"Let Me Guess, Someone Stole Your Sweet Roll": Baking Tribute to Skyrim

This summer, when the weather was too hot for doing anything, I was introduced to the wonderful world of Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, a computer game where you are a character in a fantasy world, called Skyrim, who can speak to dragons.

I've never been much of a gamer since I was a teenager, but this game is something new and fabulous! One of my characters is an axe-wielding Viking, the other is a dark-skinned woman from a country called Hammerfell who is a magical archer. You can be anyone in this fantastic game, and in the game you complete quests that require fighting bad guys and dragons, and finding hidden treasure in catacombs and caves.

In this game, your character can eat different kinds of food, including treats like the boiled creme treat, apple pies, and--my favourite--sweetrolls!

As pictured, the Skyrim sweetroll looks like a mountain-shaped piece of bread covered in sweet glacé or fondant icing. It's not specified in the game whether it's a bread roll or a cake, because it's simply a background detail. In fact, the only time in the game that it's ever spoken about is when sometimes as incidental dialogue a town guard will say "Let me guess, someone stole your sweetroll".

The sweetroll is a running gag in many games by Skyrim's production company, Bathesda. It seems someone in their design team has a sweet tooth!

Ever since playing it, I wanted to recreate the delicious looking treat. At first, I tried modelling some sweet bread dough into mountain shape rolls, but it never kept its shape on baking. However, the recently I was wandering through my local Lidl and I saw the perfect solution to my problem: a Bundt tin!

Last year, I experimented with making my own tube pan by putting a food can in the middle of a round cake tin. In the blog, I mentioned that Bundt tins are hard to come by here, and are often expensive, but the one I found in Lidl was being flogged off in their reduced section for a princely sum of roughly €5. I was delighted!

This attempt at a sweet roll is a simple vanilla and almond Madeira cake which I then topped off with some melted rolling fondant (I had some leftover from making the Zesteratops, and had read online that it can be melted into pouring fondant. It didn't work as well as I'd wanted to....)

I was super pleased with the results! I was delighted with how clean the details from the Bundt tin came out on the cake itself (I buttered and floured the Hell out of it), and it made a perfectly delicious Skyrim sweetroll, albeit a giant one.

However, I don't believe Vikings, or Medieval princes and princesses, had access to the ingredients to make a modern Madeira cake. I personally believe that an authentic Skyrim sweetroll would actually be a piece of bread with icing on, like a German kugelhopf. I'll try this approach in the future.

Maybe sometime in the future too I could get a mini Bundt tray and make lots of little sweetrolls. Someone has already done that with sponge cake mix, but not with bread. I think further experimentations are in order for bringing the magical world of Skyrim to the real world.

I'll also be doing some experiments with recreating other Skyrim sweets too! Keep your eyes peeled for further Tamriel treats.....

I've Got OCD: Obsessive Cupcake Disorder!

I've made about four dozen fairy cakes over the past few days, possibly more because I've been sending the excess cakes to work with my fiancé.

I'm going a little mad in the search for the perfect fairy cake: fluffy yet moist, tall and rounded, and deliciously sweet but not sickly.

However, the oven in my current house has become my worst enemy: recipes that worked like a treat in my mother's and two of my previous homes' ovens are routinely failing in my current oven. I think all my experiments are to be done anymore in my mother's oven because I no longer have access to the ovens in my previous rental homes, obviously!

Here is a batch of cupcakes using the traditional pound cake recipe: a quarter pound each of sugar, flour, eggs, and butter. I'm not a fan of pound cake, personally, but normally it turns out nicely in my mother's oven. These however were simultaneously peaked and flat, and dense in texture.

This batch was made using my Madeira cake recipe. These too had noses, which I couldn't work out how to prevent.

On the right hand side is a batch of cakes using the light sponge cake recipe that I normally use for fairy cakes, which normally works in my mother's oven, but in my oven they were dry, dense, and flat.

This final batch is the same recipe, however the baking powder in the recipe was replaced with a quarter teaspoon of baking soda for every quarter pound of flour. The rise on these cakes was much more even, but in fear of the cakes deflating after coming out of the oven I overcooked them and they were dry.

