Tempyra

I made this recipe up one evening in New Zealand to use up pastry left over from making something else and guess what? They’re delicious.

Because I was just using up pastry scraps I’m not sure  how much you would need to make, say, 24 - 36 of these mini tarts. A ball of pastry the size of my fist roughly. So, when I decided on the quantities listed below I figured that it would be better to have too much pastry than too little, as you can always take a little more caramel and turn the the extras into plain caramel tarts. Yes, I know I’m very imprecise.

Mini roasted walnut and caramel tarts

For the pastry:

• 115 grams of frozen butter, chopped
• 1 cup of plain flour
• 2 tablespoons of white sugar
• Water, to mix

Process the chopped butter and flour together in the blender with the sugar and once it’s nice and crumbly, mix in a little water at a time - in the blender if it can handle this kind of stuff, with a beater, or by hand. Let the pastry rest in the fridge for awhile and make the filling in the meantime.

For the filling:

• 1/3 cup of chopped, roasted walnut

To roast the walnuts, just chop them up and roast in the oven on a paper-lined tray at 220 degrees C til they start looking browned.

• 1 cup of packed brown sugar
• 3 tablespoons of plain flour
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of butter
• 1 cup of milk
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• 2 egg yolks

For the caramel,thoroughly mix everything, except the milk, together in a pot. Add the milk and heat on the stove until it’s at a good caramelly consistency (quite thick), stirring it all the time.

While the caramel cools a bit, roll out the pastry and use a biscuit cutter to cut circles that will fit neatly inside a mini-cupcake tray. Fill halfway with caramel and add a few chunks of walnut to the top. Bake at 180 degrees C for about 10 - 12 minutes. The caramel tends to bubble over the top a bit so try and take them out of the tray as soon as possible, before the caramel hardens and glues your tarts to the tray.

One of my favourite food-related blogs, which I only recently discovered, is ‘Joe Pastry‘. Written by a former baker and pastry maker, his blog is full of interesting historical pastry knowledge, a fair bit of science, and lots of good instructions for different pastry techniques with plenty of handy photos. It’s not the prettiest blog I read but I’ve learnt more from it than most other food blogs.

I’m not quite sure now but I think I discovered Joe Pastry while on the hunt for a good quiche recipe. I didn’t just find a quiche recipe, I found an entire quiche tutorial there. For my brother’s party a few weeks back, I made three of these quiches and added an assortment of herbs from the garden to them. They were delicious - great crusts, perfectly textured custard, and the strong flavours of the herbs were balanced by the cheese. They were so good my mother asked me to make another one later on during my holiday. I had time to take lots of photos so, here’s my variation on this quiche recipe:

Courgette, feta, and chives quiche

For the pastry:

• 1 cup of plain flour
• 1 cup of wholemeal flour
• 1 teaspoon of salt
• 225 grams of chilled butter (I cut mine up and froze it in the freezer first)
• Water

I blended half the flour and the frozen butter together and then added the crumbled combination to the bowl of the mixer along with the rest of the flour.  I’m not exactly sure how much water I added, but it was more than I originally intended to and the dough came out stickier than I expected. Which was actually a good thing, because after I kneaded it for a while (probably not the 10 minutes that was recommended, because I’m lazy) and let it rest in the fridge for an hour, it rolled out perfectly:

With that lovely not-falling-apart-on-me pastry, it was super easy to fold in half twice (like folding a piece of paper into quarters) and plop it into a cake tin (in lieu of a quiche mold) and unfold. Don’t forget to leave plenty of extra dough around the edge to allow for shrinkage.

I lined the crust with paper and filled it with some wheat grains that had been languishing in the pantry for awhile (whatever works - dried beans, macaroni, uncooked rice, chickpeas etc) then baked it for half an hour at 190 degrees C. Took the wheat and paper out and put it back in for another 15 minutes to get properly brown. Here’s a photo, but because it’s wholemeal you can’t really see the brownness.

While the crust was baking I got the filling ready.

