Um. Hi?

So apparently somewhere in all the travelling I've been doing, I kind of sort of forgot that I have a blog. Because this is possibly the longest I've gone without blogging since about 2009...

ANYWAY.

I promise I'll tell you about it in full detail when I get home in a few weeks and things go back to normal, but for the time being? Here's some stuff that I've been doing, in photo-overload form:

Free walking tour of London, ending at Westminster

World War I installation in the moat of the Tower of London

The White Tower

Tower Bridge

I found myself in Lisbon Cathedral - dead and still reading

Lisbon's main square

The Library at Mafra's National Palace

Lisbon from the Castelo de Sao Jorge

Portuguese royalty loves its insanely ornate ceilings

Pastel de Belem. (aka extreme deliciousness)

Quinta da Regaleira, Sintra

Monserrate near Sintra

Obligatory cream tea

The Roman Baths

So there you have it! The basics, at least. Tomorrow, I'm off to the Harry Potter studio tour and I'm crazy excited about it.

What's new with you guys??

K xx

Funemployment

When one is unemployed, one has to make one's own fun to avoid going completely and utterly stir crazy and spending one's days hitting F5 on a bunch of different websites in the hopes that a job you're perfect for will magically appear.

For this reason, Deidre and I had a somewhat spontaneous Dessert Day yesterday. We consulted our "Dessert Day Planning" Google Docs spreadsheet (yes, we have one. What of it?!), and came up with two different things that we wanted to try:
1. Gluten free chocolate eclairs, and
2. Chocolate orange biscuits.

The first involved many MANY things that terrify us, including (but not limited to) eggs, piping bags, adding raw eggs to hot things, cutting things in half and filling them, and (perhaps most importantly) trying to convert butter measurements from sticks into grams.

As it turned out, making gluten free choux pastry wasn't as scary as anticipated. Although we WERE very glad of the instruction telling us that if it looked like mac and cheese, we should keep mixing because everything would be okay. Because seriously. It looked like mac and cheese.

When it came to the filling, we decided that using the vanilla pudding option listed in the recipe was far too crass easy for the likes of us, and that we were going to make creme patissiere from scratch. A wee spot of Googling gave us this recipe. Degree of difficulty = low? WHERE DO WE SIGN UP?! We decided to double it, on the theory that too much is always better than not enough (a lesson I learnt while trying to colour match buttercream frosting...). And the degree of difficulty was, indeed, low. Except for the part where I managed to spill hot milk all over the kitchen floor. Whoops.

Eventually we were ready for the assembly process. But prior to assembly, I took photos of this eclair because it looks a little like a ghost:

No, seriously:

Ahem. The filling process - with me manning the piping bag full of creme patissiere and Deidre manning the saucepan full of ganache - went surprisingly smoothly, except for when we started to run out of room on the tray and the eclairs started making friends with each other...

End result?

The biscuits were incredibly simple to make, although rather stubborn when it came to forming a dough. I suspect you could make them in a food processor without any issues. We used regular caster sugar, on account of why would I buy a kilo of raw caster sugar when this is the only recipe I've ever seen that calls for it?! They turned out fine.

Poor biscuits. I forgot to take proper photos of them.

The verdict? We both thought the eclairs were a little eggy tasting, although we're both on the "Urgh, eggs, GROSS" train, which may have contributed to it. Now that they've been in the fridge for 24 hours, they seem to have improved and a pretty damned tasty if I do say so myself. As for the biscuits, they were FAR crunchier than I thought they would be. Yesterday, I wasn't a huge fan of them. Today? I dipped one in my hot chocolate and it was pretty much the greatest thing ever.

And then I subjected Deidre to the wonders of Paperback Hero, and there was much "WHAT IS HAPPENING OMG PUPPY HUGH JACKMAN YOU STOP THAT IMMEDIATELY"-ing.

In short, hurrah for funemployment??

Please tell me that you think that eclair looks like a ghost too and that it's not just me???

K xx

Challenge recipe 14: Portuguese custard tarts

When I made the raspberry soufflés a couple of weeks ago, I was racking my brains for a use for the egg yolks. The idea of throwing out four egg yolks just seemed like a total waste, plus I wanted to have some kind of dessert-y substance as a back up plan in case the soufflé turned out to be a complete disaster.

After a little bit of delving, I came across this, which allowed me to use up THREE of the four yolks. Back in the days when I worked in Brewery Land, there was a coffee shop just around the corner that was staffed by the champion in the Australian barista competition and the champion in the Victorian barista competition. So obviously, they were all Judgey McJudgerson about the fact that I don't drink coffee.

They also made killer hot chocolate, which was most of the reason why I kept going back. But on Mondays, it was an entirely different reason. Because on Mondays they also sold Portuguese custard tarts. And they were AWESOME. So when this allowed me to use up the eggs AND try my hand at lemony custardy goodness, I knew I had to try them.

Here's the book:

And here's what you'll need:

Start by greasing a muffin pan. I used melted butter because I'd just been using it to grease the soufflé dishes.

You then need to thaw a sheet of butter puff pastry. My supermarket didn't HAVE butter puff pastry, so I spread it in melted butter instead.

Put 1/2 cup of caster sugar into a medium saucepan:

Add 2 tablespoons of cornflour:

3 egg yolks:

And 3/4 cup of cream (and 1/2 cup water, which I apparently forgot to photograph):

Mix it all together with a whisk wooden spoon because you've just discovered you don't actually own a whisk:

Wash a lemon, and then peel off a strip of the rind. I actually wound up doing this with a knife because the peeler just kept sliding off the surface...

Add the lemon rind into the mixture, along with a teaspoon of vanilla extract. I COULD have used vanilla extract, but when I was last home in Melbourne, I bought some vanilla beans, and figured I'd give one of those a go too. I cut the bean in half, scraped out the insides with a knife, and then dumped the whole lot into the saucepan too:

Put the whole lot over medium heat and stir until it comes to the boil. When it does, take it off the heat and take out the rind and the vanilla bean. Look at the delicious black vanilla-y bits in there!

While the custard cools, cut the pastry sheet in half (I was lazy and just folded it), and then roll it up from the short side:

Cut it into 12 pieces and roll it into balls:

Roll them out on a floured surface to about 10cm. Clearly, I'm not very good at making things round...

Press the rounds into the muffin tin. They'll look really mangled and weird rustic:

Spoon the custard into the cases:

How good does that look?!

I sprinkled a little cinnamon across the top before I stuck them in the oven:

And bake at 220 degrees C for 20 minutes:

Cool in the tin for 5 minutes, then move them to a cooling rack. Apparently after that, I forgot to take photos because I was too busy making souffle and cooking chicken and roast potatoes... So I apologise, but you don't get a photo of the finished product out of the tin!

The verdict? They're pretty amazing. I'll have to try them again and use butter puff pastry rather than kludging together a solution as best I can. And I think next time, I might leave off the cinnamon. The one's at the coffee shop next door to Brewery Land had cinnamon. But I think it just overwhelmed the lemon and vanilla flavours in these.

And, obviously, I need to practice my skills with the rolling pin.

I'll definitely be trying them again!

K xx