I think I'll have to redo all my tests in my mother's oven and see what the issue is because I'm at my wit's end. I cannot find a way to prevent my cakes from:

• Either rising flat, or peaking and growing 'noses'
• Being too dense, or too dry
• Shrinking or flattening after cooking.

The tests continue......

Wedding Talk: Making My Own Cake!

My wedding is happening in less than a year! Wow. When I was a little girl, I had imagined being married but it was always "away in the future"; that future is now, and it's surreal!

I never imagined my wedding in great detail when I was younger: I never imagined a dress or a cake or a ceremony or anything, I just imagined having a husband. To be completely honest, I'm not really a weddings person: I don't really like going to other people's weddings, and I find them mostly perfunctory for social expectation. Every single wedding is the same white-dress-and-dinner thing, and sometimes the weddings are just put on to keep the family happy, and don't seem genuine to the couple.

I don't want that kind of wedding; to be honest, I just want a husband: having a small church ceremony with about 30 guests who are in Halloween costumes and then go home afterwards for a family dinner. However, I'm not the only one getting married of course! My fiancé's dream wedding has to be taken into consideration!

So, we'll be having a hotel reception but with our own twist: we're going for a red and black palette with a kinda spooky vampire theme. I want to look like a pretty vampire bride. Fancy dress will be very much encouraged.

But the main thing of interest for this blog is of course the cake, which I will be making myself! Yes, I have decided to put my baking skills to the final test and make a cake for about 100 to 120 guests, and I'm extremely excited about it.

At the time being my plan is to make a cupcake wedding cake with a small cake at the top for cutting with my brand new husband. The colour themes is black and red, with white, and so the cakes will be a selection of flavours decorated with red and white icing. I thought decorating them with little superhero royal icing run-outs would be a nice touch for my fiancé's interest in geeky stuff.

I'll be keeping a record of all my experiments and sketches on this blog as I develop my concept and practise making lots of fairy cakes!

I'm super excited to do this, and I hope you'll all be excited to follow my progress!

Having Fun with Dough: Biscuit Creatures

Baking is all about fun, so let's have fun! Here are some little creatures I made using the biscuit dough I shared in my last post.

This isn't so much a recipe as it is just showing off my modelling skills: does it show that I studied ceramics in college? Seems my skills of working with clay are quite transferable to baking. However, it's important not to overwork the dough, and if it starts to get to soft and oily, pop it back in the fridge for 20 to 30 minutes. These biscuits have to be cold before they're cooked so they keep their shape.

I just started colouring some bits of lemon biscuit dough and started playing around. I found the best way of incorporating gel food colouring into the premade dough is using the French sablée technique, which is smearing the dough across the work surface and gathering it back up. It works the gluten in the flour the less than kneading it in. I also used cocoa powder mixed to a paste with boiling water to colour the brown dough.

I'll share with you how I made the hedgehogs, tortoises, and snakes.

To make the hedgehogs, I took a piece of brown dough, and a piece of white dough about a third of the size. I rolled them together to make a cone, and then stuck black sesame seeds in to make the face.

I allow the little hedgies to chill out in the fridge for half an hour before using the tip of a cocktail stick to rough up the brown dough to emulate spines. I then baked them for 12 minutes.













To make the snakes, I took two equal parts of coloured dough, in this case red and green, and rolled them each into a rope. I then rolled the ropes together and twisted them together to make stripes, keep one end thicker to make the head. I then pointed its nose and gave it two black sesame seed eyes.

Next time, I'll add a glacé cherry tongue.

I baked the snakes for a shorter time, about 10 minutes, because they're more fragile than the hedgehogs.










To make the tortoises, I rolled a piece of coloured dough into a ball and slightly flattened it to make a dome. I then took smaller pieces of dough, maybe a fifth of the size of the shell, and made the head and legs; the head is slightly larger than the legs.

Like the others, I used black sesame seeds for eyes, and after a half-hour rest in the fridge I used the back of a table knife to score shell markings into each tortoise's back.

I baked them for roughly 12 minutes.








