Quite Quick 'Apricot Danish Pastries'

They say that the camera never lies.  I know that this is not quite true.  Being married to a professional photographer has its advantages and disadvantages.  I've always hated having my picture taken because having been fat enough to rival Jabba the Hut in my teenage years, you don't want to be reminded which bits bulge that should bulge.  And even when I'm at my slimmest, I'm still not happy with my body - in fact when I was at my running peak (and I still weighed 10st something at this point) I thought I looked skeletal and gaunt - let's face it, women are never happy.

Breakfast: Danish, Berocca, Water and a Latte

When the hubby opened his studio, I was still in my post pregnant haze and so really not wanting to be in front of the camera at any cost.  I remember coming home from walking the dogs one morning to find him unpacking new lighting equipment in the lounge.  "Just sit there and let me test this" says he.  After a lot of protesting about being mud spattered and fat and ugly, I gave in.

A few hours later, he presented me with the results of the picture.  I was really chuffed.  I was looking quite good for someone still three stones over her ideal weight and who'd suffered many a sleepless night. Stupidly, I made this comment out loud.  "Well I slimmed down your face, rubbed out your wrinkles, edited out the bags under your eyes, whitened your teeth and eyes...." At that point, I walked away to have a little sob to myself.

Still at least when Abigail looks back at some of the pictures of her mum when she was young, she'll think her mum was a bit pretty.  In reality, I don't quite look much like my blog or Twitter pictures.  Unless I'm in flattering light.  I'm too old for that.

And unflattering camera light brings me nicely round to today's recipe.  When I took the pictures of the apricot Danish,  I couldn't quite find the right angle to photograph it from.  And when I did take the picture, the harsh light from the flash (it's just to miserable to get any good light in my kitchen this morning) showed up the need to grout between the tiles in my kitchen.  Ooops!  And I'm rubbish at Photoshop so I can't even edit them to make it look better.

The rustic 'I forgot to flour the worktop' look

I picked today's recipe because I had a little bit of left over pastry in my fridge from making sausage rolls.  It's from Lorraine Pascale's Home Cooking Made Easy which the husband bought me for Christmas.  I blogged early on about trying to make cherry Danish with puff pastry.  That recipe used some weird Philly-based cheese filling which was okay, but not really what I'd consider Danish filling.  My attempt at making actual Danish pastry the other day was a bit of a long-winded failure so Pascale's recipe seemed a good opportunity for another attempt to make something I could make time and again.  Simple and tasty without hours of labour.

The original recipe uses shop-bought fresh custard as the filling.  But as I didn't have any to hand and didn't want to buy a whole pot to just make two Danish (that's all the pastry I had), I thought I'd have a go at making proper creme patissiere instead.  It's something I've made once before when I was about ten, under the eagle-eyed instruction of my mother, the ex-pastry chef.  I think we made a strawberry flan.  But I'd have no idea how to make the pastry cream off the top of my head.

Creme patisserie

So I turned to t'Internet.  I know the Great British Bake Off book has a recipe for this, but I was too lazy to get the book off the book shelf at stupid o'clock in the morning.  Instead, I used a recipe from Joy of Baking.  As I was only making two pastries, I made one third of the recipe which was probably enough to make four apricot Danish.

I also put the custard under the apricots, rather than on top of them as Pascale suggested.  The pastry points wouldn't stay together on top of the apricots so I used a little blob of pastry from the trimmings to stick them all together and this survived the oven.

For a simple, non-faffy Danish recipe, this worked really well and I'd definitely make them again when I had guests.  I'd still love to master making the actual pastry myself, but it wouldn't be something I'd do every time as these are just as tasty as shop-bought and if I'm honest, most people (ie the husband) wouldn't appreciate the hours you spend labouring over home-made pastry if they taste just as good with shop-bought.

This is my own edited version of Pascale's recipe, hence calling it 'Quite Quick...' as hers are 'Really Quick....'

Makes 12

For the Danish

• 1 x 375g packet of puff pastry
• 1 quantity of creme patisserie (see below)
• Plain flour for dusting (I forgot this and they stuck to the work top!)
• 1 x 220g tin apricot halves in juice
• 1 egg lightly beaten for the egg wash
• Sugar for sprinkling

For the creme patisserie 

• 300ml milk (full fat or semi-skimmed)
• 1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise or 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract or vanilla bean paste
• 3 egg yolks
• 50g granulated white sugar
• 20g plain flour
• 20g corn flour

