Second post in a month! Even though I wrote the last one in February but didn't hit the "publish" button until March, it still counts! I am an organized and responsible adult! Right? *crickets*
First off, the internet needs a sarcasm font. Second, I really am trying to be organized and get new recipes written up in a timely fashion. As strange as it sounds, being sick all of last week has been helpful for this because I've been compiling a very long list of all of the things that haven't gotten done while I've been lying in bed, awake and not hungry and on drugs.
My doctor gave me ephedrine (edit: actually pseudoephedrine) to help with the sinus infection. Holy crap is that stuff a strong upper! I was up all day Tuesday and part of Wednesday, about 30 hours total. I was so completely exhausted but I could not fall asleep. I lay in bed and watched the sun rise on Wednesday morning and couldn't figure out what was going on. I also didn't eat for a couple of days because I just wasn't hungry even though I could feel literal hunger pains in my stomach. And I was still pretty congested. So I ended up with a very detailed list of everything that I needed to do as soon as I was better.
Blogging isn't very high on my priority list but to me it is symbolic of organization, probably because it isn't necessary for my life to keep functioning and therefore if I have time to blog then it means that I have finished all of the truly important items on my life to-do list. At least, this seems to be what my subconscious thinks. In reality, there are an infinite number of important items on my life to-do list that are breeding with each other and spawning more important items when I'm not looking. But at least I'm blogging. Priorities!
I've made this recipe twice, once to try it out and which I completely forgot to take pictures of, and the second time because lots of people liked the first attempt and to take some photos. The original recipe is from Nigella but isn't on her website. Food.com has it, complete with automatic US/metric conversion. Unfortunately the automatic converter is literal so it doesn't convert mass to weight (maybe I should do a post on the different measurement systems...). This means that the recipes ends up with ingredients like "0.39 pounds plain flour". The recipe below is from the American version of How To Be A Domestic Goddess and has more useful measurements.
Although the recipe title says "blueberry" and the recipe calls for blueberries, I used blackberries. This doesn't have anything to do with what's in season. The first time I made this tart, I saw the recipe and thought, "orange and blueberry sounds like a great combination!", wrote down blackberries on my shopping list, bought blackberries, made the tart, made the blackberry topping, and was putting it on the tart before I realized that I was using the wrong fruit. I liked the result enough to make it a second time.
This tart is not as sweet as most fruit tarts, so it's perfect to make if you or a friend don't like desserts that are too sweet. If you want more sweetness, whipped cream or ice cream is a nice topping with the blackberries.
Showing posts with label blind baking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blind baking. Show all posts
Friday, March 28, 2014
Thursday, April 25, 2013
Mango Tart: Smashing At The End
Mangoes are my favorite fruit. I love how they taste, their texture, that they can be eaten by themselves or used in both savory and sweet dishes - everything about them, which is why I make this mango mousse cake so often. This time I decided to try something new and make a mango dessert that wasn't the mousse cake. I had already decided to retry the green tea mille crepes cake from the Zen Can Cook website. When I was on the website, I saw that he's got a recipe for a mango tart. It was fate!
But of course I can't leave well enough alone, so I changed some things before I even tried the recipe for the first time. You'd think that I would have learned after the mille crepes cake debacle, but no. This time I decided that instead of using store-bought puff pastry, I'd make a tart shell and put the filling into that instead. I used the tart shell from the dark chocolate and cherry tart and one and half bags of frozen mango chunks from Trader Joe's instead of four to five ripe mangoes.
Zen's original recipe produces a flat tart with a thin layer of mango puree topped with lots of fresh mango slices that are baked until they are cooked through. This isn't a good time of year to get fresh mangoes on the East Coast, so I made a thick tart with a lot of mango puree topped with a small amount of fresh mango that was baked until the mango puree became more solid. Sometimes it just isn't possible to get the right quantities of the ingredients you need to make a recipe. There's no shame in improvising. I figured if the whole thing didn't work, I'd just eat the mango filling with a spoon.
In the end, things worked out well enough that I have a couple of ideas for the next time I try the "thick variation" of this recipe. Nobody at the potluck got to see the result because I was cut off when I driving on the freeway on my way to the potluck. Fortunately I had put the mango tart in my cake carrier so when I braked suddenly, the mango tart smashed into the side of the carrier instead of into the back of the drivers seat. I told the potluck that it was an Impressionist version of a mango tart. We ate it with a spoon and it tasted wonderful, very mango-y.
If you don't like mango, it's not worth your time to make this since the filling is basically pure mango with a few extra ingredients.
But of course I can't leave well enough alone, so I changed some things before I even tried the recipe for the first time. You'd think that I would have learned after the mille crepes cake debacle, but no. This time I decided that instead of using store-bought puff pastry, I'd make a tart shell and put the filling into that instead. I used the tart shell from the dark chocolate and cherry tart and one and half bags of frozen mango chunks from Trader Joe's instead of four to five ripe mangoes.
Zen's original recipe produces a flat tart with a thin layer of mango puree topped with lots of fresh mango slices that are baked until they are cooked through. This isn't a good time of year to get fresh mangoes on the East Coast, so I made a thick tart with a lot of mango puree topped with a small amount of fresh mango that was baked until the mango puree became more solid. Sometimes it just isn't possible to get the right quantities of the ingredients you need to make a recipe. There's no shame in improvising. I figured if the whole thing didn't work, I'd just eat the mango filling with a spoon.