I have a whole lot of ideas now for further biscuit creature ideas: maybe some bears, or little rabbits. Maybe I can hide pieces of chocolate inside, or marshmallow. Also, designs can be embellished and refined with icing or melted chocolate. I still like the traditional 2D cut out biscuits, of course, but the new 3D angle has a lot of interesting possibilities.

It's really opened up a whole lotta doors and a whole rake of new ideas for birthday gifts and party favours.....

Recipe Revision: Sweet Biscuits, or "Sugar Cookie", and Sandwich Biscuits

When I first started this blog, I did a series where I shared a bunch of recipes based on what I made for a bake sale in our church. In it I shared a recipe for some delicious orange bourbons and coconut custard cream biscuits which are a simple sandwiches of plain (or chocolate) shortcake biscuits and buttercream filling. And since then, I've not made a huge amount of biscuits; I thought that needed remedying!

I'm not really a biscuits person now that I'm an adult: I loved biscuits when I was a kid, but now I prefer cake or pastries, and if I ever eat a biscuit it's a savoury one with cheese on top. At the absolute most, I'll have a digestive or a rich tea to dip in my tea. I don't know when my delight in biscuits began to disappear, but I've not properly baked a biscuit in about 3 years.

Now that the weather is starting to cool down from the viciously volcanic heat we've been suffering from since the middle of June, I'm being once again tempted into the kitchen. I wanted to ease myself back into the spirit of baking with something nice and simple, and also something a little different from the usual pace of cakes, pastries, and desserts that I've settled into over the past two or so years.

So I made a batch of biscuits using the recipe I used in the aforementioned bourbon and custard cream recipes: it immediately showed how out of practise I was! They were lumpy, bumpy, uneven, flavourless and lost their shape in the oven. I needed to address this loss of skill immediately!

The two main issues I encountered were that a) I used unsalted butter, which has become by go-to butter since I had the "why bakers use unsalted butter" revelation earlier last year, and b) egg yolks are not all made equal, and neither are all batches of flour.

So, in this recipe revision, I specify the use of salted butter in order to have good flavour, and also using beaten egg instead of just the yolk. Because every homebaker knows the annoyance of having a spare egg white hanging around in the back of the fridge, but also this recipe could need more or less egg depending on the dryness of the flour and the softness of the butter, similar to how you use water in pastry.

INGREDIENTS

6 ounces (115 grammes) caster sugar

6 ounces (115 grammes) salted butter, room temperature
1 medium egg*, beaten
3 ounces (55 grammes) cornflour

9 ounces (170 grammes) plain white spelt flour

1 teaspoon (5 millilitres) vanilla essence, or almond essence

* - in Ireland, a medium egg weighs between 1¾ and 2 ounces (50 to 55 grammes)

To make the lemon sandwiches

Add 1 teaspoon of lemon zest to the dough, with the butter and sugar
½ ounce (15 grammes) unsalted butter
½ ounce (15 grammes) lemon curd
3 ounces (85 grammes) icing sugar
About a teaspoon (5 millilitres) lemon juice


To make chocolate nougat sandwiches

Replace half the cornflour in the dough with cocoa powder
½ ounce (15 grammes) unsalted butter
½ ounce (15 grammes) chocolate hazelnut spread
3 ounces (85 grammes) icing sugar
Up to 2 teaspoons (10 millilitres) milk, to mix

