Ginger brûlée tarts

Photo credit: The Quiltmaker

The head notes to this recipe in Bourke Street Bakery cookbook says these tarts, especially their fillings,  are one of the most challenging items in the book, so how could I resist? The challenges I faced were more to do with locating my tiny loose-bottomed tart tins (I found two, with several extra bases), remembering to replenish my stocks of cinnamon quills and achieving an evenly browned rather than spotted blackened crust with my blowtorch. 

Given the lack of tart tins (the recipe provided quantities for 20), and the warning about their difficulty, I decided to treat this as a practice attempt and made only four. I also used leftover sweet shortcrust pastry rather than making the recipe in the book, which I’ll do for the real thing.

They were fabulous, even with their charred edges and acrid sugar. I do love a good masala chai, and these were inspired by chai on the author’s travels through the Himalayas.

 Adapted from the larger quantity in Bourke Street Bakery, pp264–5

Note: don’t get up the morning of a dinner party expecting to whip these up for dessert! They need to be started two days ahead, or you might get away with one if you skimp on either or both the infusing and custard-chilling.

145mL pouring cream

2cm piece of ginger, finely sliced

1 cardamom pod, bruised

½ cinnamon stick

2 egg yolks

20g caster sugar, plus more for dredging and burning later

small chunk sweet shortcrust pastry, enough for lining 4 8cm tart tins

chopped pistachios for decorating

Heat the cream with the ginger, cardamom and cinnamon stick until it comes to the boil. Pour into a container, cover and refrigerate overnight.

Reheat to simmering point, then set aside.

Whisk egg yolks, then add sugar and keep whisking until the sugar has dissolved. Strain the spices out of the warmed cream, which is then whisked with the yolks and sugar to combine. Put the bowl over a saucepan of simmering water (which mustn’t touch the base of the bowl), and keep whisking until your arm protests bitterly and the mixture is thick enough for tracks to be left in the wake of the whisk. 

This’ll be the most boring ten minutes of your life, so keep a companion handy to talk to and don’t be tempted to leave the whisking for even a few seconds. It’s okay to quickly change arms, but that’s all. Take the bowl off the heat and keep whisking for another minute or two to take some of the heat out of the mixture. Over the next hour, keep whisking every ten minutes until the mixture is totally cool. Press cling wrap to the surface to prevent a skin forming, and refrigerate overnight to set.

Line tart tins, freeze for 20 minutes, then blind bake at 200C for 20–25 minutes until golden. Allow to cool. Pipe the chilled custard into them, slightly overfilling, then scrape the custard flush with the top of the tart shell with a palette knife. Set in the fridge for 4 hours.

Sprinkle a teaspoon of caster sugar over the top of each tart and caramelise it with a blowtorch, somehow not blackening the tart crust edges as you do so. My caster sugar kept blowing itself into little balls that then became black blobs, but here and there were patches of perfect goldenness like an encouragement. Sprinkle a few pistachio fragments on top to serve, which I didn’t. Sprinkle pistachios, that is; I did serve, if marching into the Quiltmaker’s office and plonking it before her with a demand to sample and assess counts as serving. I think it does, and she didn’t seem to mind – she kindly took a photo in order to tweet about it, which I am now stealing as I neglected to take one of the finished item, as I am wont to do. Forget to take final pic, that is. And steal those of others to make up for my neglectfulness. But I consider the making of these tarts over several days penance enough.

So I shall make these again, probably in a quantity of ten, and serve with ice-cream. What ice-cream, I don’t know. Maybe a raspberry, as different enough to the custard and pretty besides, both advantages over a plain vanilla.

Oat and barberry biscuits

I haven’t made Anzac biscuits since Year Eight. These have tiny sour-sharp barberries to tart them up a bit – and are the first thing to make from the promising Bourke Street Bakery cookbook before I attempt its sourdough starters and croissants and ginger crème brûlée.

Adapted from Bourke Street Bakery p304

165g rolled oats

220g plain flour

100g desiccated coconut

210g brown sugar

50g dried barberries

45 mL boiling water

185g unsalted butter

60g golden syrup

1 ½ teaspoons bicarb soda

60 mL water

Preheat oven to 170C. Combine barberries, boiling water and 35g of the sugar in a bowl.

Combine oats, flour, coconut and the remaining 175g of the sugar in a bowl and mix.

Put the butter and golden syrup in a small saucepan over low heat and stir until the butter has melted. Add the barberries and sugar mixture. Combine the bicarb and water in a cup and add to the pan. While it’s still foaming, add to the dry ingredients and mix well. At this point the barberries look so shiny and rubylike and somehow evil against that bland beige Anzac lumpiness.

The recipe says to take 3 tablespoons of the mixture at a time to roll into balls, which would yield a total of 12 huge biscuits – I took much smaller-sized scoops and formed walnut-sized balls, which I pressed lightly with a fork rather than pressing to be very flat with a spatula as advised. They need to be placed far apart to allow for spreading – I could bake only 9 at a time – and baked for 15–20 minutes.

After cooling on the trays, mine were that softer, chewier end of the Anzac spectrum than the thin crisp version in the BSB’s photo. Moreish, if inelegant, and the barberries did give it a whole new dimension.