4 posts tagged “dessert”
I have a confession to make. I was once a closet pastry-phobe.
Not afraid to eat it mind you... but to make it. For years, I avoided any recipe that called for a flaky crust. If I could rework it with a graham cracker crumb crust (for pies and tarts) or a fluffy buttermilk biscuit topping (for savory pies and such), then I did so. Later, I discovered that one could make acceptable pastry in the food processor, so I did so from time to time. I never fell in love with making it, though.
But recently I've gone back to more primitive methods and have been delighted. I use hard butter (partly frozen) grated on a hand-held grater for the fat; I stir the shreds of butter carefully into the flour with an old silver fork, and add ice water to bind... and slowly work the whole mess together, with the aforementioned fork. The result is glorious, and something that most home cooks have already discovered long before me.
I first used this buttery, flaky substance to make Vegetarian Sausage Rolls:
This is a Delia Smith recipe; the stuffing is a mixture of cheddar, breadcrumbs, onions, and seasonings. I took these to the all-parish annual meeting and they were completely snarfed up. Here's another view of them sitting cutely on the cooling rack:
I had to put one aside for my husband, or he'd never had gotten to try one. Then for the church's Easter Vigil Agape Feast, I made Eccles Cakes. These are a traditional small English pastry stuffed with dried fruit and spices. They are something like a flaky Fruit Newton with overtones of fruitcake. The pastry (sweetened a bit this time) is rolled, cut into small circles, and the filling is placed in the middle; the edges are brought together and sealed like a little drawstring bag (like making Ham Baos, if you don't mind a culture-clashing example) then they are flipped over and rolled gently with the rolling pin to flatten. Slits are cut into the top and they are baked until golden.
I filled mine with a mixture of dried cranberries, golden raisins, sugar, butter, spices, and a bit of candied peel.
Last weekend I used the basic pastry to make some little meat pies, or pasties. I filled them with a mixture of leftover shredded ham, sauteed onion, parsley, and Cheddar. They were yummy, but none survived to be photographed.
Soon I may be ready to make a Real Fruit Pie!!
I haven't done much worth writing about lately, and neither have the cats. So I thought I'd look around in the humor files and see what was worth passing on.
For starters, there's this, a site that will show you the Bible in a way you never learned it in Sunday School. A clear example of creative people with misdirected energy. And then there are these people, who have the definitive word on snack food and related subjects; be sure to read the "Snacking with the Simpsons" segments. And then, for literally hours of giggling and snorting (followed by recurrence of the same whenever you encounter oddly-drawn warning signs, go here.
In the department of food, I did make a rather nice Clafouti aux Cerises this week. Clafouti must be one of the world's easiest desserts to make, yet it manages to give the impression, when eaten, that it required lots of effort. There are lots of recipes out there, but it's basically cherries (some insist upon leaving the pits in, but I enjoy using my cherry pitter too much to do that to my dinner guests) scattered in a buttered baking dish with a sweetened, vanilla-flavored crepe batter poured on top and baked. James Peterson's recipe is what I use.
This time, I used cherries that were leftover from Katr's cherry liqueur-making. She combined fresh-picked cherries with vodka and sugar last summer and let them steep in mason jars. When she gave me a jar for Christmas, I strained out the cherries and put the liqueur in a decanter. The cherries, perfectly preserved and whiffing strongly of booze, sat in my fridge until this week when I chucked them into the clafouti. Wow... they definitely made a fantastic dessert; I won't pretend that the alcohol actually cooks out, though. Those cherries are still remarkably potent even in the finished dessert.
I made the trifle this morning, with homemade cranberry jam and apricots. It needs only the whipped cream on top to be complete, which I will do in the morning. Otherwise, we spent the day in Portland up at my mom's house. We ate my brother's homemade pizza, drank a lot of wine, and critiqued the Food Network. A good time was had by all.
This morning, I found myself talking to a cake.
Not just any cake; this is a plutonium-dense traditional English fruitcake that I made a few days ago. It's sitting nicely on a covered cake stand, aging. As part of the aging process, I drizzle brandy over it every day. Today, I punctuated my actions with comments such as, "Let's see if you can take a little more. Oooh, did you drink that already?" I would have tied a napkin under its chin, if a Bundt-shaped cake could be said to have a chin.
This afternoon, I mixed up homemade marzipan. On Saturday, I will roll it out and cover my boozy little fruitcake-child in a creamy blanket of it, tucking it into every little Bundt-y ridge and valley. Late that night, I will mix up a batch of royal icing and smooth that on top of the marzipan, and let it dry overnight. I'll take it to the post-Lessons and Carols party, and serve it up to some of my most beloved fellow Anglophiles, topped with a sprig of holly.
Christmastide baking and cooking makes me a little goofy, every year. I always think that I am too busy, too professional for such shenanigans. I shy away from Christmas shopping or having a tree (the cats would knock it over, anyway) and I almost never bake cookies. But something in my soul is soothed by the making of traditional English Christmas dishes, and I realize anew every year that I enjoy the process as much as the end-result. Perhaps more.
I've dabbled in fruitcake starting about 11-12 years ago, with varying success. And our first Christmas in this house, I cooked a Dickensian Christmas dinner of roast goose, stuffing, potatoes, gravy, and all the trimmings (all while coming down with pneumonia... I think I had more stamina then). I've reprised the goose a couple of times and have done English roast beef as well. But my latent Anglophilism really kicked in with the pudding.
I think it was Christmas of 2002, or maybe 2003, but I'm not sure; we had either goose or roast beef, and I served trifle and steamed plum pudding for dessert. I think everyone was a little dubious about the pudding, and I admit that an unmolded plum pudding is an odd sight. I plopped it onto its plate and served everyone a little. And when my mother took a bite, she exclaimed, "Oh! Your grandmother used to make this!"
She went on to tell me about the half-remembered taste from her childhood. My grandmother, with a mother carried away by illness (influenza, perhaps? It was about the time of the Pandemic of 1918) and a father who didn't know what to do with her after that, was raised by her Aunt Julie. Aunt Julie was either English or a first-generation immigrant. Surviving photos of her show a sturdy peasant woman with strong arms, capable of kneading bread or stirring a pudding. She taught my grandmother how to make steamed puddings and fruitcakes. My mother remembers that Grandma steamed hers in a coffee can. She'd never mentioned any of this to me, at least not the culinary details.
I've made it since then, not every year (some years we have just given up in exhaustion and not hosted a Christmas dinner) but every year that I could. Mom still makes the same comments. I think that I serve it to her hoping that she will remember more stories to tell me, as if raisins and currants and rum sauce will trigger some hidden action in those lost childhood memories, before all of the family tales are forgotten. And almost every year, I make a least one fruitcake, and feed it lovingly upon brandy, and in turn feed it to those that I love.
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