Absolutely Homemade Tarte Tatin

Finally, more success in making tarte tatin. Our pilgrimage back home to learn the art of French home cooking has not been in vain!!!

A few thoughts why I love home cooked food so much:
1. They do not always look dressed up like in restaurants, but they certainly look and smell yummy.
2. The pleasure starts even before the meal is served at the table -- especially the anticipation as the aromatic smells of whatever that's cooking on the stovetop or baking in the oven fills the kitchen and dining area.
3. They give you a warm fuzzy feeling, as they are cooked with love and joy.
4. They are usually (though not always) healthier.

Back to our lesson on tarte tatin. Being lazy, I did not take note of the recipe as the dessert was being made. In fact, I don't think Rémi's maman referred to any recipe at all, as this is probably as easy as frying an egg to her. As she was peeling and slicing the apples (that came from her garden), she was passing some to a greedy me, and baby Pablo. At the same time, she was also making a blueberry tart (as we couldn't agree on which to have for dessert since they are both nice, she decided to make both), so it wasn't a structured tarte tatin lesson per se.

Despite a lack of a precise recipe (which I never follow anyway), I managed to take down some notes and came up with some guidelines/tips/steps that contributed to our last night's tarte tatin success.

Steps to making tarte tatin

Dough:
Pate Brisee (salty tart dough)
You can also use premade filo pastry bought from the supermarket

To make the apple filling
5-6 apples (or enough to pack up tightly the base of the tart tin), peeled and sliced into thick pieces.
Butter (according to your fat conscious. I used about 25g or less but feel free to use more)
Sugar (50g + another 50g or less to sprinkle over the base of the tart tin)

Put apples, butter and sugar into a frying pan and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, until the sugar has caramelised and the apples are cooked (do not overcook the apples though). Add a little water if necessary.

Grease the tart tin with more butter. Sprinkle the other half of the sugar over the base of the tart tin. Pour the caramelised apples into the tin. Pack tightly.

Cover the apples with the rolled up/flattened tart dough, with the edges tucked into.

Baked in preheated oven of 190 degrees for about 20-25 minutes, or until the dough is golden brown.

Invert and voilah! You have a nicely delicious apple upside down tart!

Our next plan is to replicate this success, and make a tarte tatin dish with blood! This is not a joke. Boudin noir aux pommes is another French classic dish of black pudding (blood sausage) with apples. And at a restaurant in Lyon during our trip, we had a wonderful boudin noir cooked in tarte tatin. What a delightful combination. Now we only have to find out how.

Enda's Pineapple Tarts

 

What's Chinese New Year without the yummy homemade golden pineapple tarts. That's exactly what I'm missing this year.

I'm not the pickiest when it comes to pineapple tarts, but they are best when homemade. Many expert homecooks have their own secret recipes and I don't think we can easily say who makes the best pineapple tarts. Everyone have their favourites, and I have many. Like the fresh from the oven ones I chanced upon in Melaka years ago, the ones made by the mom-in-law of my 7th aunt which my family enjoys gratefully yearly, and then, Enda makes them every year with smashing success. She seems to vary her recipe every year. And this being the first Chinese New Year when I'm not back home in Singapore, she suggested I make my own pineapple tarts to satisfy my craving, and gave me her new easy-to-make recipe.

I haven't had time to make it yet, but looking forward to trying it out sometime when I feel less lazy. Afterall, even if the dough and filling may be fast to prepare, it is still quite tedious to have to make each and every little pillow of pastry look perfect. Meanwhile, I'm recording the recipe below so that I don't lose it.

Enda's Homemade Pineapple Tarts

Pineapple filling:

1 big pineapple

about 200g sugar

1 cinnamon stick

Tart dough:

1kg plain flour

500g butter

8 egg yolks

 

1 egg yolk for glazing

 

Make the pineapple filling first. With 1big pineapple, blend until like juice then cook in pot. Add 200g sugar, and more to your taste if needed. Add one cinnamon stick and cook until the mixture is dry.

While the pineapple filling is cooking, prepare the tart dough. Using an electric mixer, mix butter, sugar and eggs yolk together until well mixed. After that use your hand to mix in the plain flour until the mixture resembles a tart dough.

To make the pastry, pinch some dough off and roll with your hands into a small ping pong ball shape. Flatten and spoon some pineapple filling, and close it up. Repeat until the dough or filling is used up.

Brush the top of the pastry with a beaten egg yolk (or milk). Bake in a preheated oven for ?? (she forgot to give me the oven temperature and time, so got to check with her again).

 

Simple berry delights

I love summer in Wellington. The weather still sucks, but at least there's more sunny days and it is marginally less cold.

The best part of summer is the berry season. Because of the crappy weather, we have been missing out on buying lots and lots of berries at the Sunday market. But we are still enjoying lots of berries from the supermarket.

