Well, haven’t I been a terrible little blogger? It’s all for a good cause though, I’ve been focusing my efforts on getting onto the postgraduate course I wanted (which has worked out very well) and in the shorter term, finding a job (nicht so well, but I’m getting there). Anyway, so that’s why my imitation recipes and dodgy photography haven’t graced your screens for a while… but this tart was so good it had to be shared.

I first fell in love with tarte flambée/flammekueche when I went to Strasbourg in 2007. It was a local charity-funded trip to the European Parliament for languages students, but they actually also did a fairly good job at attempting to enlighten us about some cultural bits and bobs too (better organised than any school trip!). Anyway, for one of the evening meals, we went to a restaurant which, if memory serves me correctly, ONLY served this dish. You had a large one, pizza-stylee, to share between four, with just the basic ingredients on… and then they brought out another one. And each following tarte had an additional ingredient – mushrooms, cheese etc. But they were absolutely beautiful. So when I had some leftover pizza dough this weekend, I finally got around to making my own!

This is the Strasbourg restaurant version:

…and this is mine! I couldn’t get over how good this was, I just kept staring at it… and then having another piece!

(burnt onions unintentional, but actually very nice)

Tarte Flambée

(this would serve 4 for a big lunch or small dinner, with some sides and salad it’d be fine… or just make double )

Basic pizza dough (I’ll include a recipe below)

One large white/yellow onion (I think white is probably traditional, I didn’t check a recipe, but I only had yellow!)

A packet (200g) of smoked lardons

Creme fraiche (I use low-fat, because it works exactly the same imo)

Roll out the pizza dough to two “a4″ sized squares/circles (I know a circle can’t be a4, but you know… I only have a rectangular tray) and leave to rest.

Thinly slice the onions. Now, for the next bit, I’m pretty sure it’s not necessary, and it’s probably preferable to have some texture to the onions, but I absolutely can’t eat an onion which is anything less than cooked, it gives me the most horrendous headaches (I don’t know why), so I fried them very very gently over a low heat for 10-15 minutes, until they had softened but not coloured. (perhaps this is why my onions burnt on the edges) And then I added the lardons at the last minute. Drain it all off on some kitchen roll.

Top the pizza bases with creme fraiche, I used about 80-100g I suppose for one square.

Sprinkle the lardons and the onion over, and cook in a fairly hot oven for 15minutes or so, until the pizza base is done. (It’s best on a pizza tray, but I don’t have one, so I cook the raw pizza on a normal baking tray, then to crisp up its bottom I manoeuvre it onto a grill rack for the last few minutes of cooking.

Then eat it! And marvel at the delicious simplicity

A very easy, quick version of this which would probably taste just as good, would be if you got some ready-rolled puff pastry, roll it out even thinner and top it with the ingredients and bake it. Laaavly.

Basic Pizza Dough

This is far, far better than buying ready-made bases, and not at all difficult, as long as you put the effort into the kneading. Also, I’ve found that it lasts perfectly well in the fridge for a day, just wrap it up after the rising process and leave it until you want it!

320ml warm water

500g strong white bread flour

1/2 tbsp sea salt

1 sachet (7g) yeast

1/2 tbsp sugar (I think I misread this and used 1/2 tsp, it still worked fine!)

2 tbsp olive oil

Put all the ingredients in a bowl and combine with a spoon until they come together in ball (it will be pretty sticky)

Plonk out of the bowl onto a floured surface and knead for 5-10 minutes, until dough is springy and smooth. (You will probably “knead” lots of flour to stop it sticking, harhar)

Place in an oiled bowl (I use a squirt or two of 1-cal spray) and cover. Leave in a warm place to rise for 45mins or so.

When it’s risen, it’s ready!

So, my dad has an allotment. And therefore for his birthday, what better to make than an… allotment cake!! (By the way, I have decided I should stop googling things. I’ll come up with some idea or other that I think is creative, and then somehow I always end up google image-searching it, I don’t know why – to develop the idea or something – and then it inevitably turns out that someone has always done whatever it was I was planning already. And invariably better than I could ever hope to achieve [google "allotment cake" and you'll see what I mean]. So no more googling, right?)

(Apologies for the crappy picture – complicated camera, sport mode. That’s all.)

 

The cake is carrot (what else?) found here http://uktv.co.uk/food/recipe/aid/528351

(The only change I made to it was that I did half as much icing again on top of what it says, i.e. 75g butter, and a little more icing sugar because I added green food colouring for the grass )

Here’s a close-up of the icing vegetables. These took hours. I have never really attempted much with icing before. It’s fun… and sticky.

