Category: Dessert
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Making The Impossible! No. 4
A Sweet Pastry – Blind baking made easy! Blind baking or par-baking a pastry shell for a tart or quiche can be a little testing as it normally means lining the shell with baking paper or foil and filling with ‘weights’, such as rice, beans or metal weights, then baking for around ten minutes or…
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What’s in the Fridge? No. 6
Trifle with cookies, kirsch, poached apricots and custard cream The old-fashioned trifle is one of the forgotten great desserts. The recipe or technique probably arose from the need to use up left over cake. At one extreme, trifles can be flavourless and gluggy. However, at the other extreme, it is easy to make an elegant…
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As Easy As … No. 2
Meringue and Berries – A sublime summer combination There are endless recipes for meringues: from a single large one to numerous small ones, from plain to flavoured, to unadorned to magnificently garnished. I remember meringues from my childhood, not at home though, as my mother rarely made them, possibly because it was too difficult in…
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Traditional Christmas Dinner – Part C
(Continued from Traditional Christmas Dinner – Part B) For a traditional Christmas dinner we propose: a seafood cocktail, roast turkey with vegetables followed by plum pudding with brandy sauce. This post continues from an article we wrote for Club Marine magazine in 1993. (Use the Print button at the top of this page for a…
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As Easy As … No. 1
“It’s a piece of (cheese)cake!” For a long time I thought the expression “as easy as pie” referred to the act of making a pie. That, of course, never made sense to me as I have generally found pies rather difficult to make, even mud ones. But then I discovered that the expression refers to…
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Europe 2016 – Part 5
Continued from Europe 2016 – Part 4. Table d’Hôtes If you have travelled through France you are probably familiar with Chambres d’Hôtes – the equivalent of the Australian and British concept of Bed and Breakfast – and Gîtes – the equivalent of our holiday rental in the form of self-contained cottages, houses or apartments. Some…
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Europe 2016 – Part 4
Continued from Europe 2016 – Part 3. We went to learn French and learnt a lot about Sancerre The name ‘Sancerre‘ is well-known in the wine world, being a wine region south west of Paris famous for its sauvignon blanc. However, we hadn’t realised that there was also a small town called Sancerre until we…
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Europe 2016 – Part 2
Continued from Europe 2016 – Part 1. A German Style Plum Sheet Cake Our plum sheet cake experiment would happen, but at Chamonix in France, not in Bavaria. The key steps in our method are described below – follow them, or find a recipe for this type of cake in your cookbooks or on the…
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Europe 2016 – Part 1
German Plum Sheet Cake After 22 hours in the air from Melbourne, we arrived in Munich for an extended European visit. Our German friends – who had visited us in Australia one year earlier – were there to meet us at the airport. It was midday but we weren’t ready for lunch then. One and…
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Making The Impossible! No. 2
It is impossible to make flour based cakes and puddings in the Microwave oven! Right? Well we have stumbled across a self-saucing chocolate pudding that gives a great result when microwaved. The background Some weeks ago we were over at Olive’s Cottage at Windermere. It was just a few days after the flood scare for…