For the filling:

• 3 medium-sized courgettes (zucchini)
• 500 grams of feta cheese
• A handful of chives
• 6 eggs
• 2 cups of cream
• 2 cups of milk
• 2 teaspoons of salt
• 1/4 teaspoon of black pepper
• Grated cheese for on top (I used up some leftover Parmesan)

I cooked the sliced courgettes in a bit of olive oil and added the salt and pepper to them while they cooked. While they were cooking I chopped the chives and crumbled the feta into a bowl. Once the courgettes were a bit cooler I mixed them together with the feta and chives.

While I was getting the fillings ready I scalded the milk and cream. I’m not entirely sure if this step is necessary for quiche (see here for more on scalding), but it doesn’t take long and it doesn’t really matter if the milk is a bit warm so I do it anyway. I blended the milk mix and eggs together (in two batches, because it wouldn’t all fit) in the blender so they came out bubbly and fluffy on top.

Once the fillings are done, the crust is cooked, and the milk mix blended it’s just a matter of putting everything together. Which for me, just meant putting the courgette mix into the crust and pouring the milk/egg froth on top. Notice how fluffy the top looks?

And a sprinkling of grated Parmesan for the top. Then into the oven at 160 degrees C for one and a half hours. Apparently, quiche is ‘done’ when it doesn’t slosh if you shake it but rather, wobbles. I erred on the side of caution and left mine in until it was about 20 minutes past the wobbly point, which didn’t seem to do any harm and gave me a bit more peace of mind. Here’s my finished quiche:

At this point I deviated quite significantly from the recipe… It looked and smelled so yummy I trimmed off enough of the extra crust to lift off the cake tin and sneaked myself a slice while it was still quite warm. Now that I’ve had quiche this good and know how to make it, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to buy it again.

I scored this cup and saucer set (four of each, in perfect condition) and these three little white dishes (also in perfect condition) from a Freecycle garage give-away event - I put fruit in them to show how small they are. Pretty cool huh?

I mentioned awhile ago that I managed to talk my parents into letting me take over their kitchen and cook dinner for the 70 or so people invited to my younger brother’s 21st birthday party (a fairly large occasion for our family). Well, that was two weeks ago now and I thought I’d write a little bit about how it went.

I had a blast. It was so much fun deciding which recipes to make, writing shopping lists, shopping, baking and cooking! This is the menu I decided on:

Appetizers:

I tried to keep this part of the menu really simple and easy to prepare ahead of time and because there were quite a few children I thought a big selection of dips and crackers would be good.

• Cheeses -  Camembert and brie and a few harder cheeses with an assortment of crackers
• Dips - tzatziki, french onion, spring onion and cheese, spicy pumpkin, red capsicum and corn, and feta salsa, all served with flat-bread and crackers for dipping

Mains:

My father organised and cooked the meat for non-vegetarian guests (in fact, my older brother and I were the only vegetarians there) so I didn’t have to worry about that. Everything was served buffet style on the huge outdoor table that my younger brother made from a three meter long slab of macrocarpa wood.

• Mustard roasted potatoes, recipe adapted from here (a recipe I will be blogging about again)
• Sweet potato (golden kumara) mash with chives and butter, recipe invented by me
• Lemon and basil risotto, recipe from here
• Onion, mustard and fennel tarts, recipe from here (I intend to post about this recipe in the very near future)
• Herb quiches, recipe adapted from here (I will be writing about these as well)

These were served with bread rolls that my mother baked on the day and a big selection of salads, including:

• Roast vegetable pasta salad, recipe adapted from here
• Potato salad, invented on the spot by me
• Roast capsicum and chickpea salad, recipe adapted from here
• A garden salad using lettuce, cucumber, tomato, and onion from out of the garden
• A Mediterranean-style salad with olives, feta, and sun-dried tomatoes

Desserts:

For desserts I planned to make chocolate puddings that would finish cooking after people finished dinner and be served hot, along with the dishes listed below, but I could tell that everyone was getting really full so I chose not to make it. Everything else I had planned for dessert was made earlier in the day, including:

• Apple and rhubarb tart, recipe invented by me
• Pear and blueberry tart, recipe invented by me
• Lemon tart, recipe adapted from here
• Plum and almond tart, recipe adapted from a cookbook of mine (I’ll be doing a follow-up post about this later in the week)
• A huge fruit salad made with melons, bananas, pineapples, and shredded coconut

After dessert was finished there was the birthday cake that my sister baked (and I decorated at the very last minute after she piked out), iced with Swiss butter-cream icing in my brother’s favourite colour - yellow. NB: the writing is off centre for a reason: candles. Also, Swiss butter-cream icing is now my choice of icings - it’s fantastic!

