Winning the leftovers lottery - Caramel Apple Tart

Leftovers.

Either as a repeat of the previous meal (I'd go so far as to suggest that the whole Christmas turkey shebang is much tastier cold the next day -apart from the roasties, which need to be sliced up and fried) , or providing components for the next day's dinner - left over roast meat in a stir fry or risotto, left over veg chopped up as bubble & squeak etc, every fridge should have some leftovers in it.

I hit the leftover jackpot today, with the werewithal to make a mighty fine pudding.

Enough leftover sweet shortcrust pastry from a luscious lemon tart that I made yesterday, and half a tin of caramel leftover from making a batch of flapjack. And apples - still, apples everywhere. I have an idea that this might have started life as a Jamie Oliver confection, but regardless of its provenance, this is a pretty flexible dessert that you could probably adapt, and would certainly double up in size if you had more of the necessary left over, or even if you decided to make it in its own right, without waiting to have the required leftovers...

  Caramel Apple Tart

Enough sweet shortcrust pastry to line an 18cm tart tin
200g tinned caramel
1 large cooking apple
a dessert spoon of icing sugar

Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

Butter and flour the tart tin, then line with the pastry. Use a fork to prick the pastry all over, and then line with greaseproof paper, tip in baking beans and bake blind in the oven for 15-20 minutes. Remove the greaseproof paper and baking beans and return the case to the oven for another 5-10 minutes till the pastry is golden and biscuity. Set aside to cool a little.

Spread the caramel over the base of the tart, then peel, core and slice the apple into fairly thin slices, and arrange over the top of the caramel. Sieve the icing sugar evenly over the apple slices, and then bake for 30-40 minutes till the apple is cooked turning golden, and the caramel is bubbling. Leave to cool a little before serving. 

It was very tasty with some left over soured cream... 

I'm linking up my leftovers pudding to this month's Credit Crunch Munch run by Helen on Fuss Free Flavours and Camilla at Fab Food for All hosted in October by Michelle at Utterly Scrummy

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Tasty tomatoes, and utterly scrumptious Butterscotch Apple Pudding

I keep getting side tracked by cake and pudding. Brownie eclipsed the healthy bean and chorizo salad that the kids enjoyed last week, and tonight, instead of getting excited about some rather tasty stuffed beef tomatoes, what I really want to talk about is pudding. But I will talk tomatoes, because this year, for the first time in AGES, we have had lots of lovely red tomatoes with more still coming. So you 'll just have to wait for pudding - or scroll down to the bottom of this post.

In fact the last time we produced this many tomatoes was when Blue was in his first year of chemo in 2006. He craved cherry tomatoes during the courses of steroids he had to take, and consumed kilos of them - quite literally. The Husband proudly grew tomatoes, they ripened, and guess what. The craving stopped. I think Blue moved on to raw mushrooms and Shreddies at that point. We've grown tomatoes ever since, but never with the same success, and green tomato chutney has been a big feature of our lives. This year, though, it will be different. The tomatoes have ripened, and they have been delicious.





Today, some particularly fine specimens - beef tomatoes - were on the menu, along with some baby courgettes ('pick 'em while they're small', is my current strategy for dealing with them). I hadn't really thought about what I was going to stuff them with, but I found some pork mince in the freezer, and some giant couscous in the cupboard.

I'd like to be able to give you the full recipe, but I got distracted by the pudding, so didn't weigh out everything - or keep a note of what I did weigh. Essentially, I cut out the tops of 4 beef tomatoes and scooped our the flesh and seeds into a bowl. I heated a splash of olive oil into a frying pan, and fried 100g giant couscous for a couple of minutes before adding what from memory (when I put it into the freezer) was 250g pork mince. I browned off the mince, and added 2 baby courgettes which I'd chopped quite small, plus a chopped clove of elephant garlic, 1/2 tsp of ground coriander and a tsp of smoked paprika.

While this was all cooking, I seived out as much juice as I could and added it into the pan, bringing it to a simmer to cook the couscous. After about 15 minutes, I filled the tomatoes with this mixture, arranged the leftover mixture around the tomatoes, then covered the dish with silver foil and baked it for 25 minutes. It could have done with being spicier, but it was pretty good and the Husband and Blue (and I) all enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I started this all too late, so Pink had to make do with pasta before she went to Brownies.

