Mary's Chocolate Orange Tart - GBBO Bakealong

Chocolate week on Great British Bake Off would once have seen me coming up with some elaborate creation, no doubt a lavishly decorated cake. But I don’t have the luxury of a lot of time any more and wasn’t really in the mood for cake - I fancied making a dessert that would keep for a couple of days. It seemed appropriate to use a GBBO recipe book and having a flick through, I settled on Mary Berry's chocolate orange tart from the Great British Bake Off Big Book of Baking.

The chocolate filling is a mixture of chocolate, sugar, butter, flour and eggs - so it's no wonder that it seemed quite cake-y to me. But the trick is not to overbake it and leave it slightly wobbly in the centre - I always have my mum's voice in the back of my mind at times like that, warning me that it isn’t cooked (or half raw, as she would probably put it) which explains why my brownies are usually overbaked! 

There is also an orange filling that you make in a similar way but using egg yolks not whole eggs, white chocolate, and the grated zest of one orange. But for some reason oranges were completely out of stock on my online shop that week (perhaps as we go into lockdown in winter, people are worried they will get scurvy?!) so I made do with a few drops of orange essence instead.

The idea is to swirl the two fillings together inside your pastry case to create a marbled effect. I think this looks quite pretty, don't you?

It is delicious served warm and also very good served cold a day or two later - if it lasts that long!

Puff Pastry Cheese, Bacon and Spring Onion Tart

This is an easy meal idea that is great for an informal dinner with friends, as it can be assembled before your guests arrive and then can go in the oven 20 minutes before you want to eat. You can play around with the toppings as well to use whatever you fancy - it's a good way of using up odds and ends in the fridge as well.

Simply take a piece of ready-made puff pastry - around 200g per person should be plenty, and I made each person their own - and roll out on a lightly floured surface into either a circle or square shape (or something in between!). Place onto a lightly oiled baking sheet.

Chop a few rashers of bacon and fry along with some chopped spring onions. When cooked, remove from pan and allow to cool.

Spread the pastry base with garlic and herb-flavoured soft cheese then scatter over the bacon and spring onion. Grate some cheese - Cheddar works well - and sprinkle over the tart. I also added some crumbled blue cheese.

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 180C for 20 minutes or until the pastry has risen and is golden. Serve with a green salad.

I'm sending this to Cook Blog Share, hosted this week by Easy Peasy Foodie.

Vegan French Apple Tart

This month's Food 'n' Flix challenge is French Kiss - the 1995 movie starring Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline. The film was chosen by Food 'n' Flix creator Heather at All Roads Lead to the Kitchen - you can see her announcement post here, and you can take part any time this month.

The premise of the film is that Kate (Meg Ryan) is flying to France alone, to confront her cheating fiancé; she is seated on the plane next to Luc (Kevin Kline), a thief who hides a stolen necklace in her bag. Which of course means that he needs to retrieve the necklace later, so Luc offers to help Kate win back her fiancé.

They bond and Kate learns that Luc gambled away his birthright to the family vineyard but dreams of buying his own vineyard some day. I won't spoil what happens as Kate goes after her fiancé and Luc tries to sell the stolen necklace - you will have to watch the film yourself!

I enjoyed the film even though it was a bit predictable and quite dated, but Meg Ryan is always good in a rom-com.

There are plenty of nice foodie references as well; for instance Kate finds her errant fiance eating in a restaurant with his new girlfriend's parents. She tries to hide and sneaks around the restaurant so she can spy on them, and predictably ends up crashing into a dessert trolley and getting a face full of food

Kate and Luc are having breakfast on the train of French bread and cheese and Luc tells her that there are 452 official cheeses in France; she tries some but is sick as she is lactose intolerant (presumably the cheese is worth it!). This means they have to get off the train part way, in what is Luc's home town and they stay at his family home, and this is where Kate learns about his dream to create a vineyard.

 

When I was thinking about recipes to make, I kept thinking of tarte tatin - a lovely French tart that is cooked upside down in a pan using apples or sometimes pears, that I have made a few times and really love. I wanted to make something a bit different but the vineyard idea had put fruit in my head as well.