They make perfect quick dessert. Like here, we have blackberries and strawberries in our natural plain yoghurt. Topped with vanilla sugar and some bit of cream.

Crumble of Pears and Dates

Hmmm....my food presentation skills are not doing justice to this tasty and easy to make crumble. Now it looks like some gluey fruits that has been messed around on a kid's plate.

Looks aside, it is a pretty light dessert after a heavy dinner, as the crumble pastry is just a sprinkle on the pear rather than a thick crust

The recipe is adapted from the Crumble cookbook by Martine Lizambard, published by Solar Editions. And it's so easy to adapt the portion size that I'm regurgitating the recipe based on memory.

Crumble of Pears and Dates
Serves two

2 pears (1 pear per person)
A few dried dates (Persian dates, not Chinese red dates, can be replaced with figs)
Some honey (about 1 tablespoon)
Roughly 1 spoon of butter (after adding my reduced quantity of butter, I regretted it as omitting the butter would make healthier dessert)

For the crumble:
30g flour (or 1 heap tablespoon)
15g cold butter
20g brown sugar (or about 1 tablespoon)
Sprinkle almond flakes or walnut pieces

Preheat oven at 200 degree Celcius.

Peel pear and quarter it. Put in a small pan with butter over low heat. Add honey. Cook for about 3-5 minutes.

Cut the dates into cubes. Mix into the pear mixture. Put everything into a baking tin.

Prepare the crumble by rubbing butter into the flour until all butter are evenly mixed into the flour. Add sugar and mix well.

Sprinkle the crumble over the pears. Sprinkle nuts over the crumble. Bake for about 20 minutes until the crumble is golden brown.

Southeast Asian night 3 with tropical fruits

We had a fruity dinner of pineapple rice and papaya sago dessert. Serving the food in the hollowed out fruits is sure a fancy way to impress guests (in my case, my other half).

As for the recipe for making pineapple rice, I found that there are as many versions of it as there are for fried rice. So as usual, I cooked it according to the prevailing ingredients I had on hand, except for the precious pork floss specially imported from Singapore, and the pineapple, that was specially bought for the occasion.

I had referred to Baking Mum's recipe to help me begin and adjusted the ingredients and taste accordingly.

A close-up look at the papaya sago dessert. It definitely looks better than it tastes.

The original plan was to make mango sago dessert with some leftover sago from the sago gula melaka, but a last minute trip to the supermarket yielded no mangoes. So we switched quickly to plan B with papaya.

Then my plan B was also quite fluid. Finding no suitable recipes online that used both papaya and sago, I concocted my own. Scooped the flesh out of the whole papaya, pureed them, added milk to make some kind of milkshake, but then I didn't have enough milk, so it's somewhere between a milkshake and papaya puree consistency. Thankfully, the papaya was rather sweet, though we ended up adding some more sugar to it.

Improved Blueberry Tart

Certain French food can be extraordinarily seasonal. Or it seems to be the case for Rémi's family. And blueberry tart is made mainly during the blueberry season. While you can probably get frozen blueberries from the supermarket out of season, the pleasure is partially derived from picking wild blueberries in the countryside. And since the season is particularly short, the window for enjoying blueberry tart is particularly short.

Anyway, this is his third attempt at making blueberry tart with frozen blueberries. And it just get nicer and nicer.

The recipe is still the same as the last one we did. The main difference this time:

1. The dough is not pre-cooked;
2. After flattening the dough on the tart mould, sprinkle ground almonds over the base of the tart, followed by sugar;
3. Then you spread generously the blueberries, filling up the tart, and sprinkle more sugar;
4. Bake for 30 minutes or more, until the blueberries just start to wrinkle.

Caramelised Apples in Coffee Syrup

Apples are probably my favourite dessert ingredients because they are so easy and versatile, and as legend goes, helps keep the doctor away. Plus apples are easily available all year round.

Besides the elusive French apple tart and our specialty apple crumble, we also like to cooked diced apples with cinnamon over low fire. The warm soft apples with some raisins added goes extremely well vanilla ice-cream. It's not necessary to add sugar or butter when cooking the apples, as some recipes suggested.

I've been wanting to try this caramelised apples recipe I got in my Chocolate and Coffee Bible cookbook published by Hermes House. Although it was Rémi who made it in the end, I'm still satisfied and already looking forward to trying it again.

Caramelised Apples with Coffee Syrup
Proportion based on 2 apples, one apple per serving.

2 eating apples, peeled but left whole
Approx. 1 tablespoon unsalted butter, melted (don't have to be precise, just need enough butter to coat around the apples
Approx. 30g sugar
sprinkle of ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons strong brewed coffee

Preheat oven to 180 degrees Celsius. Cut a thin slice off the base of the apple to make them stable if necessary.

Using a pastry brush, coat each apple with the melted butter. Mix sugar and cinnamon in a shallow dish, and roll the apple in the dish to coat it all over with the sugar mixture.

