Frangipane Frolics

For the past few weeks a group of four intrepid slow foodies: Cath, David, Holly and myself (Lottie), have been meeting every Sunday to cook delicious food, exchange cooking tips and generally have a great time!

When we last met up we made incredibly tasty pesto, sun dried tomatoes, and mozzarella bread rolls. We found the recipe on BBC Good Food, just a Google away! These are so very easy to make, if you know how to make bread then you're ahead of the game. But if you haven't, (or even if you have!) the trick’s in the kneading - when a recipe says knead for 10 minutes they really mean it! I’ve always cut corners before, kneaded for 3 or 4 minutes and left it at that. When I tasted these rolls though I knew all the effort we’d put in had been more than worth it! The texture was amazing - Paul Hollywood would have been proud. 

While the dough was proving we made a side dish of layered aubergine mozzarella and chopped tomatoes - the perfect accompaniment for the rolls. As someone who hasn't eaten nearly enough aubergine in her life I can recommend giving this dish a go. It's the perfect way to introduce yourself to it, because even if you discover you don't like aubergine you've still got oozing mozzarella and chopped tomatoes. No dish include mozzarella has even been bad. Fact. 

But next we all wanted to bake something sweet and delicious. So frangipane it was!

As the great Mary Berry says why make pastry by hand when it comes ready made (no really she does!) If that doesn’t strike you as a very slow food-esque statement then comfort yourself with the knowledge that we layered the base in Cath’s dad’s homemade (and hand picked!) plum jam.

Like the bread rolls Frangipane was surprisingly easy to make. We also found this recipe online, on Tesco’s website, so you’ll easily be able to track it down. Making the almond paste for the filling was the work of a moment, nothing tricky simply weigh and combine. As with all baking the real key to this pastry was in the measurement - if you stick to the recommended amounts you won’t go far wrong. That sounds obvious, but so much of my baking has gone wrong because I’ve winged it and added just that little bit more chocolate!

But this time we all stuck to the book and the results bore that out. The flavours were all perfectly balanced; the sweet richness of the plum jam, the juicy bursts of blueberry all brought gloriously together with the buttery almonds.

We decided to cook this fantastic French pastry a week ahead of time, but seeing the tragic events unfold in France we couldn’t let the chance pass up to pay some kind of tribute to the victims of the Paris attacks. So we made a pastry disk and melted chocolate in the shape of Jean Jullien’s “peace for Paris” symbol.