You'll be please to know, though, that Pink didn't miss out on pudding. What could have been so delicious? Well, I'll tell you - Rachel Allen's Butterscotch Apple Pudding, for which I will be eternally grateful to the lovely Annie who writes Scrummy Suppers and Quirky Cakes. As I mentioned before, as well as tomatoes, we also have an abundance of cooking apples at the moment, and this was quick to knock up and totally delicious. If I had one criticism, it would be that it could possibly have done with a little more of the butterscotch sauce - easily rectified by making more next time...

Butterscotch Apple Pudding  

100 g butter

125 g self-raising flour  
200 g light brown muscovado sugar
pinch of salt 
1 tsp vanilla extract 
1 egg
200 ml milk
3 cooking apples, (about 500g total weight)
1 tbsp golden syrup & 1 tbsp of runny honey

Pre-heat the oven to 180C

Melt the butter and set aside to cool slightly. Sift the flour and salt into a large bowl with 100g of the sugar.  

In a jug, mix together the milk, egg and vanilla extract with the melted butter.

Peel, quarter and core the apples, then slice each quarter again lengthwise and then into half. You basically want large but still bitesize chunks.  Sprinkle these over the bottom of an oven proof dish - Rachel's was 20 by 30 cm. Mine was probably 22cm square-ish

Tip the wet ingredients into the dry and whisk quickly together - as you would for muffins. Tip over the apple pieces. and spread evenly over the dish.

Make the butterscotch - in a small pan, put the syrup & honey with the remaining 100g of sugar and 150ml of boiling water. Heat, stirring, while the sugar dissolves, then pour as evenly as you can over the batter and apples.

Pop in the oven for around 30 minutes. If you can resist, leave it cool a little before serving warm. It would probably be delicious with ice cream, cream or creme fraiche, but frankly it didn't need it.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Stripy Meringues - my BakingMad favourite summer dessert

What’s your favourite summer dessert?

That's the question BakingMad asked me recently, and invited me to write a post about it. 

BakingMad.com have loads of ideas for summer recipes, from cupcakes to take on a picnic, to luxurious cheesecake. Check out the website for more inspiration.

I tend to ignore dessert in the summer – not that we don’t have 'pudding', but there’s so much fantastic fruit around that it’s easy to just bring out a plate of strawberries & raspberries without further embellishment.

If pushed, well, Summer Pudding has to rank as one of the best puddings ever, and is certainly the Husband's all out fave, but it's not quite the right time for that yet. The currants in the garden are still green.

On the other hand, there are Hampshire strawberries around. Strawberries apparently go with black pepper, with balsamic vinegar, with a whole host of things. Call me traditional, though, but I like them with cream. And meringues.

I know a lot of people get the fear from meringue. 

I don't want to sound smug, but making meringue doesn't phase me. My mum always had a tin of meringues in the cupboard, and it's never given me much of a problem. On the other hand, chewy and delicious as I like it, my meringue never looks particularly beautiful. If it's for a pavlova, well, cracks are part of the charm, and anyway it'll all be covered in cream and fruit anyway. Individual meringues, well, again, if they are a complete disaster, you can break them up for an Eton mess kind of thing. More cream and fruit. Believe me, no one's going to complain.

So to make this a little more of a challenge, I decided to embrace something that does give me the fear - piping. For too long, I have looked at photos of beautifully piped cupcakes, cakes, petit fours on OPB (Other People's Blogs), and known with certainty that in my hands, a piping bag could only lead to one thing:  complete and utter disaster. You only have to look at the mess I made of my hot cross buns, cutting the corner off a freezer bag...

BakingMad sent me a variety of cake decorating paraphenalia, including some Silver Spoon food colouring, and a booklet which included a picture of beautifully striped meringues, and something clicked in my head.  "I'm going to have a go at that" I thought. "I'm going to get me some striped meringue" (in my best Southern drawl).

Cue a trip to Hobbycraft and confusion in the cake icing aisle, while Pink roamed the store unchecked, looking for things to spend money on. We exited with some disposable piping bags, 2 nozzles and a 'coupler'. Plus some face paints and a bag of fizzy sweets.