METHOD

• In a mixing bowl using a wooden spoon, cream the butter and sugar together until well combined. It will be a challenge at first because the butter is cool and hard, but persevere!
• Beat in the egg until the mixture is light and creamy. After the egg, mix in the vanilla essence, or almond essence if using.
• Sieve in the cornflour and flour, and work in gently with the wooden spoon. Turn out onto a well floured work surface and gently, gently work into a smooth dough.
• Wrap the dough in some cling film and flatten into a disc about half an inch (1 centimetre) thick. Chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour, preferably 2 hours.
• Once chilled, roll the mixture out to roughly an eighth of an inch (3 millimetres) and cut out shapes. You can re-roll the trimmings once before you'll need to chill it for about 20 minutes for a break to re-roll it again.
• Pop the cut outs on a cutting board and pop in the fridge while you preheat the oven to 170°C (340°F, Gas Mk.3).
• Line two baking trays with non-stick paper, or grease lightly with oil, and put the cut outs on the trays about half an inch (1 centimetre) apart. Decorate the tops of half the biscuits to make the tops, and then prick the remaining biscuits with a fork or cocktail stick. You can prick them all instead of decorating, if you prefer.
• Bake the biscuits for 10 to 12 minutes, turning the trays around halfway through baking, until the biscuits begin to turn golden around the edges. This is obviously harder to tell on chocolate biscuits, so to test chocolate biscuits they should look dry and the edges should feel slightly crusty.
• Remove from oven and transfer to a wire rack to cool completely.

To make sandwiches

• Make a simple buttercream with the filling ingredients, either lemon or nougat, and pipe a little on each bottom biscuit and sandwich with a top biscuit. When sandwiching, make sure the tops of every biscuit are facing outwards, with the filling on the flat bottom side.
• Allow to set for about an hour before eating. These are best eaten after several hours of sitting, but it's not necessary.

2018's Annual No-Machine Ice-Cream Experiments: We're Here Again!

 Once again it's time to experiment with ice-cream creations as July, which is International Ice Cream Month, rolls around.

This year's trials have been broad and involved a lot more research and experimentation that in previous years, because nowadays as the Internet grows and information is more widely and readily available, research is easy to conduct from the comfort of your own living room.

The biggest research resource these days is YouTube, where you can find a video on nearly anything you can imagine and there are hundreds of thousands of aspiring cooking-show hosts who have taken the brave step of setting up a camera in their kitchen for the whole world to see.

Unfortunately, pointing a camera at what you're doing is as good as useless if you don't thoroughly and adequately explain what you're doing, and this is something I've discovered on my educational travels around YouTube.

Here are a few things I tried from online videos, and what the results were like for me. Spoilers: only one of them worked, and I already knew it worked.

Homemade Salt and Ice Churn

I found this video by an Italian man and it was very convincing and I gave it a try, but when I actually did I found that there was a lot of missing information:

In the video, the presenter:

Makes a simple vanilla custard in the traditional way with cream, milk, eggs, sugar, and vanilla

Chills the custard to be frozen later.

Prepares a bowl full of ice and salt in a rough proportion of 1 part salt to 4 parts ice

Places a metal bowl on top of the ice and adds in the custard

Mixes the custard with a wooden spatula as it freezes from the coldness of the ice

Now, making ice-cream with ice and salt is nothing new—kids have been doing this for as long as I can remember, including when I was a kid myself—but there are several things missing from this video:

1. How long does the whole churning process take?
2. Does it have to be fine salt, or will any salt do?
3. Does the ice and salt mixture need refreshing at any point in the process?
4. Can this ice-cream be stored in the freezer in a tub, or must it be eaten immediately?

When I tried this myself, these are all problems I encountered and my ice-cream never actually froze and all the ice melted before anything happened. I used coarse salt, and maybe that was an issue, but it was all very disappointing.

Food Processor Trick

Another trick I see frequently online is using a food processor to make ice-cream in a similar way to an ice-cream churn. Most people have a food processor, and this means you don't need to buy another kitchen gadget when you already have one that'll do.

In this video, the presenter:

Takes an ice-cream base and freezes it into a thin sheet in a freezer bag

Breaks up the frozen sheet

Blitzes the frozen pieces into a smooth soft serve ice-cream

Pours it into a tin to freeze for 2 hours before eating

This one works quite well, however the ice-cream freezes into a solid lump the longer it stays in the freezer: not enough air is incorporated to keep it fluffy over long storage times. Also, I found that pouring the ice-cream base directly into the food processor bowl, popping that into the freezer, and taking it out and blitzing it every 30 minutes in the same way an old fashioned make-at-home ice-cream would be made worked a whole lot better. It was still a big frozen lump after 5 hours, though.

