Chocolate Whisky-Raisin Cake

Dorie Greenspan relates in Baking how she quickly grew bored in her first job with making the same whisky-raisin cake every day, and tried out an Armagnac and prune version, which got her sacked. She offers this as the main recipe, but also gives the original, and as I am never without scotch in the house, but frequently without Armagnac, the original Simone Beck scotch-and-raisin it was.

The occasion was The Guitar Teacher’s birthday. He very often watches poker-faced as rich chocolate cakes go intact out the door and and off to my work, so I thought it only fair to throw nearly 300 grams of chocolate at him for once. And we needed the alcohol to settle our nerves, frayed as they are by sharing a house with a needy Siamese creeping miserably around in an Elizabethan collar.*

Mostly metricised version of Dorie Greenspan's Baking, pp279–81

¼ cup raisins and ¼ cup whisky combined in a jar to steep for at least 3 hours or up to a day in advance

80g pecans or walnuts, finely ground in a food processor

40g plain flour

¼ teaspoon salt

200g bittersweet chocolate callets, or chopped

120g unsalted butter

3 eggs, separated

150g sugar

Line and grease a 20cm springform tin. Preheat oven to 190C. Whisk together the ground nuts, flour and salt.

Melt chocolate, butter and 3 tablespoons water in the microwave and allow to cool while getting on with the rest.

Beat together the egg yolks and sugar until thick and pale; add with a spatula the melted chocolate, flours and raisons along with their whisky. Set aside and whisk the whites until stiff, folding into the chocolate batter until just incorporated and pouring into the tin. Bake for about half an hour or until a knife withdraws fairly cleanly – not too wet, not too dry is the key here. 

Ganache:

85g bittersweet chocolate

3 tablespoons icing sugar (sift it – I wish I had)

50g unsalted butter, room temperature

Melt in microwave (or bain marie) and stir in the sugar then butter to form a smooth glaze. Either pour the warm glaze over the top and sides of the cooled cake, or refrigerate just to slightly set for a thicker and more controllable consistency.

*In a nutshell: a cup of freshly poured tea steeping on the bench plus a bad cat who knows better jumping up to unwittingly encounter it plus three weeks, three vet visits and three courses of antibiotics later said cat preferring to scour the fearful furless burn wound with her tongue all day long instead of letting it heal.

Gingerful biscotti

It’s nearly Xmas, which I am very bah-humbuggy about, but I admit that it allows great scope for the foodish aspect of life. I’m not sure why ginger-related things are very often also Xmas-related, but as I’ve had a bag of crystallised ginger taking up precious cupboard space for some months, I’m prepared to take this opportunity to use it up as a nod towards the season. After all, I like ginger, and I’m looking for recipes that take it beyond a spoonful of bland dry ground stuff and into the chewier, sharper crystallised realm.

I had the idea that chocolate and ginger would play well together, which led me on a search for ginger brownies. Dorie Greenspan has Ginger-Jazzed Brownies in Baking, but they only have ground and raw in them – appealing, but not of much relief to my cupboard-space issue, so I’ll do those another day. I was amazed that I found so few brownie recipes involving crystallised ginger – there were only a couple on obscure websites such as this one, and packet mix was involved. So I imposed ginger on a basic good brownie recipe as a replacement for walnuts. Since I’m not recommending it to anyone, I’m not even recounting the method here. And I didn’t take any photos – the bits of translucent golden ginger failed to stand up to the dark chocolate brownie in cross-section.

I can’t quite figure out why it wasn’t on the money. Was the chewy texture of the ginger not enough of a contrast to the fudginess of the brownie? Did the ginger and the chocolate remain two separate parts in terms of taste that didn’t form a pleasing whole? (The poor Saucemaker would concur with this – she was nibbling on her piece and getting along with it okay until she came to an unexpected bit of ginger and was deeply disconcerted.) I love bits of crystallised ginger enrobed in dark chocolate and sold in fancy shops, but clearly this doesn’t translate to a cakier context.

