"It's a Miracle!" Freeform Berry Tart

Kia ora!

Well it's been quite some time since I posted. I could give you a million reasons, but mostly it's just that I've been living life (and loving it!).

As I write this I'm on holidays with Kirsti visiting Kat in NZ . We've been bumming about Auckland with Kat for the last few days, and tomorrow we head off to find us some Hobbitses. We haven't yet decided if we will make it a habit to eat Second Breakfast in our travels but I guess we'll just have to take things as they come ;)

Speaking of breakfast, this recipe is one you could **almost** get away with for breakfast - I mean, if berry Danishes are breakfast food then surely so may this be. I made it for a friend the night before I flew out, so the lucky bugger had the option at any rate!

I made a half batch (or at least I **thought** I did - recipe as follows), but the full recipe can be found in Margaret Fulton's Baking (which Kirsti gave me last year for my birthday). True to form I only vaguely followed the instructions. You should all know by now that I'm pretty impatient and also tend towards laziness, interspersed with forgetfulness. And yet, it turned out just fine. Things usually do, when it involves butter and sugar, not to mention berries and cream. Can't really go wrong :)

HAHAHA oh man, I just re-read the recipe before copying it out, and realised just how poorly I halved it. So the recipe below is the complete one. I halved the flour and almonds in the first bracket (I can't say for sure whether I halved the butter. I may have, but make no promises), and everything in the second, and it's actually a bit of a miracle that it held shape at all, but hey, it tasted great!

INGREDIENTS:

2c plain flour

125g butter

1/2c ground almonds

2tbsp castor sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

A little grated lemon rind

1tbsp rum

1/2c ground almonds

1/2c castor sugar

600g mixed berries (frozen is fine - thaw them first though, and if there is lots if juice/water, drain most of it off)

3tbsp icing sugar

Cream to serve. 

Have all ingredients at room temperature. Mix ingredients in the first bracket in the order in which they appear (I dumped them all in the food processor) until combined. Form into a ball, wrap in glad wrap and refrigerate for an hour. (I chucked it in the freezer for about half an hour. Impatience and all!)

Roll out on baking paper in a 30cm circle, put on a tray and chill for 30 minutes. (Seeing as I had halved the flour and almonds, my circle was a bit smaller, and I estimate that I smooshed it to around 5mm thick. With my hands. Yep, I was totally winging it.)

Preheat oven to 180oC. (Check!)

Sprinkle tart shell with the second lot of almond plus 1tbsp of the sugar. Spread fruit over shell, leaving 5cm border. Fold border up to hold fruit in, leaving a gap in the middle. Sprinkle remaining sugar on pastry. 

(Because I was transporting ingredients, I  combined the almonds and sugar in a freezer bag. Fortuitously there was a big lump of sugar in there to sprinkle on the pastry at the end, so I set that aside then sprinkled a thin layer of the combined mixture onto the tart shell, then dumped the berries into the bag, trapped some air in it as if you were crumbling/flouring meat and shook it around to coat the berries. I then spread that mixture on, folded the edges up and sprinkled on the sugar. More than one way to skin a cat!)

Bake on the lowest shelf for about 45 minutes, until the pastry is golden. Cool on tray until just warm (we know how impatient I am - I cooled it for around five minutes!), dust with icing sugar (I didn't), cut into slices and serve with cream. 

Dodgy iPhone photo (nicely styled cream, though!):

 

The half(ish) batch would have served four. 

Leftovers!

 

This is quite an easy recipe, and although it requires refrigeration steps, you can kind of work around that as you cook your main course. It's definitely one I'll make again. And because it's freeform, it doesn't matter a jot if it turns out "rustic" (or, to the average bystander, "ugly"). 

Enjoy!

Teacup Apple Crumble

So... is it me, or does anyone else suffer from the illusion that things that come in tiny servings must be healthy? Mini muffins. Fun-sized Mars Bars. Fun-sized anything. Mini Magnums. Doughnut centres. Aeroplane-sized cans of Coke. And that somehow, because it's in a tiny portion (and therefore uses more packaging - three cheers for environmental destruction!), you can eat more of them. Like two. For the purposes of this, let's say two. We don't need to dig deeper into my abysmal snacking habits here right now.

