Ecclefechan Tart

During one of my recipe hunts on the internet, I came across this recipe for Ecclefechan Tart. I hadn't heard of this tart before, but I was very much intrigued by the recipe, and thought it sounded delicious. 

For the pastry:

• 250g plain flour
• 125g unsalted butter
• Pinch of salt
• 50ml whisky

For the filling:

• 150g unsalted butter
• 150g light brown sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 150ml double cream
• 1 tablespoon black treacle
• 300g mixed dried fruit
• 1 teaspoon finely chopped stem ginger
• 1 lemon
• 1 orange

I was particularly interested in the concept of the whisky pastry. Being a lover of whisky, I just coudn't wait to give this a go. I even sacrificed some whisky from my own collection:

Mmmm, Jura Superstition. Yum!

I preheated the oven to 180°C before making a start on the tart. The pastry was quite a tricky one in the end. I rubbed the flour and the butter together as usual, to create a breadcrumb-like mixture. Now, usually when I make shortcrust pastry, I use beaten egg to bind the ingredients together. However, there was no egg in this recipe, but 50ml whisky instead, which seemed to make the pastry a little difficult to handle at times - it had a nasty habit of falling apart, but I eventually got it to work well enough. I must admit, there was some patching required, but it all came together, just about.

Pressing it into the tart tin, the base was then pricked with a fork, before being covered with baking paper and filled with baking beans. It was then baked for 10 minutes in the oven, after which the baking beans were removed and the pastry baked for another 5 minutes.

Whisky pastry - what a great idea.

Once the pastry had baked, the base was drizzled with delicious treacle.

It started off smartly before descending into a mess.

Then it was on to making the filling.  First the butter and light brown sugar were creamed together.

So much sugar and buttery goodness.

Then the eggs were mixed in, before the double cream was aslo added and mixed in.

Doesn't look too inviting yet.

Next I filled the pastry case with mixed dried fruit (and glace cherries), and then grated lemon and orange zest on top.

Looking good.

The cream mixture was then poured on top (carefully). I found that the quantities described in the recipe produced more of the cream mixture than was actually needed, so there was about a third of it left over in the bowl after I'd added it to the fruit.

Ready for the oven.

The tart was then baked for 40 minutes (the recipe calls for 30 minutes, but I found that it needed an extras 10 minutes before it was fully-baked). It came out of the oven looking rather nice.

Mmm, looking very nice indeed, and it smelt amazing.

I moved it to a cooling rack and then let it cool for half an hour before cutting out the first slice (my mum had demanded to try it).

Cooling and still smelling amazing.

Once a slice had been cut out for my mother, I took it into work with me, where is was pronounced as a success. The combination of the fruit, citrus zest and cream was beautiful, and the whisky pastry was lovely. As there was no egg in the pastry, it had a very different texture to that of normal shortcrust pastry; instead it was more of a biscuity texture, that was actaully very pleasant. Another success at work, it was left on a counter in the work kitchen for people to help themselves, and I found that it had gone completely after just fifteen minutes.

Yum!

Beckie.

Expectation vs Reality

As I continue on my baking quest, I'm beginning to notice how cross I get with myself at times when something doesn't quite go according to plan.  Just the other week I made the Hummingbird Bakery Chocolate and Guinness cake for a lovely friend of mine who had invited me over for dinner.  I saw an opportunity to practise my baking skills, which have been neglected a little since I moved back home.  The two photos below show the finished product.  It looks OK, I like to think.  However, there had been no end of stress before the final product.

Chocolate and Guinness Cake Mark II.

Quite nice palette knife work.

Well, the recipe calls for the cake to be in oven for 45 minutes at 170°C.  So after 45 minutes I opened the oven door and started to pull the cake out of the oven.  It was at this stage that I realised the cake was nowhere near done.  So I put it back in the oven and played the waiting game.  Unfortunately, I had just caused some damage to my cake.  Because the cake tin had been moved, it meant that the mixture had basically been knocked around a wee bit, and this resulted in the inevitable collapse of the centre of the cake.  Cue wailing and general remonstrations about my incredible stupidity.  However, I overcame this minor disaster by simply flipping the cake over once it had cooled.  As the base was perfectly flat and even, I had a perfect new top to my cake.  Luckily the lovely thick cream cheese frosting covered up the fact that the top of the cake was in fact the base.  I think I would have gotten away with the whole thing if my 'Anglican Guilt' (the guilt that stems from making a sub-par cake that would certainly not be good enough for the church fête) hadn't got to me, forcing me to confess to my friend the disaster that had befallen my cake.  Still, my friend and her family seemed to enjoy it nevertheless.