Anyway, so I moved on to Maida Heatter, whose Gingerful Biscotti (Maida Heatter's Brand-New Book of Great Cookies, p20) are the Xmas favourites of many on Egullet and Chowhound. These were more like it. Pleasantly bitey with the extra kick of white pepper; not overly sweet, not overly rich or luxurious, but that’s probably all for the best and allows for the less-guilty grabbing of handfuls.

120g crystallised ginger

200g raw almonds

375g plain flour

3/4 teaspoon bicarb soda

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 1/4 teaspoons freshly ground white pepper

1 teaspoon ground ginger

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon ground mustard powder

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

100g sugar

3 eggs

1/2 cup honey

Cut up ginger into bits the size of peas; set aside. (Maida comments rather acidly and uncharacteristically that ‘Yes, cutting ginger is boring.’ This seemed curious, as I can think of many tasks I find much more boring and onerous than spending about 30 seconds chopping up soft ginger.)

Toast the almonds in the oven at about 180C oven for 15 minutes, until lightly coloured, shaking once during toasting. Don’t forget about them, as I almost always do in an out-of-sight-out-of-mind fashion until the reek of charring almonds breaks through my haze of preoccupation. Even slightly burnt almonds taste ghastly, second only to hazelnuts, which one often thinks one has escaped with as one rubs off their burnt skins and exposes the pale nut beneath – but alas, they burn to acridness deep in their hollow middles. Anyway, set your perfectly toasted almonds aside to cool.

Into the Kitchen Aid bowl sift the flour, bicarb soda, baking powder, salt, pepper, ground ginger, cinnamon, mustard, cloves and sugar, and beat together. Stir in the crystallised ginger, then the almonds. Separately beat the eggs with a fork and add the honey, then add to the dry ingredients. Stir until the dry ingredients are completely moistened.

Place two 40cm lengths of cling wrap on a work surface and form two strips of dough down the middle of each. Spoon half of the dough by heaping tablespoonfuls in the middle – down the length – of each piece of plastic wrap, to form strips about 30cm long. Flatten the tops slightly by wetting a large spoon into water and pressing down on the dough with its back.

Wrap the dough, and press on the plastic wrap to smooth and shape it into an even strip about 35cm long, 5cm wide and 1.5cm thick. Place the wrapped strips strips of dough in the freezer for at least an hour or until firm enough to unwrap (or as much longer as you wish, like days and days until the craziness abates long enough to allow you to be home and available to the oven for a few hours while frantically tidying the worksite midden that was once your house because people are coming over. By the way, this is currently and seemingly eternally the outside of said house).

To bake, adjust two racks to divide the oven into thirds and preheat oven to 160C. Line two large baking trays with silicon liners or baking paper, and place the unwrapped strips diagonally across them, or however they fit. If your trays are big enough you might be able to lay the two strips side by side on only the one, but remember they’ll spread a bit. Bake for 50 minutes, reversing the trays top to bottom and front to back once during the baking to ensure even baking. They’ll turn quite dark.

Reduce the temperature to 150C and remove the tray/s from the oven. Although hot, carefully and gently peel the paper away from the backs of the strips and place them on a large cutting board. Slice into 1cm strips with a serrated knife while they’re still hot, using a tea-towel to save your steadying hand if you like. Slice on an angle; the sharper the angle, the longer the cookies, and the more difficult it will be to slice them very thin without the ends breaking away – happy days. At least this makes a lot, though: 70-something.

Place the slices on a cut side down on the trays and bake for about 25 minutes until the cut side is golden. Reverse the sheets top to bottom and front to back once during baking. Bake just until dry. (You have to cool one to know if it’s crisp.)

When done, cool and then store in an airtight container. They’ll keep for weeks. Pretty please, either dunk them or prepare to face your dentist – they’re seriously as hard as rocks, and I can’t imagine why they never come with a warning in recipe books. As a long-time bruxist who must now wear a mouthguard (I know, hawt) to bed for the rest of my days or at least until I get dentures, I’ve got sensitive incisors with edges described by my dentist as ‘like glass’, but still.