 

Now, I love apple crumble. I love apple crumble almost as much as I love deluding myself. So making apple crumbles in tiny portions seemed like the perfect idea. Sure, I could have made them in shot glasses like you see at cocktail parties, but come on, you need enough apple crumble for it to work its wonderful, warming magic on you.

 

INGREDIENTS:

 

3 apples

1tsp sugar

1tsp cinnamon

3 cloves

A little water

1tbsp butter

1tsp cinnamon

2tbsp brown sugar

3tbsp plain flour

 

(Note that I "wrote" the quantities into the My Fitness Pal app in grams (which was a rough conversion to begin with), and now I'm converting it back, so they may be a little out. Play with it until it feels (and tastes!) right!)

 

Peel and roughly dice apples. Cook them, covered, with a little water and the sugar and spices until softened - around 5 minutes. Make sure they don't stick. Once softened, tip off any extra water and leave cover off.

 

Meanwhile, rub butter, cinnamon, sugar and flour together until evenly distributed. Try not to "test" too much of it - rest assured that it really does taste quite nice!

 

Grease 3 (or 4, depending on their size) oven-proof teacups. Divide apple mixture among the teacups. Remove and discard cloves. Top with the crumble mixture.

 

Bake in a pre-heated oven at 200oC for around 5-10 minutes, until lightly browned. Obviously I can't remember whether it was 5 or 10 minutes, and as you can see from the scorched bits hidden under the ice cream, I overshot the mark, so keep an eye on it! All you're doing is browning the topping as the filling should still be hot. At some stage in the near future I will make this again and test the times but for now, hey guys, it's apple crumble. It's not rocket science. It needs to be hot, and apple-y, and cinnamon-y, and wonderful. No biggie.

 

 

Enjoy one with a scoop of ice cream. Or two.

 

And for those health-conscious peops out there, there are 301 calories per serving without adding ice cream. So it's probably just as well you made these in a tea cup, otherwise you'd go back to the pan a sneak another spoonful. And then another... and another... and another... yeah, I'm onto you!

Breakfast at Tom's Farm. Alternate Title: Lost In Translation. Second Alternate Title: Why It's A Miracle I Didn't Lose Weight In America.

So I've been hanging out in the US of A for the past week with my friend Carole from Toot Sweet 4 Two. We met at Bloggy Boot Camp Vegas last year and totally hit it off, although, to be fair, **not** hitting it off with Carole poses a far greater challenge!

Carole had kindly agreed to drive me from her home near Escondido (kind of outer San Diego) up to my aunt's house in Pasadena at the end of my stay, and we stopped by the side of the highway at Tom's Farm for breakfast. It started out as a produce stand on the side of the I15 near Lake Elsinore and has now morphed into almost a destination unto itself. It has a diner, a Mexican restaurant, a wine/cheese place, a produce store, a traditional candy store, a furniture shop and a model train and pony rides for the kids. And on weekends it hosts a craft market as well as the occasional blues show.

Anyway, I tried my darndest to order breakfast there, and all I can say is "lost in translation". My own thoughts were encapsulated by a set of pointy brackets, but it did something funky to the formatting and they all disappeared :(

ME: "I'll have the hotcakes combo with bacon and fried eggs over easy"
SERVER LADY: *blank look* "I'm sorry, how do you want your eggs?"
ME: "Uh, you know, like, sunny side down...?"
SERVER LADY: "Uhh..." *looks as Carole for help and then back to me* *crickets chirp*
ME: "Um, you know, fry the eggs, flip 'em but try not to bust the yolks...?" *awkward laughter*
CAROLE: "So I think she wants the eggs over, a little cooked on top"
SERVER LADY: "Oh, okay, so how do you want them?"
ME: "Medium please. Like, not too hard but not too runny."
SERVER LADY: "Right, gotcha. And what do you want to drink?"
ME: "Can I have a cup of tea, please?"
SERVER LADY: "Sure, uh, so you want, like, hot tea?"
ME: "Yes, please."
SERVER LADY: "And would you like blueberries or chocolate chips in your hotcakes?"
ME: *stunned look* "Blueberries, please."

(And for the record, blueberry pancakes go really well with fried eggs! Crazy, I know.)

(Also, Carole assures me that I used the correct terminology straight up. I can only assume she was concentrating on my accent and not my words, because that's what I do when Irishmen speak and... *vagues out to a happy place full of cute Irishmen with charming accents*)