Arrange the apples on a shallow baking dish that just fit, so that they can stand upright. Pour the coffee into the dish and sprinkle the remaining sugar mixture over the apples.

Bake for 40 minutes. In between, brush the coffee over the apples two or three times during the baking. During the last basting, pour out the juices into a small pan, but continue keeping the apples in the oven.

Boil the juices rapidly until it reduces to a thick syrup. Pour over the apples and bake for about 10 more minutes or until the apples are tender. Serve hot with a spoon of cream or ice-cream.

Apricot Clafoutis

Nothing new, but here's a variation of Clafoutis that I did last week.

I did the same thing twice, first with just half an apricot. There was too much crust and not enough fruits, so I tried by putting more than one apricot, all diced up, into each muffin round.

Making individual servings of clafoutis is useful for bringing them out on, say a picnic, no messiness with cutting the cake up.

I wish spring and summer to come soon. Right now, everyday fruits is always apples, pears, kiwis and oranges. I'm already looking forward to cherries, peaches, apricots and all kinds of berries.

What we've been up to + Pear and chocolate Cake

The spread of desserts here partly explain the absence from blogging. I've been cooking, eating, then more cooking and eating. Above picture courtesy of M, whom we had the pleasure of attending the party celebrating his engagement with LC.

Our contributions include the peachy Charlotte, the tangy Lemon Tart, and Camille's Fondant au Chocolat.

And here's a useful tip, for those who wants to make heart shaped cake like me, but couldn't find a heart shaped tin after visiting some 6 stores in the city.



Besides Camille's fondant, Rémi has also started the first experiment to find the right way to make a volcanic like French melted chocolate cake. Meaning when you use your dessertspoon to break the little warm cake, the chocolate just oozes out like hot lava.

The idea is to bake the chocolate cake for a short time in a hot oven, so that the inside doesn't cook completely and hence it's still moist. We hope to try a few variations of recipes Rémi found on French websites. By the way, the white patches on the cake is my lame attempt at dusting icing sugar on the cake, they are not the results of a mouldy cake.



And finally, the ugliest looking cake of this whole lot, because me and Rémi are too busy with savouring it while it's still piping hot from the oven and only bother to take photo after the second day.

The recipe comes from Christelle Le Ru. First time we made it for the Chinese New Year reunion dinner, it was sooooo good that despite having a 101% full stomach, I went on for a second and possibly third slice. Second time, we couldn't repeat the success but not too bad still. Third time, yum yum. So I've decided to post the recipe, for my bro who have tried the first yummy attempt. The precious highly recommended recipe book was from them afterall.

Pear and Chocolate Cake
Serves 5? I've halved the proportion and the cake last us 3 desserts for 2.

2 eggs
100g sugar
a few drops of vanilla essence
85g melted butter
135g flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
3 sweet pears
100g dark chocolate
sliced almonds

Preheat oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease a loaf tin.

Beat eggs, sugar and vanilla essenee together. Add the melted butter and mix until everything is well combined. Fold the flour and baking powder into the cake mixture.

Peel and cut the pears into slices or cubes. Break the chocolate into small pieces. Stir the pears and chocolate pieces into the cake mixture. Do not worry if you find that there seems to be more pear than cake. The juiciness of the pears gives a moist sweet texture to the cake.

Pour into the tin and scattered sliced almonds over the top. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes. The cake is especially nice when it's warm, with the chocolate partially melted inside.

Orange Duck and Orange Cake

At 18 degrees Celsius, I was told that my rented apartment's internal temperature before switching on heater is warm. It is afterall the standard temperature recommended by the World Health Organisation. The average indoor temperature of a Kiwi home in winter is 16 degrees Celsius. And according to my classmate in French class, she can even blow fog out of her breath in her lounge, if the curtains over the huge floor-to-ceiling windows are not drawn in time.

Despite being a developed country, it is universally acknowledged that Kiwi homes' insulation and heating are third world standards. I read that the country has the worst winter mortality rates in the developed world, and high pneumonia, asthma or whatever rates due to damp cold houses.

If you think that these cold hard truths will make them wake up and improve their home insulation, you're wrong. The standard Kiwi response is to ask complaining foreigners to "toughen up" or otherwise "go home". They sure are a tough species, when I see children wearing shorts and walking barefooted outside, while I am huddled up with scarf, gloves, 3-4 layers of warm clothes and a thick jacket.

Being of tropical breed, I definitely desire to have warmer house. Especially after staying one week in my brother's warm apartment in Sweden when it's minus five outside. So warm that you can walk around barefooted, wear tees and shorts indoor. Well, in my Kiwi home, I wear a jumper even in summer.

So cooking stews and baking will become a favourite winter pastime of mine to warm the house further. Just don't show me the electricity bill.