The hardest thing was trying to get orange- apparently what I learned in primary school about the mixing of colours is just not true. Red and yellow did not make orange. I ended up making the right colour from food colouring and just painting it straight on the carrots. And also, it turns out I have NO idea what tools look like. My trowel looks like a spoon. I think the others are fairly self-explanatory, I just kind of experimented to get them looking right. Maybe when I’ve got the method down, I’ll do a little masterclass-y blog. As if I am some sort of expert.

The perfect cake for any gardening fan

These are inspired from my shiny new Lorraine Pascale cookbook, Baking Made Easy, which I got for Christmas!!! (I also got a book about macarons, but my first attempt at them was a big fat failure. So let’s just talk cupcakes for now )

The recipe is for a whole cake, and it’s also to serve 8-10. Now, I halved the recipe, and made it into cupcakes, and it still made 8. So I’m not saying Lorraine’s portions are skewed, but she is an ex-model, and there is NO WAY she eats that much cake. Also, it is called “gluten-free” – because it uses gluten-free flour. I’m pretty sure that’s always an option. Anyway, here’s my version

Irish cream coffee cupcakes

(Makes 8, total cost £1.80, 23p per cake)

100g soft light brown sugar

pinch salt

100g cold butter, cut into cubes (I think margarine might be better in this recipe, as the cake was a bit dense)

100g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

2 eggs

drop of vanilla extract

40ml very strong black coffee (it’s handy hint time!! We don’t have instant coffee – so I’ve taken a couple of the mini sachets of instant Kenco stuff you get in hotels, and I use that for cakes )
For the frosting:

60g butter

125g icing sugar (maybe a little more, as my icing was a bit runny)

drop of vanilla

1 tbsp Bailey’s (or a cheeky dash more )

For the cakes, rub together the butter and the flour until breadcrumby, then mix in the sugar, baking powder and salt.

Add the eggs one at a time and beat until mixed in.

Stir in the vanilla and coffee.

Plonk in cake cases (I used my funky new silicone ones… but didn’t know if I should use paper ones too?)

Cook for about 15 minutes, until a skewer inserted into a cake (choose the least cooked one) comes out clean.

Cool the cake while you make the frosting.

For the frosting, soften the butter, then beat in all the other ingredients, adding more flour if it seems a little soft. Leave in the fridge until the butter has hardened back up. Then pipe (badly, in my case) onto the cakes.

To decorate, Lorraine suggests sprinkling coffee granules over the top. Well, it looks nice, but it’s horribly bitter. I would say, grind up the coffee granules in a pestle and mortar, then stir in a pinch of icing sugar too. (It will dissolve, but will hopefully sweeten the very bitter coffee taste)… or get these http://www.mojoescafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/chocolate-coffee-beans.jpg (I haven’t tried them, but they look cool )

Apologies for the blogging lull, ridiculous amounts of Christmas food (and post-Christmas bargains in the supermarkets) have meant that there’s not been much need for cooking fancy shtuff. But then I found these from pre-Christmas. Slipping standards, honestly.

… so here’s my guest chef back in the guise of the boyfriend. I am slightly worried I am soon to be upstaged, as these were delicious…

 

Smoked salmon scotch eggs

Inspired from here (with a lot of changes) http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/smoked_salmon_scotch_egg_02539

Serves 4 as a starter or lunch, total cost £2.70 (if you use cheapy eggs and cheapy salmon), 70p per portion

 

5 eggs

240g smoked salmon (we used 2 packs of Sainsbury’s basics smoked salmon trimmings, which is perfect for this sort of recipe as it’s already all chopped up- didn’t even need blending! To be honest, I use them for most things involving smoked salmon (apart from posh canapes). It might not be pretty but it tastes the same, and costs about 75% less than proper smoked salmon. Moneysaving tip!)

75-100g cold mashed potato (or microwave a potato and scoop out the insides)

flour

breadcrumbs

 

Boil four of the eggs for about 5 minutes (or longer if you really don’t like soft-middled eggs), cool a little and peel.

Mix the salmon with the potato and season with black pepper (I think smoked salmon is plenty salty enough)

Divide the mixture into 4 and wrap some around each egg (one tip I think I saw on Lorraine Pascale is to place the salmon in a flattened circle on some cling film, lay the egg on top, then lift the cling film up and around the egg- I don’t know how easy it was to wrap, I’m just stealing the eggies for the blog!)