Anyway, back to the meringues. This is my basic recipe, which you can increase or reduce as you like. As I use my trusty Kenwood to make the meringue mix, I'd never make less than 2 egg whites' worth.

4 egg whites

pinch of salt

225g caster sugar

1 tsp cornflower (to make chewy meringue)

Whisk the egg white with the salt till stiff but still wet.  Add a couple of tablespoons of the sugar, whisk in, then sprinkle on the cornflour and carry on whisking, slowly pouring in the rest of the sugar, till the meringue is looking shiny, and you get stiff peaks.

At this point, you can then make a large meringue for pavlova, or spoon dollops on to baking paper lined baking sheets, and bake the meringues for 1-2 hrs till dry and lift from the paper. Alternatively, just turn off the oven and leave while the oven cools down (just don't forget to take then out before you turn the oven on again).

So if you're not going to dollop with a spoon, you could use a piping bag and pipe out the meringue. And you could colour the mix, to make coloured meringue, or simply (Ha!) paint a line of food colour up your piping bag and Bob (or striped meringue) would be your Uncle. 

Well, call it a fluke, but it really worked. I made up my meringue, and took it slowly. I used gel colour for the stripey meringues, and used the Silver Spoon food colourings to make the pink and green meringues. For the stripes, you literally use a brush or a cocktail stick and paint a line of colour up the inside of the piping bag, then spoon in your mixture for piping, and pipe away.

The actual piping itself left something to be desired, certainly I didn't get it right every time, Pink had a go with a few of them, and there's no way I could offer you my 'top tips' for piping meringue, because there's a whole host of talented meringue-pipers out there in internet-land, and I am not about to try and compete - but I managed to get enough of them looking pretty good.

So there you have it. Our favourite summer dessert. Strawberries (& raspberries) with stripy meringue. And cream.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Rhubarb Amaretti Crunch

I may have mentioned before that a glut of rhubarb is never something I consider to be a problem.

I love the stuff and the kids do too.

I was in 'empty the fridge' mode this evening, and trying to cook a reasonably special tea for Blue who for once got me all to himself after school.

Half empty pots of soured cream and 0% fat Greek yoghurt, some amaretti biscuits, and rhubarb in the garden. Pudding!

This is barely a recipe, and while I was conscious that I was going to blog it, I didn't pay a huge amount of attention to the quantities I was using. But it doesn't matter, because this is absolutely the type of thing that you can muck about with. No amaretti biscuits - use ginger biscuits. I expect Hobnobs would be OK too, although either almonds or ginger do go particularly well with rhubarb, so bear that in mind when choosing your crunch element. As for the dairy product - you could use whipped double cream, natural yoghurt... You could even change the rhubarb for something entirely different. Although, then, it wouldn't be Rhubarb Amaretti Crunch...


Rhubarb Amaretti Crunch

Serves 2

170g rhubarb
1tbsp soft brown sugar
juice of half an orange
2 generous tbsp sour cream
2 generous tbsp 0% fat Greek yoghurt
amaretti biscuits

First, trim the rhubarb and slice into small pieces. Add to a pan with the sugar and orange juice and gently cook till soft, then set aside. 

Mix together the sour cream and the yoghurt.

Divide the cooked rhubarb between 2 glasses, and carefully spoon some of the cream/yoghurt mix on top. Crumble some amarettis on top then repeat till all is used up, or the glasses are full.

Serve, with extra amaretti biscuits if you have some.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

A Dessert Pizza Recipe That Will Blow Your Mind (rajiv tiwari)

Pizza Dough Ingredients:

* One cup warm water
* Four teaspoons of active dry yeast
* Four cups of all-purpose flour, plus a few spoons more for kneading
* One teaspoon of salt
* Three tablespoons of olive oil, plus a little more for the bowl

Pizza Dough Directions:

1. To start making the best chocolate pizza recipe, you have to know how to make pizza dough that's excellent. Mix the warm water and yeast in a small bowl and let it be till the yeast dissolves. This will take about 5 minutes.

2. Mix the flour, salt and oil thoroughly. While still stirring fast, add the yeast mixture and continue to stir until it is a consistent dough.