And yes, I finally found duck meat being sold in a gourmet supermarket. So I was determined to make a French duck dish. My original plan was to cook duck confit, but after discovering the horrendous amount of fats used (basically, you need enough fat to cover your meat), I opted to cook the more modestly oiled "Carnard à l'orange". Dessert came in the form of "Gateau à l'orange", an orange caked soaked in orange juice.

The duck recipe was adjusted from Camille's French classic cookbook. Cake recipe was recited by Rémi's mother from her memory.

Duck of Orange (Canard à l'orange)
Serves 6 (Serves 2)
Note: Original recipe used one whole duck, whereas I used only 2 drumsticks, enough for 2 persons. Quantity quoted in brackets are my very rough guestimations.

1 big duck about 2.5kg (2 duck drumsticks)
20g butter (1 spoonful, you decide how less sinful you want your dish to be)
1 carrot (1 small, more veg is always healthy)
1 onion (1 too, since onions has so many health benefits)
200ml white wine (about 80ml, I just poured randomly actually)
3 oranges (1 orange)
1 glass of chicken stock (less than half a glass)
salt and pepper

Slice onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole or pan, heat butter, add onion and carrot. Brown the duck on all sides. Add salt and pepper.

When the duck is well coloured on all sides, moisten with white wine. Cook for about 10 minutes and pour over the chicken stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of one orange (or half) coarsely. Blanch for 1 minute in boiling water (a step that I skipped conveniently). Squeeze the juice off the orange (or half) and cut the other 2 oranges (or the other half) into thin slices.

After one hour of simmering, pour orange juice, zest and slices into the casserole. Stir gently. Remove cover and turn up the heat to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

My resulting duck drumstick was fat and juicy, and the orange slices so soft it's almost like marmalade.

Serve with rosemary roasted potato cubes, or salad.

Orange Cake (Gateau à l'orange)

The recipe was given from memory, so not very precise. I will try making it again another way for improvements.

4 eggs, yolks and whites separated
120g plain flour + 1 teaspoon baking powder
120g sugar
60g butter, melted
4 oranges, extract zest from 2 oranges, and juice from all 4

Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius. Prepare a cake tin, lined with greaseproof paper (I was too lazy to do that, and almost couldn't unmould my cake)

Beat egg yolks and sugar together. Add flour and melted butter and zests.

Beat egg whites until it becomes stiff and firm (make sure the eggs are at room temperature before beating). I find that after adding the flour, the mixture becomes rather dry. So a tip from Nigella, the celebrity chef who likes to fling her hair is to take a big spoon of the egg white meringue mixture, stir strongly into the flour batter to smoothen the texture. Then fold the rest of the stiff egg whites gently.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden brown and a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean.

Pour orange juice onto the cake, let it soak through. You may like to unmould the cake first.

Serve cold.

Crumble of Lemon Curd

The first dish that Rémi tried to impress me with was homemade lemon curd. Or rather, a 2-week old lemon curd on bread. Errr...well, I can say that I wasn't too impressed. Moreover, it was a tad too sour for me.

Well, if he had known or seen this Lemon Curd Crumble recipe, he would have scored more points then.

The recipe came from the Crumble cookbook by Martine Lizambard, published by Solar Editions. I had decided to made it as I had some leftover crumbles from making an apple crumble.

Sometimes, one dish lead to another. From the first apple crumble late last week, we went on to have a second one, and now the lemon curd crumble. But because of a mistake I made when mixing cream and eggs together, I was left with an extra portion of cream and eggs mixture. So I made a quiche out of that earlier today. This will leave me with extra tart dough, so the apple crumble misjudgment is going to end with a pear tart tonight.

Lemon Curd Crumble (Crumble de Citron)
Serves 4 (I've divided the quantity, wanting to make just 2 cups, but still having enough lemon curd for 4 small ramekins)

100ml lemon juice (from about 2 lemons)
70g sugar
2 teaspoon cornflour
2 eggs
100ml liquid cream
1 branch of lemon verbena (it's something new to me, I tried replacing this with mint leaves)
Butter for greasing the ramekins

Crumble
60g flour
35g butter
40g sugar

According to the recipe, you may replace cream with whole milk yoghurt or white cheese. But I stuck to the cream.

Beat the cold cream with a hand beater until it becomes creamy (do not overbeat until it becomes chantilly cream). Mix the eggs in.

Boil the lemon juice with sugar for 2-3 minutes until sugar dissolves. Remove from heat and add the verbena leaves. Cover and let the leaves infuse for a while. I had used 6 small mint leaves, but probably didn't use enough to make much of an impression. Anyway, discard the leaves and let the lemon syrup cool down.

Mix the lemon syrup with cornflour. Add the cream and egg mixture to it. Cook the mixture over low heat (or bain marie), stirring non-stop until it thickens. It took quite a while for the mixture to thicken (until it almost become like lemon curd), but do not be tempted to increase the heat, as you will end up with scramble eggs.