Nectarine frangipane tart

Too easy for words, not least with the pastry already made and frozen. I’m not sure who to attribute this to – I didn’t consult a book, but I wanted to put nectarines with amaretto. I like amaretto with just about anything, but especially nectarines. The tart formed itself around this from half-remembered bits and pieces, such as the cream from Dorie’s Chocolate Amaretto Torte.

4 nectarines, stoned and quartered

¼ cup sugar

a handful of amaretti biscuits, roughly crushed

splash of Amaretto

Combine in a bowl and set aside.

Allow the pastry to defrost at room temperature for about three hours. I left mine a bit long to roll out without sticking to everything, and it had to be sort of Play-Doughed into place in the tin. I then refrigerated it for half an hour before blind baking at 190C for about 20 minutes, for another ten without the beads, and then cooled it slightly. Meanwhile, on with the frangipane, which can be used for a multitude of tarts constructed along this line: pears, berries, apples, anything juicy best kept separate from the pastry base.

40g unsalted butter

50g sugar

50g almond meal

1 tablespoon plain flour

1 egg

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

pinch salt

Beat the butter into pale submission, add the sugar for a bit more beating, then mix in the rest of the ingredients. 

Spread this over the base, then overlap the nectarine quarters – this could equally be carefully arranged apple slices, or roughly strewn raspberries. For these amaretto-doused nectarines, I added even more freshly crushed amaretti biscuits I had handy.

Bake for about 45 minutes until the frangipane is golden and puffed up around the nectarines.

Whip about a cup of pouring cream with ¼ cup icing sugar, adding a splash of amaretto to taste or ¼ teaspoon almond extract for more intensity. 

A-marketing and a-pickling and a-quiche-making

I hadn’t been to the Victoria Market for a while, but when E mentioned the sudden appearance of mangos about town I was down there like a shot. And what a transformation had taken place! There were verily mangoes, for like a dollar each, but also huge smooth eggplants at $2 a kilo instead of the shrivelled seedy $7/kilo offerings of a few weeks ago. Lebanese cucumbers were $1.50/kg, and so were delicate little zucchinis. I also loaded up with $1 strawberries, $5/kg swiss mushrooms, $1 bunches of baby asparagus, $2 silverbeet and loads of other stuff, and was back on the train to Parliament without even needing to go to the bank. Amazing what can be managed when spring has sprung and the Meat Hall and Deli is left for another more prosperous week – one that hasn’t seen expenditure on tax bills and flights to Europe, don’t you know. (It’s the one week of the year I can sound this sick-makingly yuppieish, and I’m trying it on for size.)

So because all this largesse wouldn’t fit into my narrow fridge, I had to think like a frugal pre-war housewife and preserve it and generally use it up some other way. I’ve never pickled anything before, but Alida Irwin’s all over it and has been known to ask for Fowler's Vacola sealing rings for Xmas. And so, unlike a pre-war housewife, I googled cucumber pickles and zucchini pickles and was rewarded with the Zuni Café’s zucchini. No sterilising, too easy with the food processor slicing attachment, and at last an opportunity to get out the Japanese pickle press.

The small pickle press could barely handle half a kilo of zucchini...

...but lo, it gave up its juices and reduced by half.

And then I made Dr Ben’s Cucumber Kimchi, scaling it down to three cucumbers.

 To use up some ingredients to eat sooner, I took a leaf out of Martha Stewart’s website, and another out of Dorie Greenspan’s Around My French Table, which I’ve done before, and sort of made up a leek and asparagus quiche. For the pastry case, I followed Martha Stewart’s Favourite Pie Crust just because it was there, with the addition of 15 minutes’ blind-baking in a 180C oven.

 a bit of butter

a clove or two of garlic, finely chopped

1 large leek or 2 small, sliced

2 bunches asparagus, sliced into 2cm bits

4 eggs

a cup of milk and cream, proportions as desired – I went half & half, then to the gym

2 tablespoons seedy mustard

some thyme leaves

Saute garlic in the butter until fragrant, add the leeks for a few minutes, then the asparagus for about 8 minutes until reaching tenderness but still bright green. Allow to cool slightly before adding to the waiting blind-baked pastry case.