3. Bring it out onto a flat surface and keep kneading till your dough is soft.

4. Transfer it into the oiled bowl and keep turning till the dough is well coated with oil too.

5. Cover with cling film and keep in a warm area until the dough doubles in volume.

6. Knead your pizza recipe dough and form into a ball. You can use this either immediately or store it in the fridge for one day.

Chocolate Pizza Recipe Ingredients:

* Two pound of homemade dough from the pizza recipe given above.
* Four teaspoons of melted butter
* Half cup of chocolate-hazelnut spread

* One cup of semisweet chocolate chips
* Four tablespoons of milk chocolate chips
* Four tablespoons of white chocolate chips
* Four tablespoons of chopped and toasted hazelnuts

Chocolate Pizza Recipe Directions:

1. Now continue making the yummiest pizza recipe by following the directions below. If you want to know how to make pizza for dessert than no recipe can be better!

2. Keep the oven rack on the bottom of the oven and preheat to 450 degrees.

3. Roll out two 9 inch pizza bases on a large baking sheet.

4. Make indentations all over the dough using your fingers.

5. Brush the dough with the melted butter and then bake until the crust is crisp and pale golden brown for about 20 minutes.

6. To have the ideal chocolate pizza recipe you have to immediately spread the chocolate-hazelnut spread over the pizza then sprinkle all the chocolate chips over.

7. Bake the pizza recipe for around a minute, till the chocolate just starts to melt.

8. Sprinkle the hazelnuts over the pizza.

Your yummy chocolate pizza recipe is ready to be eaten! Enjoy it and relish the fact that you know how to make pizza as the best dessert!

Rajiv Tiwari is an out and out gourmet whose love of food has made him travel to all top food destinations. In this bouquet of articles Rajiv discusses some quick tips on food recipes, and shows us how you can make people enchanted with lipsmacking food recipes. pizza recipe, dough

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Random Recipes & a poncy ingredient alert - Ottolenghi's Orange Polenta Cake

I was wondering how I was going to fit a Random Recipe in this month, but the blog challenge fairies were obviously smiling on me.

Dom's challenge from Belleau Kitchen this month was to get all those cut out snippets of recipe, those torn out pages, and clippings, throw them up in the air - or spread them out, or do something with them to enable you to randomly select one.

I thought I'd give it a go and see what it came up with. No obligation to complete the challenge if I couldn't fit it in or the recipe was one of the more obscure I'd cut out and kept. But as I say, no need to worry. The selection process turned up Yottam Ottolenghi's Orange Polenta Cake which I'd copied at Christmas from my brother's newly received copy of the Ottolenghi cook book. Fortuitous indeed because we had people coming for dinner, and there had to be dessert. Not that this is a hardship, you understand, but I'd already planned a moorish style chicken & chorizo casserole for the main course, so this fitted perfectly. Caramelised oranges, almonds, some orange blossom water (this is an Ottolenghi recipe after all - poncy ingredients are to be expected!).

First up, though, the challenge of sourcing the ingredients. I know there used to be a bag of polenta in the cupboard, but I must have used it up, because when I looked again, there was nothing. I couldn't get it in my online shop so sent the Husband off to do his hunter gatherer thing. The poor man went to 4 different supermarkets on 2 separate trips after work - he even went and worked at a different office on Friday in order to try different supermarkets, before ending up in Waitrose in Andover. Where, of course, they had at least 2 varieties. Anyway, he came home triumphant with an impressively artisan looking bag, plus some tahini paste and some unsalted pistachios which I also required.

While I've learned my lesson over the years that when people are coming for dinner it's wise to stick to the familiar and easy, there's always a certain amount of frisson to be gained cooking something with a little bit of fiddle factor when you have no idea how it's going to turn out and 10 people expecting to be fed. I have limited experience cooking Ottolenghi, and while it's always turned out brilliantly, I'm not in the same comfort zone with his stuff that I am cooking, say, Nigella. Add to this the opportunity for third degree burns that making caramel presents, and perhaps I should have stuck to something tried and tested, but I like a challenge.