Preheat the oven to 160 degrees Celsius. Grease 4 ramekins and pour the lemon curd mixture into it.

Prepare the crumble. Using your fingertips, rub the cold butter into the flour until it resembles crumbles. Add sugar and mix well.

Bake the lemon mixture for 15 minutes, or more, until you see the surface browning and solidifying. Sprinkle the crumbles very gently on the surface and return to over for another 15-20 minutes, until the crumbles are golden brown.

Serve cold or just warm.

The beautiful Charlotte

With a name as beautiful as its taste, it is still debatable how this classic French moulded dessert or its name come about.

Besides sponge biscuits, bread, sponge bread or biscuits are also used to line the mould, which is then filled with a fruits and whipped cream or custard.

The below Charlotte recipe was done with canned peach, making it very straightforward to make. Just make sure you give yourself plenty of time to set in the fridge.

Recipe source: unknown. It was a recipe Rémi found on some French website long ago and untraceable.


Charlotte with canned peach
serves 4-6

2 packets of sponge fingers biscuits
1 big can of peaches in syrup
250ml fresh cream
pinch of sugar (icing or castor)
pinch of salt
a few drops of vanilla essence

Before starting to whip fresh cream, leave the mixing bowl in freezer for 15 minutes. The fresh cream has to be cold (if you're using packet long-life cream, put into fridge an hour earlier).

Whip the cream until thick. Add the sugar, salt and vanilla essence.

To achieve the above look, you need to have a loose-based round baking tin. Although I didn't think of that when I made it yesterday, place the ring of the tin onto a serving dish.

Next is to start lining the tin with sponge fingers. Each time you do that, dip the biscuit BRIEFLY in the peach syrup.

Cut one end of the sponge fingers, and place them cut-end down to line round side of the tin. Use the leftover pieces and more biscuits if needed to line the bottom until the bottom is tightly packed.

Spread a generous layer of whipped cream over the sponge fingers base. Follow by a layer of sliced peaches. And then follow by another layer of sponge fingers (remember to dip in syrup first).

Top with another layer of whipped cream. And then cover with diced peaches.

Refrigerate for 4-6 hours before serving.

My charlotte didn't collapse when I remove the ring around it. If yours do, tie up with a thick ribbon, that should do the trick in keeping the biscuits in place.

Tips:
1. A big jelly mould can be used instead of ring tin. In this case, end the last layer with the sponge finger biscuits, cover with a plate, and unmould be inverting it.
2. Fruits like strawberries can be used in place of canned peach. In this case, make your own sweet syrup. Like making a syrup out of strawberry jam.
3. Custard can be used in place of whipped cream, though we've never tried that.

Tarte Tatin and ways to break your ceramic tart tin

We love tarts. So you can imagine us having tart tins of varying sizes. And the white ceramic ones are our favourite. They look nicer and tolerate the blade of the knife better.

Well, we are also old enough to know that they are fragile and break into a thousand pieces if we smash them on the floor. Still, in the last 6 months, we managed to break 3 of them. That's at a rate of one every 2 months!

Here's our three suggested ways to break your ceramic tart tin, without smashing it into a thousand pieces. If you do it correctly, it will just crack and break into 2 or 3 parts:

1. After unmoulding your tart straight from the oven, run the still very hot tin under cold water.

2. Put empty tin in a hot oven until it cracks.

3. Use the tin as a cooking pan and put it in direct contact with heat on the stove.


Despite having just mourned for our last broken tin, we still enjoyed the Tarte Tatin done by Rémi today. It is an upside down apple tart, a truly classic French dessert. Surprisingly, Camille's classic French cookbook doesn't have the recipe, so Rémi got the recipe from this website.

According to him, it's easy. Just don't use the ceramic tart tin to cook the caramel on the fire. And be generous with the amount of apple.

To serve, sprinkle cinnamon powder around the plate and add a scoop of vanilla ice cream. But the truly purist way of eating it is to add nothing to it.

Confiture d'abricots

Our jam making experiment continues...

Being penny-wise when it comes to jam-making, Rémi calculated that the cost of making 4 bottles of jam is cheaper than what we paid for 1 bottle.

Making your own jam can be extremely mind blowing. May even be revolting to the health conscious, when right in front of your eyes, you see the jam-maker pouring one whole pack of sugar into the pan, which were to later concentrate into four tiny bottles. So it's more than being penny-wise to spread your jam as thinly as possible.

While Rémi may disagree with me, as he still considers his strawberry jam experiment a success, I firmly believe that his apricot jam was much much better than the strawberry one. In fact, it's as good, or even better than what you can find on supermarket shelves. So if you're going to make jam for the first time, I reckon making apricot jam is a safer guarantee of success, than strawberry. We don't know about other fruits until we try them.