The coolest thing about all this was (for me anyway) that so many of the fruits and vegetables were grown in my mother’s garden or by friends. The potatoes, tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs, onions, lemons, rhubarb, and pumpkins were all grown less than 20 metres from where they were eaten. The plums and apples were grown just down the road.

Overall, I think everything went really well. Everyone there seemed to be having a great time and enjoying their dinners. I had lots of requests for recipes and plenty of complaints about full bellies and breakings of diets.

Next time I do something like this I will definitely be more careful about calculating the right amount of salad per person. We ended up having twice as much mesclun salad leaf mix as what was necessary - I bought 3 kilograms instead of 1.5. I’m pretty sure this happened because I was basing my estimates on a mental picture of a 250gram bag of the stuff thinking it was 500grams… duh.

Also, next time I am going to remember to make time to take heaps of photos. I didn’t exactly forget to take photos, but the ones I did take were all rushed and disorganised and I hate photos like that so I’m not going to publish them (aside from a one I took a few days later while cooking and a cake photo showing my hasty decoration job).

I love biscotti, but up until two weeks ago I’d never made them. Now I have and will surely be making many more; I already have a mental list of recipes to try out (including these ones and this one). The recipe I made a few weeks ago was one I originally saw at SmittenKitchen, sourced from here.

These are fig and walnut biscotti, made by creaming a little butter (I gather that more traditional recipes don’t contain butter) with sugar, adding flour and spices, then mixing in orange zest and toasted walnuts which have been finely processed together with the dried figs and baking the whole lot twice, first as a log-shaped dough and secondly as sliced biscotti. Yum.

I ate the ones in the picture while sitting on the deck in the late afternoon sun and drinking a (decaffeinated) mug of espresso coffee.

Next time, I will remember to glaze the dough before baking it the first time and try to chop the dried figs more finely, because they made it hard to cut the loaf any thinner than about two centimeters thick, which was thicker than I liked. This is a recipe I will definitely be making again though.

By the way, isn’t this a gorgeous mug? Whenever I have a hot drink while I’m at my parents’ place I always look for this one in the drawer because I like the colours and they way they swirl. The potter who made it lives just down the road from my parents.

I’ve spent the last two weeks in New Zealand, staying with my parents where they live near Whangarei in the North Island. Aside from cooking enough food for a 70 person party and reading a large number of e-books, I didn’t do all that much. Not even any blogging! I intend to make up for that with posts about my first catering experience, a plum and almond tart, Swiss butter-cream icing, mini caramel and walnut tarts, herb and courgette quiches, fig and walnut biscotti, onion and fennel tart, and pastry (I think I’ve finally gotten pastry sorted out).

In the meantime, here’s a collage of photos that I took in my mother’s garden: tomatoes, marigold, garlic chives, purple basil, dandelion, and fuchsia (can you see the bumblebee?).

And here’s what likes to sneak underneath the fence and through the gate to eat all the yummy things that grow in the garden:

After seeing a cake display at one of the local libraries and checking out their website, then clicking through to Kitchenware Plus, I went out on a mission this afternoon: to find the brick and mortar shop, look at lots of kitchen goodies, drool over the Kenwood mixers and try not to spend too much money. I was mostly successful, restraining myself (and the credit card) to two large oval stainless steel platters, a 10 liter stainless steel mixing bowl, another baking sheet, the steel reinforced silicone scraper in the picture below (it’s only been in my possession for 3 hours and I’ve put it to use!), and eight cute lil’ pans for baking miniature cakes in.

The commercial baking equipment I use at work has been spoiling me and I’ve found myself becoming impatient with normal spatulas and inadequate mixing bowls so I’ve been on the hunt for a big, lightweight mixing bowl and a comfortable-to-use bowl scraper. Finally got them today, so I’m quite pleased with myself.