This plays perfectly into my next baking attempt.  My parent both absolutely love the Lemon Drizzle Cake that is made at the fantastic Seedhouse Restaurant at Ned Yates Garden Centre in Wilmslow, Cheshire.  Therefore, one afternoon whilst they were at work, I decided to have a go at making a version of Lemon Drizzle Cake for my parents as a nice surprise.  The recipe I went for was one that I adapted slightly from the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book - the Lemon and Thyme Loaf.  

Now, my parents are not the most adventurous people when it comes to cake, so I decided to leave out the thyme, and instead add an extra teaspoon of lemon zest.  I also, on top of the beautiful lemon soaking syrup, decided to make a traditional Lemon Drizzle icing, which was made by simply mixing icing sugar with lemon juice.  This baking attempt brought out more of my usual baking anguish.  The next two photos below demonstrate how I pictured the cake in my mind.  They are two beautiful examples of Lemon Drizzle cakes.  These are the 'expectation'.

Gorgeous Lemon Drizzle Cake from 'bake with me!'

Another beautiful example, this time from Baking By Numbers.

The next two photos below display the 'reality'.

My attempt. Sigh.

Not great from this angle either...

By now, I have accepted that this isn't that bad, but at the time I was really very disappointed in the finished product.  It looked untidy, the lemon icing looked a bit too thin and it didn't 'drizzle' as nicely as I had wanted it to.  Obviously the main job of the cake is to taste nice (which it did indeed!), but I am beginning to get frustrated at my severe lack of presentation skills.  So my aim is to now attempt to develop said lacking presentation skills.  Wish me luck!

Beckie.

Honey Cake

Well this week I'm celebrating, as yesterday I handed-in my PhD thesis for examination. Normally I would have celebrated by baking some delicious cake or other, and then maybe heading off to the pub. The problem is, as I'm in the process of moving house, all my baking things have been packed away. Even sadder, I was just too tired to go to the pub, so had a quiet evening in instead.

However, even though I currently can't bake, I can still write about my past projects. This particular recipe was featured in the Comic Relief version of the Great British Bake Off, and ever since I saw it I wanted to have a go at making it. This was the Hive Cake as made by Martha Kearney. For my first attempt at the recipe, I decided to make just one layer of the cake in a simple round cake tin, just to try out the cake recipe and see if it worked as well as it did on the programme.

All the lovely ingredients.

The honey I used came from Haddon Hall, and had a beautiful flavour, so therefore I thought it was perfect for this particular cake. I didn't have any lemon juice, so I decided to use lemon flavouring instead, which seemed to work just as well, although I'm sure the flavouring from real lemon juice would be superior.

I was a little apprehensive with this recipe, as it called for self-raising flour, whereas I tend to use plain flour and a separate raising agent in my cake recipes. My fears were founded to some extent, as the cake did not rise as much as I thought it would. However, this did not prove to be detrimental to the flavour of the cake, which was lovely.

Honey cake = deliciousness.

I also experimented with some fondant icing, and made some cute little bees to stick on top of the honey-flavoured buttercream icing. Whilst I did not have an almond slices to use as the bee wings (as suggested in the recipe), I did have some meringues left over from my last meringue-making session. I crumbled the meringue up into the necessary shapes, and used them as the wings.

 

Bees!

The flavour of the cake and the icing was absolutely delicious. The icing in particular proved to be very nice indeed, which meant that I ate too much of it straight out of the bowl instead of putting it on the cake. Luckily for me, there was just enough to cover the top of the cake.

This was another recipe that went down very well with my friends, the cute little icing bees in particular proving to be a hit.

 

Lovely cake inside and out!

Beckie.

Tarte au Citron

Once again I must admit to being influenced by The Great British Bake Off. As an adoring admirer of Mary Berry, I finally bit the bullet and attempted her Tarte au Citron for the first time. I was very interested in the idea of trying out a new sweet shortcrust pastry recipe having relied on the Crazy Kitchen shortcrust recipe for so long.

Having watched the episode of the Great British Bake Off where they made the Tarte au Citron, I was very conscious of the fact that it would be very, very easy to over-bake the lemon filling. In fact this was very much the case for my first attempt at making this tarte. As you can see from the photo, the filling has started to separate from the pastry, and in fact in the centre of the tart there was a fairly large crack in the filling. This is a wonderfully tart and flavoursome lemon filling, which is one of the tastiest recipes I've ever tried.

Mildly successful Tarte au Citron

Again undeterred I decided to keep trying to make this tarte successfully. It is really easy to over-bake this tarte and I have done so several times. I have also come across problems with pouring the filling into the pastry case; sometimes it just overflows and other times simply sliding the tarte into the oven causes some filling to spill over and to make the pastry soggy, which can cause the pastry to collapse. This means that you can lose some of the tarte when you try to remove it from the tin after baking. However, this doesn't take away from the delicious flavour of the tarte, and it has always gone down very well with L, my housemate, and several other friends of mine.

Beckie.