 


The recipe was at least helpful in that it pointed out the need to thoroughly line the tin (if you're using springform, which I was) in order to prevent caramel leaking all over your oven, and as an extra precaution, I also put the cake tin on a baking sheet. A wise precaution as it turns out because even with what I thought was thorough tin lining, I did have a little bit of caramel leakage. But nothing serious.









Anyway, the recipe. I couldn't find it online to link to, but it's in the Ottolenghi cook book. Having lined your tin, you make some caramel which you use to cover the bottom of the tin.

 Next, there are oranges to zest and peel, and place on top of the caramel layer, 

before making a deliciously orangey scented batter using eggs, ground almonds, polenta along with the usual butter and eggs. The recipe also calls for orange blossom water, I forgot to put this on the Husband's foraging list, and having put him through supermarket hell in search of polenta, I didn't have the heart to fess up to needing orange blossom water, so in the end I just squeezed in a little extra orange juice. I think the random recipe rules state that you have to cook the recipe as it is, with little deviation. Well, I'm afraid that as well as missing the orange blossom water, I upped the recipe by a third to make a big enough cake to feed all of us. I hope I'm not disqualified.

 As a result of the increase in ingredients, it took quite a bit longer than the stated 40-45 minutes to bake, and I ended up covering the tin with foil to stop the top of the cake catching, but it all turned out fine. Once baked, the final nerve-wracking turnout passed without a hitch.

Ta daah!

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Passion Fruit Curd

It's getting close to Easter and close to the end of the deadline for this month's Forever Nigella.

Although I have my 'main event' in mind for this, I'm getting twitchy that I won't get it blogged in time (let's face it, I haven't even baked it yet at the time when I'm writing this post), but never fear. As a teaser, a sneaky peak, I can bring you one of the component parts, made on Friday evening, in readiness for said main event. I'm not going to give the game away entirely, but I'm sure you can guess what I might end up doing with this gorgeous jar of passion fruit curd.

Now before I go any further, given that it's Palm Sunday when the final product of my labours are to be eaten, and it's for this reason that I made passion fruit curd rather than lemon curd for the purpose for which it is intended, I thought I would explain that the passion fruit comes from the passion flower (no really!) and is so called because it was used by Spanish missionaries when they were trying to explain the crucifixion of Jesus - also known as the passion of Christ - to the indigenous population. The success of this is not so well documented, but in case you were interested, the missionaries likened the stigmas of the passion flower to the nails in Jesus' hands and feet, the threads of the passion flower were like the Crown of Thorns, the vine's tendrils were likened to the whips used to beat Jesus, the five anthers represented the wounds he sufferes and the ten petals and sepals resemble the Apostles (excluding Judas and Peter). Whether you subscribe to that or not, it's a beautiful flower

But I'm digressing. So Passion Fruit Curd from How to be a Domestic Goddess and also in Feast can also be found on Nigella.com so if you are so inspired you can find the recipe there. It uses 11 passion fruit and I suppose you could extend the metaphor to suggest that Nigella was thinking of the 11 faithful apostles when she dreamed this up, although I suspect she was more likely thinking about cake...

There's a very fiddly bit which is sort of glossed over which is the bit where you have to sieve the pulp and juice from 10 passion fruit to separate it away from the seeds, but if you whizz it all in a food processor briefly, this can help.

Once you've done that, it's pretty straightforward as far as making curd is concerned. You just need the time to stir it all constantly over a very low heat and it can take a bit of time. believe me, I have been that person with a pan of lemon flavoured scrambled egg before (obviously, when I was making lemon curd that time). Don't be tempted to put the heat up or stop stirring, even for a second - it will come good in the end. Fortunately, Nigella doesn't promise that it will all be done and dusted in 10 minutes (unlike others I could mention, and naming no names, Mr Fearnley-Whittingstall). I was a little concerned that she made no indication whatsoever of how long it might take, but in the end it was about 35 minutes to get the orangey curd thick enough to coat the back of the spoon. 

After that, it was but a moment to whisk in the contents of an 11th passion fruit before putting into a jar (unless you have an immediate use for it...)

This month's Forever Nigella is hosted by Jen at Blue Kitchen Bake on behalf of Sarah at Maison Cupcake

reade more... Résuméabuiyad