The recipe comes from Rémi's maman.

Apricot Jam (Confiture d'abricots)
Makes approx. four 300ml bottles

1 kg apricots
750g sugar
125ml water

Remove the pits from the apricots. Cut into quarter slices.

Dissolve sugar in water and simmer for 10 minutes over medium heat.

Add the apricot slices and continue to simmer for about 30 minutes or until the syrup has thickened and mixture has set. To check, spoon some jam onto a cold plate, if it moves very little, it is done.

Pour immediately into clean, sterilised bottles. Seal immediately and invert the jar to cool down. Check if seal is airtight by pressing the centre. If it flexes, refrigerate and use like any opened jam you buy.

Peaches Poached in Red Wine

If you have leftover red wine that's too good to throw away, but too bad to drink, the rule is to keep it.

You can always trust the French to find a happy solution to their excess, undrinkable wine. They come up with this home device called a vinaigrier, a big clay pot where they pour their unwanted wine from the top and drains good wine vinegar through a tap at the bottom. I would imagine it takes more than the blink of an eye to ferment wine into vinegar, but the idea is there.

Anyway, I do not possess a vinaigrier, but I do always keep a bottle of red and a bottle of white for cooking. Cheap one that is.

And yesterday, being the first day of Chinese New Year, I was determined to have a nice dinner, after sorely missing the festive tradition of feasting the night before. To digress more than a bit, we had wanted to fish for abalone and sea urchin on Sunday but luck wasn't with us. Ended up buying a pack of fresh sea urchins at the supermarket. It tasted wonderful with just bread and butter, but come on, it's New Year's eve which called for a better feast beyond bread and butter. So we followed a random recipe found on internet, cooked pasta with white wine sauce and sea urchins. It totally ruined the strong, delectable taste of the sea urchin and left me extremely unsatisfied.

So I was determined to have a good dinner last night. Nothing fancy, just some French style 'garlicy' roast lamb from Camille and Jamie's rosemary crispy baked potatoes, which made me happy to want to try again and post the recipe next time. And there must be a nice conclusion to the dinner.

Camille came to the rescue once again. Strangely, this cookbook in French was a present for Rémi, but I seem to be using it more than ever. Frequent enough to understand enough of the ingredients list before I tediously type the steps of suitable recipes on google translate.

This recipe is a must try, because it's easy and amazingly wonderful. A scoop of vanilla ice-cream may bring you to the moon, but as we didn't have any last night, we're still on earth today.

Peaches Poached in Red Wine (Soupe de Péches au Vin Rouge)
Serves two

2 ripe peaches (Idea is 1 big peach per person, so it's straight forward to adjust the quantity)
2 tablespoons sugar (you may like to reduce your sugarly sins here)

120ml red wine
Another 4 teaspoons of sugar (or 4 sugar cubes)
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon powder or 1/4 cinnamon stick

Peel the skin off the peaches and remove the pits. Cut into halves or quarters. Coat the peaches with the big spoons of sugar. Leave in a cool place for an hour.

After an hour or so, you would see a sweet syrup forming around the peach slices. This peachy syrup is crucial in enhancing the taste of the red wine syrup, so make sure you don't skip the first step.

Then, boil the red wine and the 4 teaspoons of sugar and cinnamon for 10 minutes over low heat. Add the peach slices and the sweet peachy syrup into the wine syrup. Continue poaching for about 15 minutes. The wine syrup should have reduced by about half.

When it's done, leave to cool in fridge before serving. Wonderful.

It should be possible to replace peach with pear.

Baba au Rum without Rum

Contrary to its name, this cake is not an Arabic cake invented by Ali Baba. Neither is it a Peranakan cake (early Chinese settlers in the Malay peninsular who intermarried with locals and their male offsprings are known as Babas).

As history goes, the Baba Rum cake is linked to this deposed Polish king in France. In exile in Lorraine, he found the Kugelhopf (a cake roughly similar to the baba and common in Alsace-Lorraine) too dry for his liking and soaked it in rum. Delighted with the resulting taste, he named it after Ali Baba. Or at least, this is one version of the origins of the cake.

Traditionally, the cake is made using yeast as the rising agent, but this recipe that I had from Rémi's mom can be substituted using baking powder, which makes it more manageable. In order for children to enjoy the cake without breaking the alcohol age limit, I simply omitted rum in the sugar syrup, and had in place a sweet plum cum coffee syrup from my coffee encyclopedia cookbook.

Baba au Rum without rum
serves six

125g flour
60g sugar
4 eggs, whites separated, brought to room temperature
1 tablespoon milk
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 hazelnut size of butter (as translated from the French recipe)

Syrup
4 plums, stoned and thickly sliced
100g sugar
120ml water
120ml coffee

Beat egg yolks and sugar together until the mixture becomes pale yellow in colour. Add milk, flour and baking powder.