In the end, things worked out well enough that I have a couple of ideas for the next time I try the "thick variation" of this recipe. Nobody at the potluck got to see the result because I was cut off when I driving on the freeway on my way to the potluck. Fortunately I had put the mango tart in my cake carrier so when I braked suddenly, the mango tart smashed into the side of the carrier instead of into the back of the drivers seat. I told the potluck that it was an Impressionist version of a mango tart. We ate it with a spoon and it tasted wonderful, very mango-y.
If you don't like mango, it's not worth your time to make this since the filling is basically pure mango with a few extra ingredients.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Winter Disapearance, But That's Normal (Blackberry Cobbler Again and Chocolate Cherry Tart)
My original plan for this blog was to post once a week, most likely over the weekend but maybe during the week if work was slow or boring. The last time I posted an entry was January 23rd (Oldest Sister's birthday) but I also made a draft for another post on the 27th. And then I disappeared.
Winter makes me tired, slow, unhappy, depressed, irritable, and sloth-like. All I want to do is to curl up in bed with a heating pad on my freezing cold feet, read a good book or watch some good TV, and eat cookies (or raw cookie dough or cake or candy). I force myself to get up and go to work so I won't get fired, and I try all of the fixes that people suggest for seasonal issues: vitamin D, light boxes, massage, more exercise, etc etc etc (but not colon cleanses). So far nothing has worked, and like pretty much everything else in my life, this blog doesn't get touched.
And then last week the weather got better. There is sunlight. It's not snowing. I can wear sandals outdoors, I can ride my bike to run errands, I don't have to wear a winter coat with snow boots and earmuffs. All of a sudden I want to go out with friends or do some exercise.
So obviously I need to move to a city that doesn't really have winter. I hated living in Los Angeles but I never got the winter blues in the eight years I was there. Although it's going to take a while to get the social part of my life back together, the current result is that I'm baking for three potlucks this week. This blog is about to get a whole bunch of posts in a short amount of time, especially since the draft from January is already halfway done.
For yesterday's potluck, I made a blackberry cobbler and a chocolate cherry tart. The cobbler is a recipe that I've made before and it's very reliable, while the tart was an experiment with a new recipe. I chose these two recipes for several reasons. One, if I want to try a new recipe and I'm going to a potluck, I make a reliable recipe as well in case the experiment fails. You don't want to show up to a potluck with nothing but excuses about how the dough didn't come together right or the filling never solidified. Two, one of my friends really doesn't like chocolate and I figured he would enjoy having a chocolate-free dessert option. Although I didn't plan it this way, both recipes have something in common: blind baking/parbaking.
Blind baking and parbaking are different applications of the same idea. When you want to bake a recipe where the different parts need to bake for different amounts of time, you bake each bit separately at first and then combine them for a final bake. Although this sounds complicated, it is usually easier and more time-manageable than it seems because you can mix together the second part of the recipe while the first one is being blind or parbaked.
Cobblers are a fruit filling with some type of dough topping, usually biscuits or pie dough. According to the almighty wikipedia, cobblers are an American invention to use less butter than some of the traditional English desserts. Basically, if you don't put a layer of dough on the bottom of the pan but only on the top, you use half as much dough, which mean half as much butter, flour, etc. We have many different types of cobblers over here but I like the good old-fashioned blueberry or blackberry cobblers.
Winter makes me tired, slow, unhappy, depressed, irritable, and sloth-like. All I want to do is to curl up in bed with a heating pad on my freezing cold feet, read a good book or watch some good TV, and eat cookies (or raw cookie dough or cake or candy). I force myself to get up and go to work so I won't get fired, and I try all of the fixes that people suggest for seasonal issues: vitamin D, light boxes, massage, more exercise, etc etc etc (but not colon cleanses). So far nothing has worked, and like pretty much everything else in my life, this blog doesn't get touched.
And then last week the weather got better. There is sunlight. It's not snowing. I can wear sandals outdoors, I can ride my bike to run errands, I don't have to wear a winter coat with snow boots and earmuffs. All of a sudden I want to go out with friends or do some exercise.
So obviously I need to move to a city that doesn't really have winter. I hated living in Los Angeles but I never got the winter blues in the eight years I was there. Although it's going to take a while to get the social part of my life back together, the current result is that I'm baking for three potlucks this week. This blog is about to get a whole bunch of posts in a short amount of time, especially since the draft from January is already halfway done.
For yesterday's potluck, I made a blackberry cobbler and a chocolate cherry tart. The cobbler is a recipe that I've made before and it's very reliable, while the tart was an experiment with a new recipe. I chose these two recipes for several reasons. One, if I want to try a new recipe and I'm going to a potluck, I make a reliable recipe as well in case the experiment fails. You don't want to show up to a potluck with nothing but excuses about how the dough didn't come together right or the filling never solidified. Two, one of my friends really doesn't like chocolate and I figured he would enjoy having a chocolate-free dessert option. Although I didn't plan it this way, both recipes have something in common: blind baking/parbaking.
Blind baking and parbaking are different applications of the same idea. When you want to bake a recipe where the different parts need to bake for different amounts of time, you bake each bit separately at first and then combine them for a final bake. Although this sounds complicated, it is usually easier and more time-manageable than it seems because you can mix together the second part of the recipe while the first one is being blind or parbaked.
Cobblers are a fruit filling with some type of dough topping, usually biscuits or pie dough. According to the almighty wikipedia, cobblers are an American invention to use less butter than some of the traditional English desserts. Basically, if you don't put a layer of dough on the bottom of the pan but only on the top, you use half as much dough, which mean half as much butter, flour, etc. We have many different types of cobblers over here but I like the good old-fashioned blueberry or blackberry cobblers.
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