To breadcrumb things, I like to make myself up a production line- lay out three bowls, the first with flour in, the second with beaten egg, then the third with breadcrumbs in… then work the thing-to-be-breaded through the line – flour, then egg, then breadcrumbs. Easy peasy!

On Saturday Kitchen where we saw James Martin making these, he deep-fried them, however we don’t have a deep-fat fryer, and I think without a basket these might just get lost at the bottom of a pan full of oil. We fried them in about 1cm of oil, rolling them around regularly, and that worked just fine

These are very fishy and pretty rich, so just serve with a simple iceberg salad. Done!

 

… not very festive I know, but in my opinion more suited to a tummy full of turkey and sausages and bacon and veg and potatoes (phew) than a horrible heavy Christmas pudding will ever be. I shook things up a little bit this Christmas day, after suggesting that we eat Christmas dinner at, well, dinner time, to avoid the horrible heavy afternoon-of-Christmas-day-because-I’ve-eaten-too-much-for-lunch thing, and have canapes and lighter things for lunch. And I don’t know about anyone else, but I felt better. So, this gateau was eaten veeery late, about 9pm… which was probably a good thing. Because I made the mousse at 11am, and by 5pm it was still not set. Sooooo… I put it in the freezer. I think the problem was my use of gelatine… anyway the recipe was Sophie Dahl’s from BBC Food if you’re interested, but as I say I don’t recommend it as it stands, also it was one of my least favourite kinds of recipes- it uses hundreds of bowls. Now I am an over-user of bowls and cutlery by default- I’m the person that stirs the soup with a spoon, licks it, puts it in the sink and then gets a new spoon out 5 minutes later. But this recipe just makes all that worse. And here it is!! http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/4362/lemon-mousse

But just as a hint, a way to save a [raw egg] mousse which has not set (as I didn’t find anything helpful on the net to save the batch I didn’t freeze)- you need to cook it. Put it in a pan, over a very gentle heat, and stir slowly until it’s warm all the way through, and leave it until it looks like thickening up. Sieve it to make sure there’s no bits of scrambled egg in it, and leave to set again. And it should work! It does change the texture of the mousse (because it cooks the egg!), but I figure it’s better to have at least of vague resemblance of a set lemon-flavoured dessert, rather than a lemon milkshake!!! Or put it in the freezer

I made a basic vanilla sponge for the base, pressed flat (well, the second one was pressed flat. The first cake I made, I decided to press flat on a wire rack. Bad plan, Stephanie.) Then I sprinkled it with a bit of booze… limoncello would have been perfect but in the absence of that as my boozy family had finished it, I used triple sec. Then a layer of lemon curd, which should have been thicker and unfortunately froze harder than the mousse did, and then mousse over the top.

I decorated the gateau with a piped chocolate star (draw a template, lay some greaseproof paper over the top, and pipe the chocolate fairly thick in the pattern you want ), a mini meringue and some (admittedly very expensive, but it’s Christmas) gold glitter stars. Yay!

Fingers crossed for even more this year!!

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 17 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

On one of my first days (or, what I remember as my first proper day) in Le Puy, we went to this fab little saladerie called Le Croco, which looks something like this…

Isn’t it adorable? And you even used to get little crocodile sweets with the bill. Won me over! Anyway so I had this lovely salad pretty much without fail everytime I went, which is lush and also gets to show off Le Puy’s most famous export – Puy lentils!!!

It’s a lovely light salad, but also a bit festive-ly special, what with the blue cheese and the smoked salmon, so I thought boxing day would be the perfect day to give you an idea for something a little lighter, but still Christmas-sy special that you won’t feel at all guilty about eating

To make this salad, you will need:

Cooked Puy lentils (you can buy them ready-cooked in jars, which is way easier, but don’t get the ones with sauce on for this recipe)

Hard-boiled eggs

Tomatoes

Smoked salmon (or, if you use smoked trout, that’s a bit more Haute-Loire authentic, as they live nowhere near any seas but conveniently near a river )

Blue cheese – nothing which whacks you in the mouth, a more subtle blue cheese is best – in the original, it’s bleu d’auvergne, which you can buy in Sainsburys – and again, it’s authentic!)