Semifreddo, not Ice-Cream

This one has no video, but I remember seeing Nigella Lawson do this kind of thing on one of her programmes once. In this recipe, you mix eggs and sugar into a fluffy sabayon before folding with softly whipped cream and freezing into a loaf. This loaf is then sliced up and served with fresh fruit and sauce.

I tried this and it was quite tasty, but definitely not ice-cream: it's mouthfeel was more like a frozen mousse, and as it thawed and melted it produced a thick bubbly mixture all over the plate. Like the food processor ice-cream, it too freezes completely solid if left for too long.

Cream and Condensed Milk Old Favourite

This method is the one I have used on here for about 4 years at this point, and it still works fabulously. My only tiny issue is that if you over whip the cream the resulting butter-fat can leave an oily film on the roof of your mouth that makes for quite an unpleasant mouthfeel. In comparison to the other methods, however, that's only a tiny gripe.

It has the richness of a luxury ice-cream, like Haagen-Dazs or Ben and Jerry's, so if you're looking for something a little lighter like a French ice-cream or a gelato this really isn't the recipe to use. That's why I was experimenting with the other methods to see if I could make something a little lighter and a method that could be used to make sorbet too.

In conclusion, I really think if you want to make traditional ice-cream, you need a churn, or you've simply got to accept that no-churn ice-cream will be fiddly, time consuming, and hard to store longterm. Happy ice-creaming!

Irish Weather Report: Too Hot to Bake (pun not intended)

June has been a slow month for me recipes-wise: the weather has simply been too, too hot to stay in a kitchen cooking up sweets and treats! I don't handle the hot weather well in any way, shape of form, and find that when the weather is too hot I don't feel like doing anything but sleeping or hiding in the fridge.

Ireland is in a moderate temperature zone: generally, the weather rarely creeps over 17°C, and rarely dips below 5°C, and is typically hovering around a nice 10°C (I have no idea what any of those temperatures are in Fahrenheit, by the way) so my mild Celtic constitution has zero concept of how to cope with anything above 20°C.

However, the end of May through June this year have been averaging at 26°C.

Needless to say, I've been suffering. A lot.

This has been one of the hottest summers I can remember: 2013 was pretty damn hot too, with highs of 28°C with constant, oppressive, blazing sunshine. There are times where even wearing string vests and short shorts is still too many clothes for this kind of heat.

Usually in this kind of weather I turn to making ice-cream, chilled desserts, and ice-pops, but even staying inside the house long enough to make any of those has been too challenging for me. Coming up with new ideas has been even more so of a challenge when encumbered by a constant, dehydration-induced brain fuzz, as even my usual idea generating exercises and inspiration processes aren't working.

I think if climate change continues to make our summers hotter, I might have to migrate to a more northerly part of the world.... maybe Denmark!

Despite that, I did do some little experiments and projects throughout the past 6 weeks that I'm gonna upload to June as back-dated blogs: I made some kiwi curd, some nice milk tart, and a few other delicious things.

The videos will be returning too now that my martial arts training and exams are over for another few months. I understand that my last video was April, which was ages and ages ago. Where I fell down with my video production was that most of my videos were impromptu shoots and I didn't have a battle plan that I was sticking to.

Let's see what the next few weeks have in store.....

Love,
Sweetie x

Speculaas: Dutch Style Spice Biscuits (Wheat Free)

Have you ever gone to a café and got a little spice and caramel scented crispy biscuit on the side of your saucer? Well, you don't need to go to a café to get this delicious morsels any longer, because now you can make them at home!

I present to you: Speculaas biscuits! Well, at least my take on them anyway.

Yesterday was my second anniversary with my wonderful companion, and three days ago marked one year until our wedding, so I presented him with some lovely handmade presents. I made him a paintbrush roll from some vibrant neon pink and chocolate brown flock curtain fabric that I found in a bargain bucket in my local fabric shop, and I made him a jar of these lovely, thin, crispy Speculaas biscuits.

These aren't 100% authentic to the original Dutch recipe because they don't have the same amount of spices, and they aren't 100% authentic to the shop bought brands either because they have too many spices. Normally, the shop bought ones tend only to have cinnamon (and occasionally ginger) in them, and the traditional biscuits have white pepper, ground aniseed, ground mace, and ground nutmeg.

