Apple Poor

"Part of me wants another disaster because it would be way more fun to write about..."

Those were my words in yesterday's post, following an out and out success with my cheese and mustard scones, and by god do I regret saying because it seems that there is someone up there granting my desires to come true... Well only in this case! 

Today was meant to be so easy, an apple pie certainly doesn't sound like an overly difficult task, yet it was far more of a trial than I could have ever imagined. It began with the small task of shopping for the ingredients, things like buying cooking apples shouldn't be so difficult! My girlfriend and I went to pretty much every single fruit and veg market stall in the centre of (market town) Boston, which I call my home, and yet every time we got to one they'd either ran out of these seemingly precious fruits or had never stocked them. 

- how can they be so precious?! I'm pretty sure we used to have a cooking apple tree in the back garden ( and so did the neighbours) but we got rid of them because the apples got everywhere, surely we didn't have the last one in my humble little town?! -

But finally we found one place with a few left and so I eagerly hoarded them in my bag in case someone else was in search of this green and bitter treasure...

As we arrived in the kitchen with flour, the precious apples and lard - something I almost forgot to buy so had to turn round and add an extra mile on the journey to get ( at least it helped working off the pie I'd soon be guzzling!) - the baking began.

And not for the whole of the challenge have  I been so distraught and frustrated by any single recipe. It was just pastry, and yet it just wouldn't bend to my will! It wouldn't stay together - even after the half an hour in the fridge - and every time I attempted to roll it just stuck to the surface, despite almost covering the entire kitchen - let alone the surface - in flour. In other words it just wasn't going my way today, the pastry ended up being more like a dough which I had to squash into the dish and hope that it would work. I fact I became so sure that it would ultimately fail that I even kept some filling back for the retry.

Alas, it came out of the oven after nearly an hours worth of baking looking... Messy - that's the first word that comes to mind! - but it was still clearly edible, and really quite edible in the end. The pastry was very crumbly, as expected, but it certainly tasted good, and when covered with custard, cream or ice cream no one would bat an eyelid at how destroyed it was by simply lifting it out of the dish! 

Not one to have to retry, but still, it certainly came close!

The Result: 

Mmmm, oh dear god, that looks horrific!

Ricotta make this again!

As I mentioned only a couple of days ago, following my disastrous attempt to make pecan pie, I really wanted to try and make a pastry based recipe again. Having had a look through them all, I settled on one neither too complicated nor one too easy ( I want to leave plenty of easier ones to break up the dead hard ones later on, just to keep faith!) with the beautiful - and intriguing - sounding name: Ricotta Tart with Walnuts and Chocolate.
I must admit that, in my amateur status as a baker (or perhaps my ignorance), I had no idea what Ricotta was. On closer inspection I discovered that it was a cheese. I can't decide whether this was a disappointment for me, on the one hand the Pecorino and Walnut Scones remain to this day one of my greatest successes - and my housemate's favourite - so the idea of combining Walnuts with cheese again appealed to me. On the other hand, I seriously wanted something really tasty and couldn't bear the thought of another Pecan tart style vomit pie (which funnily enough my housemate also loved... though to be fair anyone getting free tart shouldn't be too picky!). But the allure of Chocolate, walnut and Rum drew me in.

- I may be the first student to have ever bought Sainsbury's Basic Dark-Rum for any reason other than to get absolutely annihilated and stumble off "down town" or "t'ut club" -

Making the pastry was frustrating, for some reason the way of doing it seems to change quite a bit per recipe (probably to account for sweetness of the end product) and this time it asked to mix in the flour last with your fingers to form a dough... Unfortunately by this point I'd already made a woopsy and turned the lot into a very fine bread-crumby mixture. *Sigh* Luckily my status as a slightly more experienced baker is coming along strong and I rectified the mistake merely by adding a drop of water... TV deal and cookery book offer still a long way off though!
Onto the filling. As I've mentioned numerous times on my culinary adventure, I am a student having to deal with the harsh realities that I'm simply going to have to "make-do" with the equipment I've got. Luckily, I happened across a tart tin at work one day which my boss happily gave me for free but other than that stroke of luck I'm severely handicapped in the equipment department. Today I needed a pyrex dish to melt the chocolate in. It sounds like a simple problem to solve, but it was annoying, I had no bowls which were either fire retardant (my mixing bowls are plastic) or the right size to slot over a pan of simmering water. Rather than melting the chocolate in the microwave (which could easily burn parts and leave others solid) I used a small plastic bowl in a bigger plastic bowl of boiling water, the same idea as the intended way and success was mine!
After the mixture was done, it was a simple matter of prettifying the top with some purely decorative slices of Pastry and it was complete.