1. First, make the creme patissiere.  Mix the egg yolks and sugar in a heatproof bowl then stir in the flour and corn flour to form a thick paste.
2. Heat the milk and vanilla pod (if using) in a medium saucepan until scalding.  Carefully remove the vanilla pod (if using) and scrape the seeds into the milk (this can be rinsed and added to a jar of sugar to make vanilla sugar).
3. Pour the hot milk into the egg paste and whisk quickly to combine.
4. Return the egg mixture to the saucepan and bring to the boil whisking constantly.  Once boiling, whisk for a further 45 seconds then remove from the heat and leave to cool.  If using vanilla extract or bean paste, stir this in now.
5. Preheat the oven to 220C/gas 7.
6. Roll the pastry out on a lightly floured work surface to a 30cmx30cm square.
7. Cut the pastry into 7.5cm squares and make diagonal cuts form each corner to within 1cm of the middle (note in the picture, my windmills are not precisely measured and cut - it was too early to find a ruler!)
8. Put a spoon of pastry cream into the centre and then top with an apricot half.
9. Fold alternate corners of each cut section to the centre, brushing the tips with beaten egg.
10. Refrigerate for 15 minutes or so until firm.
11. Remove from the fridge, brush with egg wash and then sprinkle with sugar.
12. Bake for 20-25 minutes or until firm, risen and golden brown.
13. Remove from the oven and leave to cool.

Almond croissants

On days when the husband is in charge of the child, I they have to have a snack they can share.  This usually involves malt loaf or lots of grapes, Cheddars or croissants.  This week, I picked up some croissants from the local Tesco Express, only to be met with refusal from both of them.  The child's been fussy because she's poorly and the husband (who is just plain fussy) declared that they were too sweet.

I'll admit, they were the horrible, bog-standard supermarket type of croissants stuffed full of additives to keep them fresh, but they'd probably also turn their noses up at home made for being to crisp or buttery or something.

I'm not a fan of supermarket bakes, but when you live in a provincial town, sometimes that's the best you can do.  I refuse to buy cake any more (save for malt loaf) but I've still yet to master the art of croissant dough - that's next Sunday's task.

One of the things that I love about being in France is that pastries found in supermarkets, McDonalds (a long story) and even petrol stations (another long story) is of bakery standard.  Fresh, crisp and buttery.

I had planned to try another Dan Lepard bake today for a workshop I'm attending on Tuesday at Super-Spy HQ but still feeling rough as a badger's backside, I figured I'd have a look for something easy and comforting to do with the leftover croissants instead.

There's a croissant in there, somewhere

The very first recipe Google returned me was from Not Quite Nigella, an amazing food blog that harbours many delights, including the very yummy sounding Bacon Jam.  Yes, that's right.  Bacon Jam.  Definitely one to try before the end of the year!

NQN explains that almond croissants were first invented exactly to allow people to use up stale croissants.  They are dipped in sugar syrup, stuffed with almond paste and topped with flaked almonds before being baked and dusted with icing sugar.

As a little side experiment, I also tried melting a 25g of marzipan with a teaspoon of water in the microwave to see if it would make a decent enough almond paste.  And it did, so you could make the recipe even quicker and easier.

I think it would be better made with proper bakery-standard croissants or leftover home-made ones but it was good enough to go well with a latte and Mamma Mia for an indulgent afternoon :-)

The almond croissant recipe can be found here.  And if you don't believe me about bacon jam, check it out here.

Eggs Benedict

It's an early blog today as I'm off on a management training course for a couple of days.  In between practising my catchphrases such as 'we're really skiing off piste here', I've found time to do some important research into how to make hollandaise sauce.

I love poached eggs and bacon and if I'm staying somewhere posh that does more than the bog-standard full English for breakfast, Eggs Benedict is my breakfast of choice.  No chance of getting this at the swanky hotel tomorrow as the course kicks off again at ridiculous-o'clock so it'll be a lovely room service pastry basket for me!

But making hollandaise is one of those cheffy things that they make sound really complicated. Delia, for example, advocates using a food processor but the husband would kill me if I turned mine on before midday so I had to find a recipe to do it 'the hard way'.

In fact, it all sounds pretty simple aside from the risk of it splitting.  The present tense is because I'm quickly typing this blog before I make an attempt on this recipe so it may all go horribly wrong.  I settled on a BBC Good Food recipe by Cass Titcombe, partly for the fact it's only supposed to take 10 minutes but also because it uses an even number of egg yolks, so I know it should work if I halve the recipe as I'm only making it for me.

As for the perfect poached egg, I have my own method.  Being something that I would eat most days in lieu of a proper dinner, I perfected my personal art of egg poaching many years ago.  My mother swears that you should poach in a shallow pan and add vinegar to the water, but I hate the weird tang this gives to the eggs.  I'm not sure how to describe it, but it just spoils the flavour of the yolk by making the whites taste like they are rancid.

