Honey Madelines and some other random bakes

I haven't posted for ages, but then again, I've not really baked for ages. I had a yen earlier in the year to buy a madeline tin - not that I particularly liked the factory monstrosities that my mum occasionally got from Icelands/poundshops, but the shell is pretty so I did it. I waited till work took me to a town with a Lakeland and bought me a tin! You'd be surprised how hard it was to find tbh. John Lewis sells silicon ones, and the rules are that silicon doesn't make the nice colouring in the grooves. Anyway, Lakeland has the cheapest at around £8. In the wretched way of most recipes, the recipe made 14 madelines... when my tin has 12 pockets. So I made an extra mini pan as well. The recipe I use was from Roux brothers for Honey Madelines. Claire Clark repeats it in her book Indulgence. It's easy as and makes a liquid mix so I'm not entirely sure where all the concern for more air to make it light came from, but there you go.

Other little bakes include Pineapple upside down cake:

Blueberry whoopie pies which were heavy - blame the recipe pamphlet that came with the tin (Robert Dyas, £6.99??) and Allisons lumpy flour... but using blueberry rather than plain yoghurt makes them this rather grotesque Halloween blue. Awesome.

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Rachel Allen's Chicken Pie

Some things should be noted. I'm not a major fan of Rachel Allen. She always seemed such a poor man's version of Nigella. Some trophy wife of a producer somewhere making a lady of leisure's living of cookery shows playing up the Irish accent in a cavernous show kitchen. Perhaps it was because all her helpful "tricks" had already been touted by others a long time ago - like getting the garlic smell out of your hands... But over the years she's kind of grown on me. The format is a little twee, the pink accessories want to make me barf, but she isn't the spawn of all things faux goddess anymore. (FYI I have no idea with regards to her personal life etc, but like my distaste for Ashley Judd, one wonders how she gets good films with little acting skill.) So here I was, tapping away on the internet last week whilst she was on tv, and there it was. A beast of a pie. It was so beautiful. Her job was done. Out I trotted to buy a huge pie dish (we don't own cera...

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