The Result:

An absolutely mind blowing success. Doesn't it just look gosh darned delicious?! Believe me, it tastes just as good! By no means is it the most normal of baked goods, it is full of flavours you just don't encounter on the average day, whether you're a renegade foodie or not! The chocolate and walnut give a solid foundation of flavour which though basic makes for a perfect after dinner treat. The rum and ricotta though, are the real Pièce de résistance, they add the kick to it and make it that little bit more exciting and interesting than your average tinned chocolate desert.

In many ways I'm sad that I'm doing this challenge on this occasion, because I know fully well that until the 20th of August I'm not really going to have the opportunity to make such a delicious dish again. But I suppose that without this challenge I would neither have the skill nor the desire to try it, I would always just settle with the more basic, humdrum and canned desert style dish and never even find out what Ricotta is.

Another Pecanlamity

Yes, Pecan nuts are back on the menu, and guess what? It went wrong... again. Last time I tried to make pecan and maple biscuits it went horribly and was the first major disaster of the whole challenge (even though they tasted pretty good). This time, it went way worse. Way way worse!

The challenge in question was a Pecan pie, it has a self-made pastry base and a filling made of syrupy, sugary, nutty mixture, yummy! Thankfully my first ever self made pastry base went swimmingly; putting it into a tin, weighing it down with baking beans (or rice, it's cheaper and does the same job!) baking, rising. Perfect! I had assumed that once that was out of the way the rest would be fairly straight forward. It was merely melting a few ingredients and mixing them together before cooking everything for a bit. As always, the simple task is always the one which goes wrong!

It went into the oven with everything melted together looking beautiful; it was literally picture perfect. I could compare the book and mine and they looked identical other than not being cooked. But everything went so very wrong as soon as it went into my terrible, teasing, sadistic oven. Have I mentioned my oven before? If yes, I don't care, I'll say it again. IT'S BLOODY AWFUL!

- My apologies for the language but I figure if "Bloody" is in the first Harry Potter film then it'll hardly bother anyone with access to a computer! -

The oven has wonky shelves. It has the most imprecise heat gauge I've ever seen on an oven (there is literally a millimetre between gasmarks four and five and no dashes to help differentiate the two). And of course it has a big ole fire at the back just to make baking anything that bit more difficult. I think the first problem can be blamed on the oven - unequivocally, unmistakeably, undeniably the oven. The pie is all wonky on one side, strangely not the side which the oven slopes down towards but the opposite end! I can only assume that despite rotating the slowly-spoiling pie half way through the cooking time wasn't enough, my oven is far too clever to be outwitted in its attempts to spoil my food for that, nooooo, it all bubbled up in the second half of the cooking time and solidified halfway up. Result... WONKY PIE.

I must admit, that this wouldn't usually bother me, I've made various concoctions on this challenge which have been, let's say, aesthetically challenged. So I would have let it fly if it wasn't for problem two...

The reason I decided to do this challenge was mainly on a whim inspired by Julie Powell's famous blog (check out what's left of it here) but also because I stumbled across a recipe book which looked great and was reduced by £15 down to £3. A bargain I simply couldn't resist! Yet, my parsimonious (word of the day!) ways have resulted in me having what can only be described as a sh***y recipe book.