I was visiting friends for new year's eve and had been asked if I could bring dessert. I made these chocolate brownies with candy cane frosting but wanted to make something that wasn't chocolate, and that my vegan friend could enjoy. (I would have made vegan brownies but was only using ingredients I already had in the house, and didn't have what I need).

I found a recipe on Good to Know for French apple tart and decided to make it vegan by making my own pastry.

What I love about this tart is that you have fluted apple slices on top which look appealing, but underneath a layer of sweet stewed apple. The combination of textures is amazing and it tasted delicious.

This is what I did:

To serve 6, you need:
for the pastry:
125g plain flour
55g vegan (soya) margarine - I used Pure
2-3 tbsp. water
for the filling:
6 eating apples
20g butter
50g caster sugar plus 2 tbsp. for later


First make the pastry, by sifting the flour into a large bowl and using your fingertips rub in the soya margarine to make a breadcrumb texture. Add a couple of tablespoons of cold water and mix by hand until you have a dough consistency. Form the dough into a ball and wrap in clingfilm; put the dough in the fridge while you make the filling.

Cut one of the apples in half and peel four and a half. Cut the peeled apples into small chunks and put in a saucepan with the butter and 4 tbsp. water. Bring to the boil and simmer until the apples have softened; you may need to top up the water as you go. You don't want the mixture to be wet at the end, though you can drain it through a sieve if necessary.

When the apples have softened add the 50g sugar (return the apples to the pan if you have drained them) and heat, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved. Leave the mixture to cool.

Preheat oven to 190C. Roll out the pastry and line a 9-inch fluted tart tin. Line with greaseproof paper and fill with ceramic baking beans or raw rice and bake the empty pie crust in the oven for 10 minutes.

Carefully remove the paper and the baking beans and bake the pie case for another 5 mins until golden brown.

Spread the apple filling over the pastry base then peel the remaining apples.

Remove the core with a corer or knife and slice the apples very thinly all the way around so you can fan them out over the top of the tart as shown.

Sprinkle over the remaining caster sugar and bake in the oven for 20-30 minutes until the apples have turned golden brown. Serve warm or cold.

I'm sharing this with Food n Flix as described above.

I'm also sharing this with CookBlogShare, hosted this week by Sneaky Veg.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies Cookbook Giveaway and Halloween Chocolate Orange Tart

 

 

I've got a great giveaway just in time for Halloween where not one, not two, but three of you can win a spooky cookery book full of recipes and ideas for party food for Halloween and any sort of horror-themed party (movie night?) you might want to hold at any time of the year.

The Hoxton Street Monster Supplies Cookbook is worth £13 and is a beautifully illustrated 160 page hardback cookbook with over 70 recipes and humorous advice for entertaining.

Hoxton Street Monster Supplies claims to be London’s "and quite possibly the world’s only purveyor of quality goods for monsters of every kind." All profits go to the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing and mentoring charity for young people which looks absolutely brilliant; I would have loved something like this when I was a kid and am going to look into signing up as a volunteer.

The cookery book says it is a revised edition featuring recipes suitable for humans, but has plenty of advice for what to do if you are inviting the undead to your party - allow extra time for zombies to eat dinner as they tend to be very slow; never seat a cyclops next to a giant spider (cyclops are sensitive about the fact that they only have one eye) and so on.

Recipes are divided into chapters: sweets and pastilles (including crunching bone toffee and fairy brain fudge), biscuits and cookies  (phlegmy dodgers, gingerdead men and toenail macaroons), cakes and bakes (clotted blood cakes, fresh maggot brownies, which I couldn't bring myself to make, and spiced earwax pie, which looked like treacle tart from the recipe), jams and curds (including human snot curd and pickled eyeballs), savoury snacks (chunky vomit dip, small intestine skewers) and potions and poisons (eg satanic smoothie).

The recipe for brain cake, or rather 'braaaiiiinnnn cake', made me laugh - translated for use by zombies. The recipe runs: "Oooooooog. BBBRRRAAAIIINNNNS! Brraaaauuuunnnnns. AAR! Errrrrg" and so on. So I won't be attempting that one.

