Pete Fred

I can't remember the last time I had a rock cake (similar to a US scone, perhaps 🤷‍♂️)... Delightful. Will be making more of these. Less successful were these cheese, anchovy and chilli biscuits (UK biscuit)... Tasted good, but the texture wasn't quite right. I'll be sticking with Nigella's parmesan shortbreads for this kind of thing. And I wanted to test a tarte au citron filling: the one Heston Blumenthal made in the early days of The Fat Duck when it was more of a French bistro. Rather than make a full batch I scaled everything down to ring-sized and brûléed it... In effect, a lemon crème brûlée. Errrr... lembrûlée?

Yet another custard tart (sorry)... I changed up the pastry for something a little shorter, more of a sablée dough; and the custard was essentially a crème brûlée mix. French cream is lighter than what I would ordinarily use, so I really should've thrown in an extra yolk or two for a richer mouthfeel. For those who appreciate a nice wobble...

Another steamed figgy pudding... I had some fig jam that a friend made last year, so that turned into a nice sticky topping. Overall, I preferred this to the last one; less fuss but equally tasty. For anyone with an account at the Internet Archive, the recipe is in English Puddings: Sweet and Savoury by Mary Norwak.

@ElsieD Thanks. I'm not sure that it's 'unusually silky', but it's otherwise as described (not that I've tried her grandma's Jell-O!).

Stella Parks has a recipe for pastry cream (or pudding) that uses just egg whites. Having only ever made it with yolks, I was curious and whipped up a batch... The mouthfeel was lighter and less fatty than regular pastry cream, and it tasted a little more eggy. It was nice, but I'm not sure what the point of it is. Maybe she explains more in her book. Anyway, needing to do something with it, I made some eclairs... (By the way, the cream is pale yellow because I used custard powder instead of cornstarch. Otherwise it would've been white.)

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.