- Harry Potter fans don't get that word so nor can you! -

Over the few challenges I've had so far I've discovered that most of the recipes have been ok, but some have certainly not been anywhere near as good as ones I've tried in the past. DO NOT USE THIS PECAN PIE RECIPE... EVER. Essentially, the recipe has turned into a wonky pie which tastes absolutely awful. There is significantly too much syrup in it which makes for a dominating and permeating taste in the mouth, the flavour of the £5 per kilo pecans is lost and the filling has the consistency of scrambled egg ( my guess is two eggs is too many!). I won't pretend to be able to tell you what is wrong with this recipe properly or how to amend it but I can promise you that I followed the instructions to the letter and it came out with something I almost feel bad giving to my housemates... almost.

The Result:

Mmmm, it looks as good as it tastes...

All in all, I want to try another pie/tart because that bit went remarkably well... There's a chance I may have mentioned enough times how badly the rest went!

Recipe 15: Pecan Pie

Ingredients:

Pastry:
200g plain flour
115g Butter
2tbsp Caster Sugar
Cold Water

Filling:

70g Unsalted butter
100g light muscovado sugar
140g golden syrup
1 large Egg beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract
115g pecan nuts

Method:

1: Rub the butter into the flour until it forms breadcrumbs and then stir in the sugar and add a little water to make a firm dough. Cool for 15mins in clingfilm.
2: Preheat oven to Gas Mark 6/ 200c
3: Roll out the pastry to line a 9 inch tart tin. Prick the base with a  fork. Chill for a further 15mins.
4: Line the pastry with baking paper and fill with baking beans/rice and cook (bake blind) in the oven for 10minutes. Remove paper and beans/rice and cook for 5 more mins. Reduce oven to 180c/Gas Mark 4
5: melt the butter, sugar and syrup in a pan. Remove from heat and quickly beat in egg and vanilla extract.
6: Mix in the chopped pecans and bake for 35-45 mins in the oven until the filling has set. Serve warm or cold.

To see my tips and how I fared on this recipe click here!

Life of (Potato & Onion) Pie

Yesterday's challenge was one of the first real challenges in baking something savoury. Of course I have already baked bread a couple of times, cheese scones and of course the disastrous naan breads but yesterday's was a proper pie. Potato and Red Onion pie to be precise. For me this was also quite a significant evening in general because it was one of the last evenings I spent with all my housemates together before we head off to our various home towns across the country for summer. Part of the joy of baking this pie was that I was never going to be able to eat it all myself over a few days but that instead I could share it with my housemates and have a nice "family" meal together. The first time I cooked specifically for others...

Naturally it didn't all go to plan at all, so it didn't make for the wonderful family event I'd hoped. The first hiccup was the little fact that I had forgotten to get any more eggs. I had bought 15 eggs this time last week but already they had all vanished! I honestly never anticipated that, I mean I knew I'd need a lot of eggs but 15 in a week seems unreasonable! Luckily my housemate had one so I pressed on with the challenge... Until I realised I needed two... Dang! So to the shop I went, it seems that all I ever spend my money on these days is food. I'm rocketing through my student loan quicker than you can say "Orange and Poppy seed Bundt cake" (which still looms in my mind as the one challenge I dread to take on). Eggs in hand, pastry, onions and taters ("boil em mash em stick em in a stew") prepared the task carried on as intended. I must admit that seeing the puff pastry puff up in the oven is one of those wonderful delights in cooking. It unfolds like a flower tentatively in the start of spring and soon turns into something which looks remarkable and delicious. Brand new eggs whisked up with cream made the sauce to dribble into the top of the pie - another strangely enjoyable task, I am starting to get really geeky about this stuff - and then it was only a quarter  an hour before it was done.

The pie was a little bit too overdone on the outside and the veg was undercooked on the inside, so all in all not exactly great for the first pie I've made so far!Yet, despite those flaws, it was actually very tasty. Personally I am starting to doubt the credibilty of this book I'm working through (to be fair it was only £3 from The Works) so often the heat i've cooked it at has been way off... Though then again I am working on a "student" quality oven so I guess that may be playing a part!

The Result:

Mmm Undercooked...

Mmmm and Overcooked...

So all in all neither thumbs up or down for the poor ole Onion and Potato pie. But I learnt some pretty handy lessons (mainly to be careful with the heat of the oven and make sure it doesn't burn!