If you can get past the slight sense of revulsion that I felt when reading the names of some of the recipes (yes I know they are not serious but some are just gross!) and read the introduction to each recipe they are really funny - and I can assure you that the recipes contain perfectly normal ingredients! I think this would go down really well with children in particular so if you fancy being in with a chance to win a copy of the book scroll down to the end.

 

The giveaway is open to UK addresses only and the books will be sent to the winners directly by the publishers.

I decided to make one recipe from the book so I could review it, and since it was over a week until Halloween and I wasn't about to throw a party I decided to make one of the most normal sounding recipes: Night Terror Torte. This is basically a chocolate and orange tart, using a ready-made sweet shortcrust pastry base.

You slice two oranges and cook them in a sugar syrup (mixture of sugar and water); bake the pastry case blind and then make the filling from ground almonds, butter, sugar and eggs then dark chocolate. Add some of the orange slices which you have chopped while keeping the rest for decoration, and bake the assembled tart in the oven.

 

raw:

 

 

cooked

 

 

scroll down for the giveaway- starting at midnight tonight!

 

 

 

 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Quinoa Cheese Tartlets

I’ve been following a low sugar diet for the last few weeks and bought the book I Quit Sugar by Sarah Wilson, which is full of healthy recipes. Weekend lunches are probably the meals where I struggle most to come up with dishes – my fiancé would have a bacon sandwich every Saturday and every Sunday if he could, but I prefer to cook different things and at the moment I’m not really eating bread so that doesn’t work for me at all.

 

I found a recipe in I Quit Sugar for quinoa and pumpkin tarts which I knew my fiancé would never eat, so I decided to do him a cheese and bacon tart on a pastry base to use up some shortcrust pastry I had in the freezer. For myself, I followed the recipe but scaled it down as I didn’t need it to serve 4. I also used butternut squash instead of pumpkin, and agave nectar instead of rice malt syrup. I also realised I didn’t have any parmesan so used a little gruyere instead, along with the blue cheese and ricotta.

 

It was a bit fiddly to make as you have to rinse the quinoa first then cook it, then let it cool and form a ‘pie crust’ and then bake it blind, while cooking the butternut squash at the same time. The quinoa created a surprisingly good base for the tart and it was really tasty – butternut squash and blue cheese is a nice flavour combination and the creaminess of the ricotta was a lovely addition. I don’t know whether I’d go to the lengths of making these again but I think if I was soaking and cooking quinoa for a couple of recipes at the same time, eg a salad for lunch at work and then these tarts the next day, then it would be well worth the effort.

Mixing the quinoa with the cheese and egg:

I used a mixture of loose-bottomed tart tins and, because I couldn't find where my cleaner had put the bottoms to the other ones, some mini foil pie dishes. Here they are about to go in the oven.

The base is baked, so adding the topping

Just out of the oven

Serve with lots of green salad

 

I'm sharing this with Meat Free Mondays, hosted by Jacqueline at Tinned Tomatoes

 

 

 

Mini Kentish Pudding Pies

Back in the winter I was looking for a dessert that my fiancé would like that didn't involve chocolate, but where I could make individual puddings rather than something big like a sticky toffee pudding. I have a book called Desserts by James Martin and found in it a recipe for a Kentish pudding pie - an old fashioned  English dish consisting of a shortcrust pastry base, filled with a set custard made of ground rice and often citrus flavoured and topped with dried fruit and ground nutmeg. It's served cold, often at Easter.

The recipe is available online here.

Here I've brought the cream and milk to the boil and added the whisked eggs and sugar. It looks a little lumpy but it got better as it thickened!

Lining the tarts with the pastry to bake them blind. I got some great little loose-bottomed tart tins from Amazon.

Adding the ground rice, nutmeg and lemon zest and juice to the filling mixture

Ready to go in the oven: the cooled pastry cases filled with the lemon and cream mixture, topped with currants

They only take a few minutes to bake and can be served hot or cold - I preferred them hot

I didn't find these particularly sweet and they certainly weren't my favourite dessert, but an interesting change and a good English classic.