I decided to add the aniseed and pepper as optional ingredients to the spice mix, but I generally speaking don't have mace or nutmeg around. If however you don't have access to all these spices, just use shop bought mixed ground spice, like Goodall's.

Another reason that these aren't 100% authentic is that I roll the dough out and cut out the individual biscuits: the traditional ones and the shop bought ones are moulded by having the dough pressed into a wooden or silicone mould. I hope in the future to experiment with using or making moulds

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

DIFFICULTY
Requires making roll-out cookie dough

TIME

About 2 hours, mostly chilling in the fridge

RECIPE RATING

Easy!

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

INGREDIMENTS

Spice Mix

4 teaspoons (20 millilitres) ground cinnamon

3 teaspoons (15 millilitres) ground ginger

2 teaspoons (10 millilitres) coriander

1/2 teaspoon (3 millilitres) cloves

Optional: 1/2 teaspoon (3 millilitres) ground white or black pepper

Optional: 1/4 teaspoon (1 millilitre) ground aniseed

Dough

8 ounces (225 grammes) plain white spelt flour

½ teaspoon (3 millilitres) baking soda

Pinch of salt

3 ounces (85 grammes) dark brown sugar

3 ounces (85 grammes) caster sugar

4 ounces (115 grammes) very cold unsalted butter, cut into cubes

1 teaspoon (5 millilitres) vanilla essence

A few drops almond essence

2 tablespoons (30 millilitres) cold milk

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

METHOD

This recipe is best prepared in a food processor, but you can do it by hand.

To make in a food processor

• In a mixing bowl, sieve together the spice mix, flour, salt, and baking soda and set aside.
• In a food processor, blend together the cold butter, the sugars, and the essences until mixed but still cold.
• Add in the dry ingredients and blend until you have a dry mixture that looks like sand.
• Add in half the milk and pulse the machine in short bursts to combine. If you need more milk, add it a teaspoon at a time: you don't need a lot of milk to combine the mixture.
• Once you have a crumbly yet chunky mixture, turn the mixture onto a floured surface and bring together with your hands into a ball.
• Wrap the ball in some cling film and flatten into a disc and chill completely in the fridge for at least an hour.

To prepare by hand

• In a mixing bowl, sieve together the spice mix, flour, salt, and baking soda. Add in the sugars and break up the big lumps of brown sugar with your finger tips. Rub the sugars and dry ingredients until it's completely mixed.
• Add in the cold butter and rub into the dry ingredients as if you were making pastry. Rub until it's completely sandy.
• Add in the essences and then add half the milk and continue to rub, adding more milk gradually if you need it, until you have a nice dough. Don't add too much milk: just enough to bind it together.
• Once you have a crumbly yet chunky mixture, turn the mixture onto a floured surface and bring together with your hands into a ball.
• Wrap the ball in some cling film and flatten into a disc and chill completely in the fridge for at least an hour.

Then, make the biscuits

• Preheat the oven to 160°C (320°F, Gas Mark 2½). Line one or two baking trays with non-stick baking paper.
• Take the dough from the fridge and work a little with your hands to make it malleable. Roll out to an ⅛ inch (3 millimetre) thickness and cut out shapes using whatever shape you want.
• Place the biscuits on the baking sheets about half an inch (1 centimetre) apart, and place in the centre of the preheated oven for 15 to 17 minutes, or until the biscuits are dry and a delicious tan brown colour.
• Transfer to a wire rack and cool completely before munching down with a cup of coffee. The Dutch are great at coffee.

STORAGE
Keep in an airtight container for up two a fortnight.

Recipe Review: Melktert, a South African Custard Pie

Hou jy van melktert?

It's been a while since I made a melktert, or milk tart in English, and since then I've eaten a few and seen a few more made on YouTube. I thought a little review was in order!

