Beating the January Blues

Bored after the Christmas holidays? Have the January blues laid you low? If you’re like me and desperate to recapture some of that Christmas pizzazz and sparkle, then do I have the over-the-top, festive pudding for you!

As we all know Christmas dinner is but a warm up for the main marathon event that is dessert. If your family is anything like mine then at least half of the dinner table will swear blind that they’ve never liked Christmas pudding, they never will and will never eat one morsel. Every year this leaves you with a dilemma – what can I make that is fantastic enough to fill the flaming void left by Christmas pudding? This year Mary Berry descended like a primetime Christmas miracle and revealed to mine eyes the fabulous “Rosace a l’ Orange”.

This is a great recipe to try if you want to practice some French patisserie, and everyone does. Every time the Great British Bakers whip up a quick creme pat I go a little bit green! The flip side of this is of course that if anything goes wrong then you have all the key ingredients for a great trifle! 

For the full recipe please follow this link 

The star of this desert is the orange, so make sure you choose a really nice and fresh one - it makes up the majority of the decoration as well as the majority of the taste. If you don't have a mandolin (I didn't) then choose a really sharp knife, if it's dull don't struggle on, sharpen it. You need really thin slices, both to get the most out of your orange and to help with the candying later.  

As you can see we went through most of our knives trying to find one that was sharp enough. 

Once you've sliced your orange, make a sugar syrup (see recipe).

Then place the orange slices in the hot syrup and then leave them there - for as long as humanly possible. Mine was in the syrup for a long as Mary Berry recommended but I think I should have left them in there longer. Don't get me wrong the slices were definitely saturated, but for me they lacked a certain something.

While your orange slices are having a sugar bath make your creme patisserie. I've always been slightly in awe of this, anything with a French name automatically jumps up three places in my estimation. If you're like me then prepare for a slight disappointment because this is basically just custard. I know right I felt so betrayed. But on the flip side, it's not nearly as hard to make as you might imagine - as long as you stick exactly to the measurement and timings then you will not go wrong.

This is my finished creme pat. To this day, custard or not, I'm still proud.

 Whereas creme pat is much easier than I expected, the perfect genoise sponge still eludes me. If your not sure exactly what a genoise is, it's basically a sponge made with no raising agent. Any rise you get comes from the air you manage to whisk into the mixture. I first tried to make this about two years ago, I followed a Paul Hollywood recipe to the letter and  for all my effort was rewarded with two cake-y pancakes (the perfect fodder for a trifle). Mary Berry got me closer to the perfect sponge, but there were still problems! I really struggle with mixing in the flour into my egg and sugar mix (if you look carefully at the cake below you will see little spots of flour. I know.) The only thing I can suggest if you don't fancy a genoise faff is to just make a normal sponge - no one will know, and crucially no one will really care. That's what I'm going to do next time. 

 In case this is all getting a bit much, here's a picture of a Christmas dog.

Now the fun bit, the assembly! Find a suitably sized bowl and line it liberally with cling film - being careful to keep the film as flat as possible (you don't want the imprint of the film on the pudding) Then retrieve your orange slices, and arrange them as prettily as possible. Remember, this is what everyone is going to see - make sure they will be suitably impressed, you worked hard damn it! Slice your genoise in half (again being careful) 

Then layer everything! I forgot to keep some candid orange back for my middle layer, so I just used some fresh chopped up orange - but I think that a mix of fresh and candied would be interesting, so maybe try that? 

Lastly, leave your creation in the fridge.  I would leave it in there overnight, plus a couple more hours - I was really dubious of the creme pat actually setting, but as you will see below I was pleasantly surprised.  then hopefully you will have a suitably fancy French desert! I apologise for the quality (or lack of of the below photos - it was Christmas day).

 It's a really nice desert to eat on its own - a nice light alternative to Christmas pudding. But it also a great accompaniment for a chocolate tart - you can never go wrong with the chocolate orange combo!  

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.