The platters and mixing bowl I’m taking with me to New Zealand later this week, along with some baking sheets, cake tins, serving trays, and other odds and ends to use next weekend when I’m cooking for 70 - 80 people. I guess my lugguge is going to look quite interesting to the person behind the x-ray screen.

As I write, I’m making chocolate puddings tonight and trying out the ramekin dishes (in the photo on the right above) I got during the Boxing Day sales; a plain chocolate one for Wes (I spiced it up with cinnamon and coffee, but Wes doesn’t know that yet) and a mixed berry one for me. The recipe I used was this one here, scaled down by two thirds for two people. It’s one of those scary recipes that ask you to make a chocolate pudding batter and then pour a whole lot of boiling water over the top of it before baking, like so:

Guess I better go see how they’re cooking…

Wow. We just ate these with vanilla bean and elderflower icecream while sitting on the floor, because that’s where I put them to take photos and they looked so delicous we had to eat them straightaway. Do not ever let the scary boiling water part of this recipe put you off it - it takes five minutes to make, 25 - 30 minutes to cook, looks spectacular, and tastes like everything chocolate pudding should be: chocolatey, crunchy and chewy on top, saucy underneath, gooey around the edges and cakey perfection in the middle.

This is one of my favourite pizzas to make. I love the contrasts of the salty feta and the sweet golden kumara (or, sweet potato, as it’s called here in Australia) and the crunchy capsicum with the flavoursome herbs.

• Pizza base (I used a bought one today, being in a bit of a hurry)
• A sauce of your choice - I used the spicy red sauce shown here
• 1 sweet potato - a small to medium-sized one
• 1/2 of a red capsicum
• Either rocket, flat-leafed parsley, or another herb of your choice
• Feta cheese
• Mozzarella

Peel and chop the sweet potato into cubes - about the same size as what you’d ise for potato salad. Roast them in the oven or boil on the stovetop until they’re just about cooked.

Brush the pizza base with your sauce and add the sweet potato, sliced capsicum, chopped herbs, feta, and mozzarella, in that order. Bake at 200 - 250 degrees Celsius for 10 - 15 minutes. If you have a pizza oven or even a pizza stone to bake it on, that would be ideal (and I would be jealous!).

One of them is being able to eat cherries.

I haven’t been blogging much lately. Generally, I’m in my most-likely-to-write-something mood late in the evening and, just lately, my evenings have not been very late at all. Which brings me to the reason why: my new job (something I mentioned awhile ago and said I should write about, so I am). Wes saw a vacancy sign for a baker about six weeks ago (I can’t believe it’s been that long already) and suggested I apply for it.  So, on a whim, I walked in and asked if I could have the position.

Short story: I got it. Since then I’ve been waking up extremely early (between 3 and 4a.m. mostly) to start work. Mostly I bake sweet and savoury muffins as well as a lot of scones. My favourite part of the day is the half hour I give myself to ice and decorate all the sweet things.

While there are aspects of my job that I’m not all that pleased with (they keep screwing up my pay and I would prefer to have more hours than what I get rostered for), mostly I like it. Commercial baking experience, plenty of creative freedom, and being able to work on my own for much of the shift make me happy. Occasionally, one of the baristas will ask me to work one of their shifts, so I get to make coffee as well. So yeah, this summer has had it’s benefits.

One other thing (well, probably a lot of other things) that I’m going to enjoy about this summer is that I get to go back to New Zealand for a couple of weeks; I fly over next Thursday. I’m looking forward to my little brother’s 21st birthday, catching up with my grandma, going to the beach, and getting out of the heat of Brisbane. Oh, and I talked my parents into letting me create and cook a three course buffet style dinner for my brother’s party, which will be attended by a minimum of 70 people. More about that next time I talk myself into writing something!

These are for a two year old boy’s birthday party tomorrow - the colourful ones are for the kids and the sophisticated ones are for the adults. I’m going to enjoy both sorts!

I put wafers (or whatever you call those cylindrical things made of wafer-like material with chocolate inside) on half of the chocolate cupcakes and cherries on the other half. Aren’t they rather elegant?