Brandied custard and fruit mince tart, 500 posts and a giveaway

Have you ever seen a recipe and built up high hopes around it, and literally itched to make it, then when you finally do, it falls short of your expectations?

This is exactly what happened to me when I made Jocelyn Hancock's Brandied Custard and Raisin Tart, from p22 of Brisbane News (December 2-8, 2009). I am not blaming Jocelyn or the recipe - it's just that (a) I found this tart too eggy for my liking (and I am a fan of egg custard); and (b) I used a smaller pie tin than recommended, which resulted in the wrong ratio of fruit to custard in the finished tart, making it a little "meh" in my view.

My tart shell would not take all of the custard, and as I did not reduce the amount of fruit proportionately, I ended up with a tart filled with lots of fruit and with a thin custard shell on top:



I substituted the brandied raisins for fruit mince, which could have worked well if the custard component of the tart had turned out.

If you are a custard tart fan and would like to try this out, the recipe is as follows:

28cm baked shortcrust pie shell (bought or home made)
1 1/2 cups raisins
180ml brandy
zest of 1/2 an orange
2 egg yolks
3 eggs
75g sugar
375ml whipping cream
nutmeg for sprinkling on top

Put the raisins and 160ml of brandy in a small bowl and allow the fruit to soak overnight.

Next day, preheat your oven to 165 degrees Celsius. Put the zest, yolks, eggs, sugar and cream into a large bowl and mix well. Stir through the remaining 20ml brandy.

Cover the base of the pie shell with the raisin mixture, then pour the custard mixture on top. Sprinkle some nutmeg on top of the custard, and place the tart in the oven to bake for 40-50 minutes or until set. Remove the tart from the oven and allow it to cool. Chill before serving.

I have just realised that this is my 500th post - I can hardly believe it, but it is true.

To celebrate the occasion, I am going to introduce a Laws of the Kitchen first - a giveaway. I have bought a copy of The Australian Women's Weekly Little Pies and Cakes to give away:

Just like this blog, this book is a little bit savoury and a little bit sweet - hopefully something for everyone.

If you'd like to win this book, just leave a comment on this post. I will then use a random number generator to generate a number, and if the number of your comment matches that number, you win the book! It doesn't matter where you are from - for this celebration, I will mail anywhere in the world that has a postal service (although I can't guarantee that it will actually get there - the mail can be mysterious). If you don't have a blog, you will need to leave your email address with your comment so that I have some way of contacting you if you win.

Entries close at 6am Australian Eastern Standard Time on 27 January 2010, and the winner will be announced on this blog by midnight Australian Eastern Standard Time on the same date. Good luck!

TWD - Chocolate Oatmeal Almost-Candy Bars

Every now and again, a Dorie recipe makes me go weak at the knees - literally. Unfortunately, this normally happens when the recipe is very, very naughty from a nutritional perspective. And so it was this week. Our TWD host, Lillian of Confectioner's Realm, chose Dorie's Chocolate Oatmeal Almost-Candy Bars.

Let me tell you folks, these bars are not almost candy bars - they ARE candy bars! They consist of a buttery, oaty base, onto which is slathered a rich, fudgy filling comprised of condensed milk and chocolate and studded with dried fruit (Dorie chose raisins, I chose cranberries), then topped with more of the oaty dough. The resulting taste is out of this world - or to quote the Hoodoo Gurus, Like Wow, Wipeout!

The bad news is that they contain 350g of chocolate, nearly 2 cups of peanuts, a tin of condensed milk and over 200g of butter - so I had to shut my eyes and nonchalantly ignore these facts while I consumed 2 of these bars. But did I tell you how good these are ...

I cut my bars into 60 pieces - Dorie only got 32, so hers must have been enormous. My small squares of decadence were enough to satisfy me, so I am content to leave them this size if I make them again. (I would love to, but would need some occasion where there are LOTS of people who can take these away from me.)

For the recipe, go to Lillian's website. And to drool over these bars some more, visit some other TWD members via the TWD blogroll.

Viv's birthday - Apricot cake

Today was Viv's birthday. Viv works in our finance section at work, so this is a sneak preview - she won't see this cake until tomorrow.


The cake is Aprikosenkuchen, or Apricot Cake. According to About.com, it is a popular cake in Germany that many Germans learn to make by heart. The recipe for this cake can be found here.


Viv is Chinese, not German, but I still think she'd like this cake. I made it in a sweet heart-shaped pan, inspired by Sally Seltmann's film clip for Harmony to My Heartbeat - her heart-shaped layer cake is so cute that I really wanted to make a heart-shaped cake myself.


I may have left my cake in the oven for a teensy bit too much time, because the apricots started to brown; however, as I was using a very different size and shape of cake tin to that called for in the recipe, I wanted to be sure that the cake was cooked through before taking it out of the oven.


I can't comment on the taste of this cake yet, because I am saving it for Viv tomorrow - but I will try and update this post then with the feedback.

