Apple Flan Menagere

Oh la la! Now there's lovely.

Here's the recipe courtesy of Leiths Cookery Bible. The picture makes it look a lot more fancy than it actually is. I'm not going to go into the method for making sweet shortcrust pastry here. We did it in a very time consuming but "traditional" way involving pecking, chopping, and frasiering which has nothing to do with Seattle psychiatrists.

Serves 4

170g flour quantity of sweet shortcrust pastry
(170g plain flour, 85g unsalted butter, 3 egg yolks, 85g sugar, 2 drops vanilla essence)
1kg medium dessert apples
caster sugar
6 tablespoons of warm apricot glaze.

1. Preheat the oven to 190 degrees C
2. Roll out the pastry and line a flan ring. Refrigerate until firm. Bake blind
3. Peel,quarter and core all but 2 of the apples. Do not peel the final two but quarter and core them. Finely slice all the apples. Lay the peeled apples inside the pastry case right up to the rim of the flan.
4. Neatly arrange the slices with the peel still on over the surface.
5. Dust with caster sugar and bake well for 25 minutes.
6. Brush with warm apricot glaze.

And that's it!

No going back

This week I sent off a rather large cheque to Leiths to pay for my course which starts on January 7th. I was sent order forms for my whites and knives and they have been schnaffled away by a very kind Santa who will be delivering them to the school ready for my first day of training. I think I've now covered most of the techniques that are taught during term one, my breadmaking is becoming more consistent, and I have knocked up a couple of cakes including my first Victoria sponge. Every night, my very own Jeremy Paxman tests me on the difference between chopping brunoise, julienne, paysanne and jardiniere and I hope that by early January I will be at a satisfactory level to hold my own alongside my fellow starters.

On Thursday I was invited by Albion, a lovely advertising agency where I did my final freelance stint, to come in and give a talk about my career change. It was lovely to see them all again because they are genuinely some of the nicest people I've worked with in the advertising industry and they have been really supportive of what I'm planning to do. Instead of a standard talk I decided to host a foodie quiz and we did some cheese tasting and had some fun games of trying to identify spices by their aroma. I brought along some strange fruits and vegetables that I picked up at Borough Market and they had to name cuts of beef from a diagram of a cow. I really enjoyed myself and it was lovely talking to a group about something I'm genuinely passionate about. In return I was presented with a new cookery book, Beyond Nose to Tail, which is the follow-up to Fergus Henderson's Nose to Tail Eating. I've only eaten once at St John and it was a bizarre experience. Some of the recipes in the book are off the wall. I'm not sure I'll be rushing to cook braised squirrel anytime soon!

Pear Tart

There are good times to choose to go on a diet and there are bad times. I would class the day I'm making a pear tart as a pretty bad time, but no amount of persuasion can break the Chief Taster's resolve. Credit to the girl, she won't even have a sliver, even as I torture her by eating a fairly large slice in front of her eyes. Oh well, that's one big tart for me to get through over the next few days. Chief Taster suggests taking some of the remaining tart into her office to share with her colleagues. What a lovely idea, it really should go to a good home and I'm sure it will hold its own amongst the patisserie of W1. Besides, there'll be plenty left for me.

The next morning as usual, Chief Taster leaves for work while I am still semi-conscious in bed. She says something about the tart and I grunt in agreement. When I do get up and head to the kitchen, I open the fridge to find that actually, there isn't plenty left for me. Most of it has disappeared, gone, shazam! My lovely pear tart with the shortest of shortcrust pastry has been reduced to a solitary segment and my plan to eat a slice at 3 hour intervals throughout the day has been scuppered. She emails to say she didn't want me to get fat, and she's right of course. Because only I know how much butter went into that tart...

Money Pie

Mmmmmm, I love a large slice of money pie. With its rich and decadently glistening filling, the al dente clatter of silver against tooth enamel - nothing quite beats it. Abramovich is a fan I hear, washed down with a pint of Russian crude. And Bill Gates has been known to guzzle a few after his marathon sessions of online scrabble, the greedy monkey. Flavoured with exotic ingredients from around the world:- a few grams of Brazilian Reis here, a pinch of Thai Baht there, maybe a slug of US dollars to hold it all together. Yum.

Waiter! Bring me another slice of that pie and this time go easy on the custard will you!?

Of course you can't really eat money pie. That would be stupid. Imagine the indigestion that would follow and I won't even go into the toilet issues. Do you remember the fantastic French entertainer Monsieur Mangetout on Record Breakers with Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter? He's guzzled over 9 tons of metal in his lifetime, including a Cessna 150 aircraft. You just know Health and Safety watchdogs would prevent that from being broadcast to children nowadays.

Mum: What would you like for tea tonight Jonny?
Jonny: Can I have carburettor and chips, Mum?
Mum: Don't be so silly, Jonny. Chips are terribly bad for you.


Anyway, maybe when he's feeling a bit flush Monsieur Mangetout gets his local patissier to knock up a flan au fric rather than visit his local Michelin starred eatery. Quel imbecile!

Ok, I'll come clean. This post isn't about money pies or flan au fric at all! It's about blind baking the Blumenthal way. On his programme Perfection, Heston demonstrated his method for blind baking by filling the pastry case with coins instead of baking beans. The reason for this is that metal conducts heat more evenly, ensuring the bottom of the pastry cooks properly. There's probably some rule about only using coins made of the same metal but I just tipped in a load of foreign currency left over from my travels and it did the trick. It produced the perfect rich shortcrust case for my caramalised onion and gorgonzola quiche.