Love.......the rustic baker

Ok. This is becoming a bit of a habit. More baking and now it appears that Fridays have been designated as Quicheday, owing to a slight obsession with getting the best pastry and flavour. This week's offering was a spinach, feta, spring onion and pea quiche with a creme fraiche, egg, mustard and milk filling. Pastry as usual by Paul Hollywood and filling all my own. This time the pastry was bashed with a rolling pin after chilling, rolled out, pushed well into the sides of the tin and then chilled again before blind baking. I think my timings were off this week and once I took the beans out to bake the rest of the pastry it all puffed up again. I did the fork thing but case came out a little too early. Anyway the filling went in and baked. End result pretty good taste but even better the day after. I did also notice the green-ness of my quiches thus far so next week I'm going to bung in some colour. 

I cheekily made macaroons too.  Out of a pack from that well known supermarket Sainsburys. Total cheat but worth a go. I found the actual macaroon mixture easy to blend and I liked their instruction of bunging them in on the lowest oven setting. This still produced the sheen we all love to see. Maybe a trick worth knowing in the future. My piping is still crazy but these baked well. I have a fan oven that is really efficient so I do tend to fly by the seat of my pants where timings etc are involved. So their proposed 20 mins of baking time was approx 12 mins in my oven. I was disappointed in their buttercream mix. My softened butter didn't mix well so I used a store bough raspberry jam on one shell and a hint of the buttercream on the other. All in all a good product, probably a 8/10. Makes you feel like you can really do it. My macaroons came out with the elusive ruffle despite dodgy piping. Try one of the kits out. 

Love......the rustic baker

Well last week and the early part of this week saw a baking session. I made quiche, macaroons, chocolate mousse, peanut butter & chocolate muffins and pistachio friands.

Quiche was a made up pea, bean and potato number. Tried the Paul Hollywood pastry recipe and I played around with the egg filling by using creme fraiche. The result - so so to be honest. The pastry was delicious, the peas etc were delicious but the egg filling not so. Decided I needed to put in some mustard to jazz up the flavour. But at least no soggy bottom though a beautiful puff in the pastry.

Next I made macaroons from a recipe from How to avoid a Soggy Bottom by Gerard Baker. Actually they were splats. Too little air in final product as I mistakenly squeezed it out whilst using a small nozzle in the piping bag. Plus i have a suspicion my egg whites weren't at their best. Now I know why there is a high charge on a good macaroon. They are extremely time consuming and on the Pfaff Scale about a 9/10. They did taste delicious.

Oldest One had a school friend over this week so I thought I'd try peanut butter & chocolate muffins for the kids. Recipe taken from Baking Magic by Kate Shirazi. I am slowly getting the hang of a good muffin especially the technique. Definitely a mix, dump and bake rather than a good beating and baking! Delicious though I would have like more dampness in the muffin. The kids loved them.

I made pistachio friands from a recipe in the Independent on Sunday by Bill Granger. I have never tried making these and they were slightly pfaffy and I had 6 egg yolks left over. I used a muffin tin not friand tins which can be hard to find. Bill Granger recommends eating them whilst warm, but they tasted under baked. I added honey over the top and left for 24 hours. They seem to age well and taste delicious as time passes. Little mini treats.

I would love to show you a photo of the delicious Irish Cream chocolate mousse I made. But we ate it all up before I remembered to take a photo. We served it with blackberries and raspberries. This recipe was taken from Jamie Oliver's 30 Minute Meals.

Love.......the rustic baker

Just occassionally, ok mostly every day, the urge to bake takes over my brain. I decided today to try something I have never done before, using some ingredients we had left over from Easter lunch. I made a quiche.  Bring on the band....... It was an adaptation from Tom Kerridge's recipe for new potato, spring onion and Montgomery cheddar quiche. I had the potatoes and used one bunch of spring onions and some cheap cheese. I added a leek to the mix and read the reviews and followed some advice there.

I have never made a savoury shortcrust pastry and it's as fiddly as everyone says. Top tip #1, I noticed on the GBBO was that you could flatten the pastry in a disc before chilling but perhaps everyone knew that already. Top tip #2, use a ball of pastry dough to gently push the pastry to corners of case.  I bought baking beans ages ago and have finally used them. Once blind baked my pastry was a little cracked but hey ho in with the filling. Top tip #3 put quiche tin into a bigger tin to help contain leakage.

So although I know there are cracks in the pastry and I dread a soggy bottom this is my leek, potato and cheese quiche.