Postscript - this cake was good - it was certainly not a sweet cake, and is on the more substantial side, but it would be perfect for someone who is not really a sweet tooth.

Hope you all had a good weekend!

TWD - Mrs Vogel's Scherben

Our TWD host this week is Teanna of Spork or Foon? She has chosen the intriguingly named Mrs Vogel's Scherben as our Dorie recipe for this week. Mrs Vogel was a real person who is the source of this recipe, and "scherben" (love that word!) is the German word for fragments - because this is what these cookies are - fragments of fried dough, dusted with cinnamon sugar and icing sugar.

The biscuits without the sugar dusting are very plain - you could almost dip them in salsa and it would be fine.

Although I loved the name of these biscuits, I didn't really like them that much - I found them to be very plain, even with the sugar. Mrs Vogel's son adores them, so it's just a personal thing.

If you'd like to try these, Teanna will have the recipe. To see what the other TWD bakers thought, go to the TWD blogroll.

Salted Brown Butter Rice Krispie Treats

My Christmas baking has meant that I have quite a few leftover ingredients that I need to use up - not turkey and ham, but sweet ingredients. From my Rocky Road, I had a huge bag of marshmallows which I had been guilty of eating from every time I walked past it, and from the White Christmas, I have an enormous box of Rice Krispies.

This combination of leftovers was begging to be made into Deb of Smitten Kitten's Salted Brown Butter Rice Krispie Treats - you can find the recipe and Deb's commentary here.

My rice krispie treats are pink because my marshmallows were pink and white - perfect for a girl's birthday party!

The mixture is very thick and reasonably hard to pat down, so I recommend taking Deb's tip of using a piece of oiled baking paper to push the mixture into the pan.

The resulting treats are delish - very light and sweet and crunchy. Kids would love these for their lunch boxes (if you don't mind the fact that they aren't really healthy).

I still have heaps of Rice Krispies left, despite using 6 cups of them to make these treats! I am searching for recipes that use both the rice krispies and milk powder, and am open to suggestion.

Have a great week!

Loreto Mango Chicken

I mentioned previously that my good friends Steve and Craig gave me a copy of Loreto Cooks, compiled by the Catholic girls school in Toorak, Victoria.

At the time, I posted about the Rocky Road recipe (which was delicious!). However, around the same time, I also made mango chicken, a recipe submitted by Amanda Quirk. There are two recipes for mango chicken in the book, but the one that I chose did not include cream - given that it was Christmas and I was already eating way too many boombah* foods, I needed to cut down wherever possible.

This mango chicken was delicious. I spoiled it somewhat by adding too much salt afterwards - do not do this! The recipe is good as is, and if you feel that you need to add salt, go easy on it instead of tipping in half a jar, like me. I love the vibrant colour of this dish - it looks like sunshine.

The recipe is as follows:

Oil (for frying)
2 onions
2 teaspoons curry powder
2 teaspoons cumin powder
2 tins diced tomatoes
1/2 cup mango chutney
4 tablespoons honey
750g diced chicken fillets

(I also added 1 chopped carrot and 1 chopped zucchini to make this a more complete meal in itself.)

Heat enough oil for cooking in a large frypan (I actually just sprayed the base of the pan with spray oil, and that was heaps). Add the onion, curry powder and cumin, and cook until the onions are soft. Add the tomatoes, chutney and honey, and cook for 5 minutes. Add the chicken and cook for a further 15 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through.

Serve with rice. (I served it with steamed bok choy!)

*Boombah is a word used by Jane Kennedy in her new cookbook Fabulous Food, Minus the Boombah, and means "food that makes your [backside] fat".

Happy 2nd anniversary TWD - Tarte Tatin

This week is the second anniversary of Tuesdays with Dorie - congratulations to our founder, Laurie, for starting the group and keeping it going. To celebrate, Laurie gives us the choice of making one (or both) of two recipes - one for Tarte Tatin, and one for a Cocoa-Buttermilk Birthday Cake. I have been a member of TWD since October 2008, so I wasn't there at the beginning, but Dorie's Baking - From My Home to Yours is already the most used cookbook that I own.


I am over cake at the moment, and have never made Tarte Tatin before, so that is what I made. For the base, I used home made puff pastry, left over from a Daring Bakers project, and I used Granny Smith apples.


I always wondered what the fuss was about making Tarte Tatin - why is it regarded as difficult? I found out when I flipped out my tart - all of my carefully laid concentric circles were laid to naught, as ALL of the fruit tipped off the tart when I flipped it over out of the oven. (For the uninitiated, you make tarte tatin with the fruit on the bottom, then flip it over once it is cooked so that the fruit is on top.) So if the apple pattern on top of my tart looks a little haphazard - it is.


That said, the tarte tatin tasted delicious - as it would with all of that sugar and butter. I have just returned from family holidays with a groaning stomach, so having now tasted a small slice of this tart, the rest is going to work so that other people can help me with it.


Happy New Year to all TWD members everywhere, and to all my readers!