her recollection was accurate because the cake element was more like an extra-buttery Breton sablé (cookie). But then again, her memory might be spot-on because it was absolutely delicious.

In terms of meringue, some useful info on Kitchen Projects.

I used one of Pierre Hermé's. In English here (with some actually useful tips on technique) or in French (with egg quantities in grams).

I think the reason the Cassonade canelé won this mini taste test was because it was manufactured in the shop. You can see them being made and baked from the street, and with good timing you can get your hands on a freshly made one. Baillardran and Toque seem to be outlets supplied from a central manufactory, which possibly accounts for them being past their best. I also visited several independent bakeries on my pastry tour but the canelés didn't cut it, either being made in silicone moulds or in some other way looking unappealing.

As this appears to be the most currently active canelé thread, I'll put this here, in lieu of the Mods finding a better home. I passed through Bordeaux recently and took the opportunity to sample a few canelés in the city of their birth. The two big players in town are Baillardran... and La Toque Cuivrée... Both were quite disappointing with chewy exteriors and pasty insides. I marginally preferred the Toque due to a stronger rum flavour, but there wasn't much between them. The Toque, however, was remarkably inexpensive at just €0.75, whereas the Baillardran was a total rip-off at €3.10. Better was the offering from Cassonade... This at least retained a hint of crunchiness in the shell, had decent flavour, and the inside was less gummy. These were €2 a pop. All three may have improved with a quick refresh in the oven, but if you're simply a tourist passing through then I'm afraid it's slim pickings (unless you remembered to pack an air-fryer in your luggage). Weirdly, I think you're more likely to find a good canelé in North America, or Tokyo or Sydney than you are in France. They're no big deal over here, just another commodity product, sometimes at exorbitant prices - I'm looking at YOU Baillardran 🫵.

French custard tart goes by several names (flan Parisien, flan pâtissier, flan nature). It's a cheap 'n' cheerful staple in most bakeries, seemingly made with a box mix most of the time. So it's a treat to make one with real vanilla... I prefer mine on the creamier side with quite a dark top for that burnt milk flavour, which means a relatively quick blast in a very hot oven. The only downside is the thin layer of what looks like undercooked pastry on the base. I think it's cooked, just not coloured. Even the fancy flans of Paris seem live with it. Anyway, the pastry around it is so well cooked and crunchy that you'd never know. (I think I tried blind baking in the past but ultimately decided it wasn't worth it.)

Maxime Frédéric's Île flottante/Œufs à la neige (Floating islands/Snow eggs)... I'm not sure that a picture of the insides of a meringue brings any extra information but... This was delightful. Before getting a quick flash in the oven the meringue is dusted with icing sugar, resulting in a delicately thin crust. It's like eating a crispy cloud. You can watch him make it here.

Chocolate Buckwheat Truffle Cookies (recipe)... If cake-brownie is your thing then go for it. But not for me. I found them better cold from the fridge when a little chewier. (And I actually preferred the raw batter; kinda like a dense chocolate mousse. Go figure.) A batch of The World's Best Cookie... A bold claim. They turned out to be, indeed, very good... These might be of interest to @ElsieD who is searching for her Platonic crispy, oatmeal coconut cookie. In the recipe linked above, the volume measures are from the book. I don't do cups, and didn't like the look of a couple of Heidi's conversions, so I did my own. It's so nice when something actually lives up to the hype for a change.

I had a pot of plum and vanilla jam from last year that I was looking to repurpose. I found a recipe for a steamed suet pudding lurking in a folder and thought I'd give it a go, even though I could kinda tell it probably wouldn't amount to much. The sponge contained ground almonds (almond flour) which I don't recall having in this sort of thing before, and the jam was stirred into the batter rather than lining the bottom of the pudding bowl. It looks quite plain... Unfortunately it tasted quite plain, too. The jam flavour was pretty invisible, and the texture was a bit dry and heavy for a steamed pudding. I managed to perk things up with a jug of custard and a dousing of plum caramel, but I won't be bothering again...

You can view it on the Wayback Machine. 👍

I made the brioche earlier this week so that I could stale it for a few days, all the better for soaking up the orange flower syrup in this bostock... The almond cream on top was spiked with a generous amount of rum. And because it's been more than a week since I posted a Gateau Basque and @Katie Meadow will be suffering withdrawal symptoms... I was curious if unblanched almonds would add anything (spoiler: not really). Plus, the bottle of rum was now open so that found its way into the custard.

I had 250g of surplus brioche dough so decided to turn it into a small tear-and-share* loaf... I love warm brioche straight from the oven but then I remembered I still had some of the plum caramel from a couple of weeks back. A good dredging later... *there was no sharing, just tearing.

I posted a couple of links a few months back (although the Bruno video seems to have now disappeared). But most recipes seem to be broadly similar, so I doubt you can go wrong. A regular pastry cream is fine; I just seem to have settled on this slightly different one, and I use a larger quantity than is usual. You should make one. It's a good cake, and pretty straightforward.

Gâteau Basque... I've posted several in the past, so for those suffering Basque-fatigue I've left the pretty French countryside in the background for added interest. The little granules in the filling are down to it being a semolina crème pâtissière. Belgian friends were passing through whilst château-hunting and gifted me a book covering their part of the world... In the past I've flirted with the idea of getting a waffle maker but ultimately never bothered, figuring any initial enthusiasm would soon fade and it'd just languish in the cupboard. The book has several variations of Belgian waffles so I told my friends that maybe this will spur me on. I sent them away with some macarons (I think I got the better end of that swap)... A few days later I received a text... And they didn't just turn up with a toothless nonagenarian's best wishes. Oh no, they also had one of these... Apparently, this was languishing in the cupboard (obviously!) of their airbnb host, Madeleine, a barely used gift from her grandkids. Dazzled by my macarons, and saddened to hear of my waffle maker hesitancy, she figured it would be better off going to a good home instead. And so I made my first waffle... Having zero experience, the first ladleful (right) was slightly misjudged, but the second (left) wasn't too bad. I was getting in the swing of things by the next batch... The batter wasn't sweetened, so a generous dusting of icing sugar was recommended... I don't think I've had a freshly made waffle before, so the hot, crispy shell and soft, airy inside was a bit of a revelation... Even better with vanilla whipped cream... So thanks to Madeleine my waffle adventure has begun. As a small thank you, my friends headed back with a chunk of gateau Basque for her to suck on.

Good to know. If I come across some decent peaches I'll give it a go.

I made some scones... For an English cream tea, it always feels wrong to use crème fraîche but you've gotta make do with what you've got... Not wishing to offend any Cornwallians who might be reading*, the other half got flipped... *are you a top or a bottom 🤔

I used mirabelles.

Apologies for the continuing Mira-pocalypse but every day or two there's another kilo or so lying on the ground. They'd otherwise just go to the wasps. Today's went into a German Plum Cake... I believe there are many regional variations; this one had a bread dough base and a streusel topping... I liked the yeasty flavour, the bready texture and the crunchy crumble topping. I'd like to try it with some bigger, deep red plums next time make it pop more visually. It was a good cake, especially with some of the plum caramel from yesterday...