Preheat oven at 160 degrees Celsius.

Beat egg whites until firm and stiff. If the eggs come from the fridge, make sure to bring them to room temperature before making the meringue.

Fold the egg white mixture into the sugar and yolk mixture. I found this part tricky and used the electric beater, but instead causing the resulting cake texture to be denser than desired. As the sugar and yolk mixture is very thick, while the egg white mixture is very delicate, a more proper way is to scoop 1 or 2 spoons of meringue and stir strongly into the yolk mixture, so that the texture becomes smoother. After that, fold the rest of the meringue gently into the yolk mixture.

Butter the ring cake mould generously.

Pour cake mixture into the cake mould and bake for about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, prepare the syrup. Melt 25g sugar in water. Add the plums and cook over low heat until the plums are almost tender. Remove plums and add the remaining sugar and coffee to the pan. Heat until sugar are dissolved but do not boil.

When the baba cake is cooked, leave to cool for 5 minutes. Then dunk the cake in the warm syrup until well soaked. Let it drip dry on a wire rack or whatever.

To serve, fill the middle with fruits, like the plums and topped with cherries. Spoon extra syrup over the cake and serve with Chantilly cream or plain yoghurt.

As seen from the picture on left (cake done by Rémi's mom), after soaking the cake with sweet syrup, you could also pour Chantilly cream over the whole cake and fill the inside with strawberries and raspberries. This is the expert version.

Tips:
It is also possible to use canned peach or apricot for this cake, and use the syrup straight from the can.

Strawberry Conserves

I imagine that the commercial jam market in France is very small. Even though it has a population of 61 million, and most of these 61 million Frenchies probably have jam on toast for their breakfast everyday.

Why do I imagine so? Because French grany and maman (French for grandmother and mother) make their own jams, jars and jars of them. And they do jam exchange within the family, grany to maman, and maman with aunts for variety of flavours. And the mamans will in turn distribute these lovingly made jams to their city dwelling children. So who needs to buy jam in this country? Especially when homemade jams come with deliciously chunky pieces of real fruits!

(Well, there is still a commercial jam market in France, and one popular brand is called "Bonne Maman", translated into Good Mother. This brand of jam contains chunky fruit pieces almost like mom's. It's sold in Singapore supermarkets too, and no surprise that we've tried almost all the flavours.)

When making jam, French mamans buy big quantities of fruits. You can trust them on knowing where to buy seasonal fruits cheaply in bulk. And they are usually too ripe to be eaten on its own but perfect for jam-making, which is why they are cheaper too.

Being well into the fruity season in New Zealand, we reckon it is time to try our hands in jam making. Especially after finding 1kg of strawberries selling cheap at the Sunday market.

Our jam recipe comes from, who else, but Rémi's maman. While we reproduce the trusty recipe she has been using here, we still have to check with her on how to improve. Our jam looks more like strawberry preserves -- very liquid, with whole strawberries floating in the thickened liquid. But it's perfect with plain yoghurt. To spread on toast, just smash the extremely soft strawberries over it.

A few words on sterilising the jam jars. Put clean jars into boiling water for 10 minutes. Let them drip dry. Then pour the hot jam into the jars, cover tightly immediately and invert right away. The steam from the hot jam is supposed to kill bacteria in the remaining pocket of air. And the expanding heated air will make the jar air tight. If you suspect that air has sneaked in, then store in fridge and use immediately. Otherwise, the preserved jam can keep for a long time in your store cupboard.

Strawberry Conserve/Jam

2 kg strawberry
1.5kg sugar
250ml water

Wash strawberries and carefully remove the stalk.

Put them in a large pan with water. Cook over low heat for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Add the sugar and stir to mix evenly and cook 25 minutes. When it's done, store into jam jars.

Some after thoughts:
1. Traditional recipes used by mamans are always amazingly brief in details. We may have missed out the obvious step, which is to cut the strawberries into chunky pieces first (can't really blame us, we had very small strawberries, and Rémi still insists that keeping strawberries whole are better).
2. Strawberries are known to not set well. So some recipes call for adding a spoon of pectin-rich fruit (raspberry, apple, black currant, gooseberry) jam into the conserve mixture to help the gelling)

Fast and easy Cherry Clafoutis

Just back from a fulfilling, beautiful trip to the South Island of New Zealand. One of the highlights of this two-week trip is to indulge ourselves with berries and cherries.

On our road trip around Golden Bay, Nelson and Marlborough region, we were lucky to pass by many fruit farms. Interestingly, most of these farms operate by honesty box. Their produce are kept in a fridge in a little kind of "outpost". You just help yourself and is expected to pay honestly. We had to empty out our coin purse to get our hand on the berries.

While we didn't manage to try all the berries, I really enjoyed the blackberries and boysenberries. Best of all were the chilled cherries, which were huge and very sweet. We had more than 2 kilos of cherries, including the kilo that we brought back to Wellington.