Other people use microwave poachers (why?? the eggs go all rubbery like you were at a Little Chef) or poaching pans or the new-fangled poach pods you can buy from Lakeland.  Or they faff around breaking the egg into a cup and sliding it into the water.

Me?  I bring a deep saucepan of lightly salted water to a simmer.  I then put the eggs in their shells into the water for 10 seconds which just starts to firm up the white.  Scoop the eggs out with a slotted spoon, then use a whisk to create a vortex in the pan.  Crack the egg on the side of the pan and pour into the still spinning water.  This will ensure the white doesn't spread everywhere - same theory as the vinegar method, it just tastes far nicer and has a much better shape.  Keep the water at a simmer for four minutes, remove egg and serve.

Faffy?  Maybe.  But once you've got the knack, it becomes second nature and that long-winded paragraph is like riding a bike.

Right.  Off to test the recipe - back soon!

So yellow, you can't see the egg yolk oozing on the right!

Okay, I'm back.  In the end, because I couldn't be bothered with the extra washing up that Cass Titcombe creates by melting her butter in a separate pan first (and using the microwave this early carries the same penalty as using the food processor), I opted for James Martin's hollandaise recipe instead - although having no smoked salmon I stuck with the traditional ham.

The other bonus was that it used half the butter of Titcombe's recipe.  Which surprised me as the lovely James is a huge fan of butter.  He must have humungous arteries having seen all the lovely, buttery grub he rustles up on Saturday Kitchen.

The sauce was a success.  No splitting.  Although I can see the benefits of melting the butter first as mine was rock solid and it took ages for it to melt.  But I was left with a gloriously sunny sauce which perfectly complemented the rich egg and salty-smoked ham.

As always the picture is rubbish.  Dingy kitchen, 6.30am, crap camera phone.  Please Santa, bring me a lovely new pocket camera!

Huevos Rancheros

There are several advantages to working from home.  One - you can go to work in your pyjamas.  Two - you don't have to suffer from the terrible canteen food at lunchtime.

Heaven on a plate

You'd think I'd've learnt now to take my own lunch but by the time I've cooked three different dinners and made two other packed lunches, I usually can't be bothered to do my own so live on overpriced jacket potatoes and tuna courtesy of Sodexo.

Fridays is always fish-finger sandwiches all round but I cherish Thursdays as I spend my half hour lunchtime making myself something special.  The child is napping, the husband is napping (childcare is stressful, donchya know!) so I sneak down to the kitchen for something lovely.

And because it was so flipping miserable outside today, I decided to whip up some Huevos Rancheros courtesy of Thomasina Miers.  It's something I've wanted to try for simply ages and it was well worth the wait.  In fact it was soooo good, I intend to have it again for my tea tonight to use up the rest of the gorgeous tomato sauce.  The lovely Bridestock Bride blogged about planning to make this recently so if you've not already made it Laura, I would highly recommend this recipe :o)

Recipe - serves 4

• 
  
• • 1 large onion, finely chopped
  • 1–2 red chillies, finely chopped
  • 3 cloves of garlic, chopped
  • 2 tins plums tomatoes
  • Sea salt and black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon piloncillo or demerara sugar
  • A generous few splashes of Worcestershire sauce
  • A small handful of chopped tarragon
  • 4 corn tortillas, chapattis or other flat breads
  • 4 eggs
  • 60g Lancashire cheese (I used feta)

1. First, get the tomato sauce cooking. Heat 2 tablespoons of the lard in a wide saucepan and add the onion and chilli.
2. Let them sweat over a low heat for 10 minutes until the onion is translucent. Add the garlic, cook for a few minutes more, and then add the tomatoes. Season the sauce well with salt, pepper, sugar and Worcestershire sauce, breaking up the tomatoes with a wooden spoon to make a roughly textured sauce. Leave the tomatoes to gently cook over a low heat for half an hour, adding a little water if they get too dry.
3. When you are ready to eat, melt 1 to 2 tablespoons of the lard in a frying pan and gently turn the flat breads in the fat. Put them in a low oven, wrapped in foil, to keep warm, along with four plates. Add the tarragon to the sauce and stir.
4. Melt the rest of the lard in the frying pan and turn the heat right up until the fat is sizzling. Fry the eggs, two at a time, spooning the lard over the top of them so that they turn a golden colour at the edges and absorb some of the flavour. Season the eggs well with salt and pepper.
5. Put a flat bread on each plate and top with the tomato sauce. Put a fried egg on top and scatter with the grated Lancashire cheese.