Normally, milk tart is a simple conflour-thicken vanilla custard in a tart shell, either crushed-biscuit base (most common among home cooks), shortcrust pastry (which I rarely see) or—so I've read online—puff pastry (which is apparently the "traditional" way, but I've personally never ever seen it), sprinkled with ground cinnamon. I've made a few changes to the usual way of making if, which I'll explain in this blog.

But first things first, ignore the wrinkly top: it's a by product of a new technique of making the custard lighter by mixing in beaten egg white. The tops only go wrinkly if you undercook them and take them out of the oven too soon, so learn from my mistake!

Despite that little gaffe, mixing whipped egg white into the custard was the first main change I made. I read other recipes online which all did the same thing, claiming it to be the traditional way. It makes the custard feel lighter on the palate, and slightly more moussey in texture.

The second main change I made was to the biscuit base: normal biscuit bases are 1 part butter to 2 parts biscuit, but I halved the amount of butter. It made for a lighter, crumblier base. I also used half digestives and half Speculaas biscuits, to keep the Dutch theme going.

INGREDIMENTS

For 6 mini tarts, or one 9 inch tart

• 8 ounces (225 grammes) biscuits, either digestives, gingernuts, or Speculaas, or a mixture
• 2 ounces (55 grammes) butter, at room temperature
• 1 UK pint (2½ US cups, 570 millilitres) full fat milk
• 2 eggs, separated
• 4 tablespoons (¼ cup) cornflour
• 2 ounces (55 grammes) caster sugar
• 1 teaspoon (5 millilitres) good quality vanilla essence
• ½ teaspoon (3 millilitres) lemon zest
• 1 ounce (30 grammes) butter
• Ground cinnamon, for decorating

METHOD

• Crush the biscuits, either using a food processor or by rolling over the biscuits in a plastic bag. In a mixing bowl, mix the biscuits with the room temperature butter with your hands to make a crumbly mixture.
• Use this mixture to line 6 mini tart tins, about 4 inches (10 centimetres) wide, or one 9 inch (22 centimetre) tart tin. Pop in the fridge while you prepare the filling.
• Separate the eggs, putting the whites into a mixing bowl and the yolks into a saucepan. Mix the yolks with half the sugar, the cornflour and the lemon zest until super smooth and lump free.
• Add in the milk gradually until completely incorporated. Once you have a nice smooth mixture, cook over medium high heat and bring to the boil, stirring all the time.
• Boil the mixture for a full minute, then remove from the heat and add the butter and vanilla essence. Set aside to cool slightly while you preheat the oven.
• Set the oven to 180°C (350°F, Gas Mk.3) and allow to preheat before moving on to the meringue.
• In the mixing bowl, whip the egg whites to soft peaks. Gradually add in the remaining half of the sugar and whip into a medium-peak meringue: when you lift the beaters the peak should flop over.
• Fold the meringue into the cooked custard a third at a time, quickly but gently to prevent the egg whites cooking. You don't have to fold each third through completely before adding the next third, just enough to lighten to base.
• Pour the mixture into the prepared tart shell(s) and spread out nicely, giving the tin a gentle little shake and tap.
• Bake the tart for 20 minutes on the centre shelf, or until the outside inch (2.5 centimetres) of the filling puffs up slightly and the entire surface is dry to the touch.
• Take the tart out of the oven and cool completely on a wire rack in the tin, before chilling in the fridge for 4 hours before serving.
• Before serving, sprinkle the surface with a good layer of ground cinnamon.

Kiwi Curd, or Any Curd for that Matter (Volume Measurements, not Weight)

Remember when for World Goth Day when I did the Madeira cake with eyes? In that recipe, I mentioned that my friend Aimée's original memory of eating that kind of cake as a kid was that it was kiwi flavoured filling, not strawberry. I also promised that I would update you with a kiwi filling recipe, and here it is!

Confession time: I hate kiwi fruits. They taste like under ripe strawberries, and when they're puréed they look like green frogspawn. They probably taste like frogspawn too, but I've never eaten frogspawn so I have no frame of reference.

But there are people in this world who like kiwi fruit and if you do you'll enjoy this recipe, which is very simple. Like most of my recipes, this is a simple ratio:

To make the curd base

2 parts fruit purée : 1 part sugar

In volume (fluid ounces, millilitres, etc.)

