Corn Custards and Sunday Lunch

Today I decided to try some new recipes from my books. Corn custards from Marcus Wareing's book Nutmeg and Custard. Funnily enough, there's both Nutmeg AND Custard in this...

It was a really basic recipe although I had to amp up the heat to Gas Mark 5 rather than 1/2 as after 20 minutes it still didn't set. It was lovely... but I'm not into it. It's too sweet as a side dish, and that's just from the natural sweetcorn!

I also made mushroom risotto and a large meat stew. Naturally mushroom risotto took twice as long as usual and twice as much stock as it said on the back of the packet, but it did taste fabulous!

This was from yesterday. Strawberry and cream chiffon swiss roll. It was my second attempt at chiffon as it's drives my mother's competitive streak so I try not to touch it too much. I used Sunflower (see blogs on the right) recipe for Orange Chiffon, replacing the orange juice with water instead. I poured far too much and therefore made this giant roll which cracked when I rolled it. But it was lovely and got eaten very quickly. I still think my mother's version has an edge, but I think that's due to the cream of tartar in her recipe. This recipe only has baking powder so it's a little crisper.

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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...

Raspberry Cream Cheese Buns

What with my new cupcake books arriving from Amazon, one look at the Raspberry Cream Cheese buns on someone elses's site (made with blackcurrant there) and I had to make them. Knowing full well my family wouldn't touch them. Four of these babies were therefore made with big dollops of lemon curd instead, which made delightfully caramelly messes of the tin, but also on the buns, not that I get to touch those - I have eight buns to eat! The original recipe is from Buttercup Bakery book (New York) and one of these days I'll try the dried cherry one from Magnolias (since I own the book...) What you need to know about these is that the recipe is easy - as easy as muffins are, but they sink like heck given the amount of preserves you're putting in them. What they give back though, is something so moist and rich you just want to sink yourself into them. And since I've eaten two of them, I'm doing quite well! As you can see, massive craters. If you don't want that...

Lemon cake a la Raymond Blanc

I made this cake after watching Kitchen Secrets and thought WOW that cake is YELLOW!!! Sadly it seems, this was not something to be repeated with mine. Note to self - retune the tv. Anyway, the recipe is here , but oddly the voiceover lady gets it wrong (based on the producer comments) so when the recipe says add zest only to the cake, and she says add the juice, she is wrong. Ho hum. Having made the cake, I'd say ADD THE SODDING JUICE. Without it, it tastes distinctly... eggy. And not of lemon. So after the first mini cake (I split the cake into two batches - one for work and one for a taster for my hard-done-by dad who had to watch me make cheesecake yesterday and waltz off with it to a friends.) I made some adjustments. 1. Stab and drizzle. If you've made lemon cake before, the usual rule is when it's warm from the oven, stab it with a skewer and pour over lemon juice mixed with icing sugar. 2. His recipe calls for an apricot jam layer of glaze. I used lemon curd. ...

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