Originally, we thought of making cherry jam, but since we have also bought lots of homemade jam and honey during this trip, we opted to make a Cherry Clafoutis, from a recipe from Camille.

Clafoutis is a custard-like French dessert, made out of a pancake-like batter, and baked with cherries. It's so fast to make that Rémi's mother usually prepares it within 10 minutes. But instead of cherries, she uses this small red berry called griotte. It's sour, so the sweet custard is supposed to neutralise the sour taste.

Cherry Clafoutis
Serves 2-3

300g black cherries (or more, to fill up the tin)
100g flour
50g sugar
250ml milk
50g butter
pinch of salt

Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius.

Melt butter with milk over low heat.

In a bowl, mix sugar, flour and salt and pour the hot milk gradually to prevent lumps from forming. The dough should have a creamy consistency.

Butter a tin generously (we use our approximately 20cm diameter ceramics tart tin). Spread the cherries around the tin (be as generous as you can). Some people prefer to remove the pits of the cherries, while some would argue that the pits release a wonderful flavour when cooked. Whatever it is, we leave the pits as they are and just spit them out as we eat the cake.

Pour the batter mixture into the tin and bake for 40 minutes.

Note that fruits like apricot, berries, plums can be used in place of cherries.

Strawberry Tart with Crème Pâtissière

Strawberry season certainly rocks. With this deliciously seductive fruit in season in New Zealand now, we can't resist buying one pack after another, especially when they look so lusciously sweet and affordable. And of course, we have no more excuse not to make some strawberry dessert.

In Singapore, strawberries are not only pricey, they are also seldom sweet, being all imported and probably harvested before they are ready to be eaten to endure the long journey.

Originally torn between making a Strawberry Tart or a Strawberry Charlotte, Rémi couldn't wait to sink his mouth into his dessert and opted to make a tart (you need to chill a charlotte for at least a few hours).

French Pastry Cream (Crème Pâtissière) is used to line the sweet tart. To Rémi, the difference between a good pastry and a lousy pastry can be judged by the amount of cream used in the tart. Stingy pastry makers who are out to cut cost tend to use more cream than fruits.

Our cream recipe comes from Camille's classic French cookbook again. In her dessert section, she carries several types of dessert cream and sauces, including Crème Chantilly, Crème Anglaise, Coulis de Fruits Rouges, Sauce au Chocolat and Sauce au Caramel au Beurre Salé. Well, we shall see if we will try each and everyone of them.

French Pastry Cream (Crème Pâtissière)
makes slightly more than one tart

1 egg plus 1 egg yolk
15g flour
15g corn flour
65g sugar
25ml milk
vanilla essence

Bring milk with vanilla essence to boil, and let it stand for 10 minutes.

Whip the egg and yolk with the sugar until it has double in size and paled in colour. Then add the flour and corn flour, and add the warm milk gradually while continuing to whisk.

Put back onto fire and let the mixture thickened while beating continuously and strongly so that the cream does not stick to the bottom of the pot. Remove from heat and continue to whisk for 1 minute.


Strawberry Tart
Serves 4

1 sweet pastry dough (pâte sucrée)
enough strawberries to pack the size of your tart
strawberry jam

Make the sweet tart dough. Bake at preheated oven at 200C for about 10 minutes. Allow to cool.

Make one portion of crème pâtissière. Spread on the cooked tart. Halved the strawberries and line them on top of the cream.

Dilute the jam lightly with some water and use it as a glaze over the strawberries. Chill before serving.

Getting Apple Tart right

For the past few years, finding the key steps to making the simple Apple Tart seems as elusive as understanding a woman having PMS. We tried so many times with different types of apples, we tried pre-cooking the tart dough. We also consulted at least two French mothers who are good at it (this being a very traditional, typically French dessert), and who in turn told us to simply put sliced apples on top of the raw dough and bake it. To them, it's as straightforward as frying an omelette, there's just no science behind it to help you get it right.

Well, out of the say 6-10 times we made the apple tart, we probably only got it right 1-2 times. Either the tart base wasn't cooked well enough, or the apples too dried out, or both. And we couldn't understand why it was successful on those rare occasions. Luck? Maybe.

Last night, we may have found the answer. That is to squeeze as much apples as you could into the tart, so that they will ooze out just enough juices for the perfect apple tart. We had been too stingy with apples before, perhaps.

Apple Tart
1 tart dough (Pâte brisée)
at least 4 apples
sugar
cinnamon powder

Preheat oven at 180C.

Roll out tart dough. Line on a prepared tart tin. Spread apple slices onto the tart, packing as tightly as possible, and into nice patterns if you like.

Drizzle sugar (amount according to how much of a sweet tooth you are) and sprinkle cinnamon powder over.

Bake for about 30 minutes or until golden brown.