Pear and cardamom tarte tatin

This post is exciting, because I actually have a proper recipe for you all (and by you all, I mean the 3 people that probably don't bother reading this anymore. But oh well). It's my mum's birthday tomorrow, and she isn't a huge fan of cake, so I decided to make her an alternative instead. It's quite difficult baking for her, as she isn't always a fan of classic yummy things that people normally like. Luckily I didn't have to think too hard, because I was stalking, er, browsing on facebook and I found a recipe for pear and cardamom upside down tart, which I thought sounded nice and suitably unusual. It also sounded a lot like tarte tatin, which is one of my favourite desserts, and I have made it a few times, so I decided to modify recipe to make it more like pear and cardamom tarte tartin, as I thought shortcrust pastry would keep better than the puff pastry specified by the original recipe.

Not pretty, but pretty yummy

Making tarte tatin is pretty simple. Effectively it's just caramelised fruit put in a flan dish, with the pastry laid on top. After it's baked in the oven, you turn it out on a plate, so there's no hassle of having to bake a pastry case beforehand. The method of preparation means it's not the prettiest dessert in the world, but the taste makes up for it. Don't be afraid of making your own shortcrust or puff pastry, it's seriously easy, and once you've done it you'll realise there's no need to buy frozen pastry ever again. I also decided to make some toffee to put on the top. I was going to make spun sugar (those fancy sugar threads you get on desserts) out of it, but then changed my mind in case it made too much of a mess. I later burnt my finger on the molten sugar whilst trying to pour it on the tart and it hurt like a bitch. My finger is still stinging like crazy :( bear in mind this happened at midnight while my mother was sleeping, so I had to dance around the kitchen screaming silent expletives until I came to my senses and stuck it under a cold tap. So yeah, as long as you excise some caution when dealing with boiling hot sugar, this is a pretty hassle free recipe. If you don't like the idea of pears and/or cardamom, you can swap them for more traditional apples, peaches, pineapple or any other fruit you fancy.

Pear and cardamom tarte tatin

125g sugar
3 tbsp cold water
10 cardamom pods
4-6 pears, cored and quartered lengthways
100g butter
1 quantity of shorcrust pastry (see below)

1. Put sugar, water and butter into a deep frying pan. Stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved. Increase the heat and bring to a rapid simmer.

2. Remove seeds from cardamom pods and crush. As the sugar begins to colour, sprinkle over the cardamom and add the pears. Stir occasionally and cook for about 10 minutes, until the sugar starts to turn golden brown and the pears start to become soft.

3. Pour pears and sugar into a flan dish, and leave to cool for a few minutes.

4. Meanwhile, roll out your pastry into a circle which is just larger than the flan dish. Put the pastry over the pears, tucking it down the sides of the pan to enclose the fruit.

5. Bake in the oven at 400F/Gas mark 6 until the pastry is golden. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes before turning out onto a plate.

6. Serve with creme fraiche

Mmm, caramelised pears
And...I will let Delia explain how to make the shortcrust pastry ;)

Good luck, and remember: approach hot sugar with extreme caution!

Bonus "isn't my cat cute" photo

My cat, Rudy. Isn't he cute?!

P.S. If anyone is reading this and knows a bit about html, please help me. Blogger photo uploader sucks and I don't know why it keeps inserting so many line breaks even though I edit the html so it shouldn't do :(

Death of a chocolate cake

It might seem odd that I've decided to blog about a chocolate cake which was initially a failure...but that's only because with the help of my flatmates, I managed to salvage it and turn it into something beautiful. Well, ok, something.

Anyway, my plan was to make a chocolate layer cake for my friend's birthday. It was going to be decorated with chocolate curls, ganache and strawberries. It was going to be a work of art in sponge cake form. 6 bars of chocolate...off I go. I thought I would it would be the decorating stage where something went wrong, but unfortunately I never got there, because our bitch of an oven decided to burn the top of the cake whilst leaving the middle undercooked (I think I should do a separate post about our bitch oven, as we've lost so many cakes to that thing). I didn't know that some of the sponge was still slighly raw, and only found out when trying to slice the cake into layers, which caused it to crack.
"Shit! Fuck! Damn! dsdhfudthruoghdooshdygh. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy?!?!"

I doubt anyone wants to hear about the minature fit I had in the kitchen that day, but I couldn't let that chocolate sponge go to waste (most of it was fine). So I took a knife to the already quite dead cake and cut it into bite sized pieces, layering them in a bowl with chocolate cream and strawberries.