Once you make the base mixture, you'll need to thicken it with some cornflour.

To thicken with cornflour:

8 fluid ounces (225 millilitres) of base mixture : 1 to 1½ tablespoons (15 to 22 millilitres) cornflour

Now, I do understand the obvious issue here: how many kiwi fruits/strawberries/raspberries etc. are in 8 fluid ounces of purée? Well, that might be a question for Google, but what I do is I buy the fruit, purée it, and then work with what I have with respect to the ratio. That's the beauty of ratios, and why I love using them in the kitchen.

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

DIFFICULTY
No baking required, but uses stove top cooking

TIME

About an hour

RECIPE RATING

Easy!

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

INGREDIMENTS

8 fluid ounces (225 millilitres) kiwi fruit purée, smoothly blended, I think I used 6 peeled fruit to make this much purée

Zest and juice of 1 lime

4 fluid ounces (115 millilitres) caster sugar

1 to 2 tablespoons (15 to 30 millilitres) cornflour

Pinch of salt

Optional: 1 tablespoon (15 grammes) unsalted butter

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

METHOD

• In a saucepan, heat together the fruit purée, lime juice and zest, and sugar over medium heat until the sugar dissolves and comes to a simmer.
• In a small cup, mix together the cornflour with a few tablespoons of water to make a slurry. When the purée is simmering, gradually add in the cornflour and mix until it comes to a thickness you like: you can add all the cornflour to make it more like a jelly when it sets, or add less to make it more like a loose jam.
• If you want a little extra richness, take off the heat and then mix in the butter until it has completely emulsified into the curd.
• Pour into a wide shallow bowl, allow to cool slightly before covering with cling film - making sure that the cling film touches the surface of the curd - and allowing to cool completely before chilling until set, which will take about 4 hours.

STORAGE

Keep in the fridge in an airtight container and use within a week.

No-Bake Toffee Crisp Slice

Do you like Toffee Crisp bars? Well, now you can make them at home for half the price!

I love Toffee Crisp bars (well, the ones you get in Ireland and the UK): the lovely chocolatey rice crispie bar, the chewy caramel layer, covered in chocolate.... it's absolutely delicious! They used to sell homemade toffee crisp squares in the college cafeteria where I studied for my bachelor degree.

Making them at home is super simple: the layers are all very easy to make, and doesn't require any oven baking! Just a hob to make the caramel.

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

DIFFICULTY
No baking required, but uses stove top cooking

TIME

About an hour

RECIPE RATING

Easy!

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

INGREDIMENTS

For one 8 inch (20 centimetre) square tray of squares

For crispy base

150 grammes (5⅓ ounces) rice crispies or cocoa pops

250 grammes (9 ounces) plain or milk chocolate

50 grammes (1¾ ounces) margarine, or butter

For caramel

200 grammes (7 ounces) condensed milk

75 grammes (2½ ounces) salted butter

35 grammes (1¼ ounces) light brown soft sugar

1 teaspoon (5 millilitres) vanilla essence

Salt, to taste

For chocolate topping

125 grammes (4½ ounces) milk or plain chocolate, or a combination

20 grammes (¾ ounce) sunflower oil

~~ ^ _ ^ ~~

METHOD

• Line a 20 centimetre (8 inch) square tin with non-stick baking paper.
• Melt the margarine, or butter, and chocolate for the base slowly together in a heatproof bowl over low heat. If you're using butter, the microwave works well, but not with margarine.
• Once completely melted, stir in the rice crispies or cocoa pops and mix thoroughly until each crispy is coated.
• Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and flatten the top. Pop in the fridge while you make the caramel.
• Make the caramel according to the instructions in my millionaire's shortbread recipe, or on the Carnation UK recipe. Pour the caramel over the top of the crispy layer and spread out well.
• Melt the chocolate for the topping with the oil, either in the microwave or in a bowl over hot water, stirring well. Pour over the caramel while everything is still warm.
• Allow to cool completely to room temperature before chilling in the fridge for about an hour, or until the topping is set, before cutting and serving.