Vinaigrette dressing

A mix of salad leaves

 

Lay the salad leaves in a big pasta bowl, and top with slices of smoked salmon. Then sprinkle over a big spoonful or two of lentils, some cheese broken/chopped into small pieces, and then add the quarters of boiled egg and quarters of tomato on the side. Drizzle the whole lot with vinaigrette and dig in! Serve with some lovely crusty bread and an ice-cold beer. Wait, did I say beer? I know it’s a bit nippy for that, but just do it anyway kaaay?

Just a pretty pic for this bloggy… on my birthday I had lunch with the rents, we had some lovely warm gruyere and leek/tomato and camembert tarts from M&S, and I also got these lovely cute cream cakes for my birthday cake

These can be found in the chiller cabinet (even in the little food section in the local and fairly useless M&S), and cost £3.99 for 10 pieces. You get 4 mini chocolate choux buns, 4 palmiers with jam and cream, and 2 mini doughnuts with jam and cream, and they come in 2 layers of very well-constructed trays so you can’t squish them!

The mini choux buns were lovely, the palmiers nice but a little difficult to eat- as the pastry part of the cake is pretty hard, the cream squidges out the other side when you bite in… but that’s half the fun! The mini doughnuts were… doughnuts. But not bad Overall a nice mix of posh little cakes, but nothing uber-special.

 

Oh, and as this is my last post before Christmas, Merry Christmas!!

Boy works. Boy needs “healthy” (read: not too chocolatey) snacks to take to work. Girl does oatie experiments for boy to eat. Boy is embarrassed and refuses to take the heart-decorated ones to work. Sad face.

Granola bars – cranberry and white chocolate

(I forgot how many this made but it was a fair few – about 8 I would think)

- Consider the coconut, cranberries and hazelnuts to be changeable with whatever you fancy – you could use almonds and dried cherries with a little dash of almond essence, or you could do hazelnuts and chocolate chips, grated apples with sultanas – go crazy! Just make sure the final mix is a fairly stiff, sticky mix, not too runny but not impossible to work with either!

1 cup rolled oats

3/8 cup (horrible amount I know – a quarter then half a quarter) brown sugar – soft or demerara

1/2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 cup flour

1/3 cup dessicated coconut

1/2 cup cranberries

1/4 cup hazelnuts

pinch of salt

1 egg

1/8 cup oil or melted butter

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/4 – 1/3 cup honey or golden syrup

Melt the butter and golden syrup together.

Mix all the dry ingredients together, pour the syrup and butter in and stir it all together good.

Plonk it into a lined tin (I’m not sure about the size you need, I think about a 9-inch circle pan was what I used, but a square would obviously be more practical for granola bars… the mix should be about 2cm deep once it’s all spread out.

Cook at about 170c until nice and golden brown on top and fairly solid on the inside.

Cut into bars before it cools completely, otherwise it gets a bit difficult!

I decorated my bars with piped white chocolate- in embarrassing patterns.

A little bit of sunshine and a last minute gift idea for you now, you still have time to make this and even find jars for it, so if someone is in need of a supplementary present, get curding!! (New word I have just invented – to curd, meaning the process of making luscious lemony treats.)  Give someone a jar of this stuff with a packet of nice shortbread and you are on to a winner. Unless they don’t like lemons. In which case, they are picky and you should have organised their present in October

I take no credit for this recipe, it’s taken completely from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/mar/07/nigel-slater-lemon-curd-recipes. The only few hints I do have are:

- While mine was cooking, bits of cooked egg white started showing up in the mixture. To get rid of these, and the larger bits of lemon zest as I do not have a very fine grater/any type of zester, I sieved the mixture into another bowl right before the end, then finished it off without horrible bits in

- It doesn’t say anything about sterilising jars in the article, I don’t think- but I’m pretty sure this is necessary if you want to keep the lemon curd for a couple of weeks, as it says you can. After cleaning and drying the jars, put them and the lids in the oven at about 140c for about half an hour, and pour the curd into them (note- if you’re using a jug to pour the curd into the jars, sterilise that too!) while they’re still fairly hot. Another handy hint – put the jars on a TRAY in the oven. Otherwise you end up with some very hot jars which are hard to get out of the oven

- I was worried my curd hadn’t thickened enough (I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be fairly solid) when I’d finished cooking it, however after a few hours in the fridge (where it went while it was still a little warm- not something I’d recommend but I had to go out!) it was nice and firm. So don’t panic or throw it away- wait and see, then have a strop

- I am planning on making a lemon mousse gateau thing over Christmas with this curd as a kind of zingy middle layer, so you pretty much have to make it anyway