I'm sharing these with Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Janie from Hedgecombers. Their theme this month is local and regional recipes - and these originate from Kent, the "garden of England" (and not very far from Surrey where I live).

Mincemeat Tart

I had a lot of ingredients left over from my Christmas pudding and realised that many of them were found in the recipe for mincemeat – that is, the traditional English mince pie filling, a sweet pastry that is nothing to do with Shepherd’s pie or spaghetti Bolognese!

 

My fiancé loves mince pies though I’ve never been keen, so I decided to make a bit of a twist on the idea and make a giant one – but to make it a bit healthier, I wanted to make a mince tart rather than a pie, with a lattice top.

  

With something so traditional as mincemeat who else to turn to but Delia Smith? I used this recipe

 

 

 

 

and did leave the flavours overnight to infuse. However, I left out the suet as I didn’t have any, and I’m sure when I made mince pies before I didn’t add suet – I’m not sure these days it’s really something people use in cooking. The mixture turned out perfectly well without me doing this.

 

 

Lack of time meant that I used ready made shortcrust pastry. I lined the bottom of a pie tin and spooned in the mincemeat filling. I used my lattice cutter to make the top of the pie, though I'm still not very good with getting to grips with it! I brushed the top with milk, and cooked it in the oven for about 25 minutes until the top was golden brown. My fiancé really enjoyed it – while I stuck to an apple crumble as I had fruit that needed using up, but he doesn’t like apple!

 

 

I’m sending this to the Food Year Linkup, hosted by Charlotte's Lively Kitchen, as it's a very Christmassy recipe.

 

 There is nutmeg in my mincemeat mixture so I'm sending this to Alphabakes, the blog challenge I co-host with Ros of The More Than Occasional Baker, as the letter I have chosen this month is N.

 

 I'm also sending this to Tea Time Treats, hosted by Karen at Lavender and Lovage and Janie at the Hedgecombers, as their theme is sugar and spice.

 

 

Jus-Rol Pastry: Chicken, Squash and Sage Pithivier

Jus-Rol have been making pastry in Berwick-upon-Tweed for over 60 years and they have just launched a new campaign, Jus Create, to showcase what you can do with pastry.

I would think most people have used Jus-Rol at some point to at least make an apple tart, a chicken pie or puff pastry straws. But there are so many more things you can make, some of which I learnt recently at a demonstration evening.

I was invited by Jus-Rol, who have teamed up with Great British Chefs, to an evening at the Atelier des Chefs cookery school in London. Professional chefs Mark Dodson and Sally Abe, who have both got impressive credentials and many years of experience, had devised four recipes, including the chicken, squash and sage pithivier.

 

We watched a demonstration of the pithivier and of a chocolate and peanut butter ganache tart; you can see the recipe for the tart here. We were divided into two groups and made one recipe each; I made the pithivier but I did get to taste the chocolate tart as well and it was amazing! Really easy to make and a great recipe to end a dinner party with.

I'd never heard of a pithivier before; it's a French pie made with flaky puff pastry, but instead of having a deep dish base and a flat top as many pies have, this one has a flat base and a domed top. Did you know puff pastry was invented in the 17th century?

You can see the recipe for the one we made here.

It's a real crowdpleaser, and you can make them small or large - we watched Sally make a large one then made small ones ourselves. Most of the prep can be done before your guests arrive so you just pop it in the oven while you are chatting and mingling. That's my kind of dinner party!

 

I also picked up lots of useful tips, such as: take pastry out of the fridge 20-30 minutes before using. You want it to be chilled, but not too cold.

When lining a tin with pastry, let the pastry overhang the sides and bake it like that as pastry will often sink. Then trim off the excess afterwards, with a serrated knife.

This is where we came to make our own...

They were quite small so it was hard to get much filling on the base. It helped that I don't like mushrooms so picked them all out!

I also learnt - afterwards - that when scoring pastry you should hold the knife at an angle. If you hold it vertically like I did here, the cuts won't really show up after baking.

Egg wash is always important for a golden shell.

Here's one of the large pithiviers cut in half. It was lovely!

 

 

Thanks to Jus-Rol for inviting me to the event.