(yeah ok, I admit it, I did only just post this so I had an excuse to draw faces on those strawberries)

There was still quite a bit of sponge left, and I did actually want something resembling a cake, even if it was going to be tiny. So I grabbed a heart cookie cutter and cut 3 hearts out of the remaining sponge, stacked them and decorated it with more chocolate and strawberries. It turned out a bit like one of those mini one-portion birthday cakes you can get in gift shops.

What was left was one layer of sponge, which had a rather strange shape due to bits being cut out of it. But it still had potential to be transformed...


...into a vomit cake! Crumbled biscuits were added to some chocolate cream for extra effect. Clearly my creativity knows no bounds.

I didn't actually give the vomit cake to my friend because I couldn't carry 3 cakes, so kept it for me and my flatmates to enjoy. Which we did, with beer. Thankfully no one actually vomited, because the cake tasted nice and the beer ran out before anyone got anywhere near to that stage. I'm not going to post the recipe for the chocolate sponge, since if you want to try this yourself it's not incredibly difficult to mess up baking a cake. My personal tips would be turning on the oven too high, adjusting the quantity of mixture but not adjusting the cooking time, or adding too much baking powder. Alternatively, get yourself a terrible oven like ours (if you're a student, chances are your shitty landlord has already provided one. Lucky you!).

There's no real moral to this story, but what I'm trying to say is that if something goes wrong in the kitchen, you can usually make the best of a bad job, and have some fun doing it at the same time :) Apart from if you put too much chilli in something. Adding water, sugar or yogurt can help up to a certain point, but after that you may as well chuck it in the bin before you end up killing your tongue eating it out of stubbornness.

Happy baking!

Preserves of epic proportions

Encouraged by my friend's newly created food blog, and my flatmate and I sitting in the kitchen obsessing over complicated desserts (macarons, anyone?), I decided to revisit here. I think the reason why I never really got very far with this blog is because I always forgot to take pictures of what I'd made, and felt that it would be pointless to update with recipes when I had no accompanying photos. Because, let's face it, loads of people read food blogs not just for the recipes, but for all the photos of amazing food. I'm also not that great at photographing food to make it look mouth-wateringly appetising; unless it's already pretty and delicate I quite often end up with a picture of something resembling mush, even though it usually tastes a lot better than the picture implies.

Anyway, I digress; I realised that over a year has passed since I last touched this blog, and that I must have a backlog of food photos on my computer, some of which have to be decent. Thinking back to last summer (as it is difficult to recall the exact nature of my kitchen adventures past then), I remembered going to my cousin's house to make preserves. We made a lot and the whole thing took about 2 days, including picking some of the ingredients (she has loads of fruit trees in her garden) and a trip to tesco which yielded a massive amount of sugar and vinegar.

This is what we did...

Massive pot full of freshly picked blackberries



























Yes, this is really the amount of sugar that goes into jam





Boiling crab apples for crab apple jelly



If you don't know what crab apples are, they're basically like tiny, sour apples. You can't eat them raw, and I think the trees are grown mainly as ornamental plants. My cousin and I found a recipe for crab apple jelly, so thought we might as well give it a try. To make the jelly, you just boil loads of crab apples and then strain through a sieve like so (please take note of our very advanced juice collecting technique...one of the many uses for Yellow Pages):



After it's been left to strain for a night, you boil the juice with lots of sugar (naturally) and then stick it in jars to set. The end result?



Not the most attractive picture, but yeah. We added some herbs from the garden to give it a little extra flavour. If you're wondering what it tastes like, I don't really know how to describe it besides saying that it's really sweet, and goes really well with roast meat. So kind of in the same league as redcurrant jelly or apple sauce.

Another less conventional preserve we decided to try making was some spicy preserved pears. These actually turned out really nice and were extremely simple, much easier than making jam and having to worry about it not setting/all your teeth falling out from the crazy amount of sugar you ingest tasting it every minute (seriously, it is unavoidable when you're waiting for a huge pot of the stuff to be ready. We felt sick after a couple of hours).



Peel. Chop. Add sugar and spices. Boil.



Then stick in jars with syrup and cloves!




On the same day, we also made spicy plum and apple chutney. I think this actually turned out being the best thing we made, mainly cos I love chutney, especially if it has a bit of sweetness. I gave a few jars to people as presents and they all said they really liked it too!


Fresh organic apples and plums (dead wasp content 2%)




Chopped fruit plus sugar, vinegar, chilli, ginger, lemon juice and sultanas



So at the end of our jam and chutney extravaganza, this is what we ended up with:




I still have lots of jars left. Anyone want some? :P