Briefly whisk together with a fork the eggs, mustard, thyme, and milk/cream, and salt and pepper. Pour over the leek and asparagus, and put in the still-on 180C oven for about an hour or until it’s golden on top and only moves slightly when jiggled.

Meanwhile, the rest is earmarked for later – there will be Ottolenghi’s Mango Soba Noodles with Aubergine and Mango, a recipe beloved of the Quiltmaker, and Roasted Cauliflower with Dill from the same book, Plenty, and spanakopita, and an actual cooked breakfast of mushroom and spinach. And by Cup Day it will all be gone.

Korova Sablés

These elegant, rich choc-chip slice-and-bakes are also known as World Peace Cookies in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking, but I prefer Korova Sablés, as they’re named at Pierre Hermé’s in Paris and in Dorie’s little earlier cookbook, Paris Sweets. Anything that touches on A Clockwork Orange is fine by me, my droogs, and these are good – in fact, you’ll be out of your rasoodocks with radosty to have these in your rookers, along with a nice moloko or chai.

175g plain flour

30g dutch-process cocoa

½ teaspoon bicarb soda

150g unsalted butter, room temperature

120g brown sugar

50g raw sugar

½ teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

150g dark chocolate (I used Callebaut Strong 70%, the very last of my 2.5kg)

Beat the butter until creamy. Add the sugars, salt and vanilla extract and beat for a couple of minutes.

Sift in the flour, cocoa, bicarb, add choc chips and beat on the lowest speed or by hand only until the mixture looks crumbly – don’t overwork it. 

Scrunch the dough into a rough ball and then divide in half. Form each chunk into a log, wrap in baking paper or Gladwrap and put in the fridge to chill for at least 2 hours – it can stay there for three days, or can be frozen for future reference.

Preheat the oven to 165C. With a sharp nozh (I find a little serrated one good for getting through the choc chips), shive the logs into rounds about 1.5cm thick. If they crumble or break, just push them back together again – they’ll come good in the baking (I also roll their edges in sugar, for prettiness, but this is also a good moment to get them shapely again). Place lomticks onto a tray lined with baking paper, a centimetre or two apart.

Bake for 12 minutes. They mightn’t look cooked, but will firm up as they cool.

And then, oh my brothers, bliss and heaven, horrorshow gorgeousness and gorgeousity as you cram these into your rot.

Devil’s Food White-Out Cake

For the first time in recent memory, I thought I’d found something pretty good-looking, albeit with a vague Franco Cozzo aesthetic. And it was no less pleasing in the eating – I never knew that whole dark choc-chips in cake could be such a viable thing.

This is the very same layer cake that graces the cover of Dorie Greenspan’s Baking, with a few tonings-down. I kept just the two layers rather than attempting to slice them lengthways in half.

This was mainly because I decided not to follow Dorie into crumbling one of the halves to stick all over the marshmallowy meringue-like icing – it made it look too much like a curly pelt to me. But marshmallow icing – now what could be done with that? I get to use my blowtorch all too little since I moved on from creme brulee every night, so out it came and what fun I had.

This is a great, rich, fudgy cake to have in the stable. There’s a plethora of other ways it could be dressed up. It’s reason enough to buy Baking, with the other 299 recipes as a bonus, but the recipe can be found all over the internet like a fabulous, badly kept secret.

Macawrong II

No. These are not mine, they are made by someone much clever than me and I have stolen the picture from a photo library because I suck at macaroning.

And again to the actual subject of my blog, despite its tangents into biscuits and slices and such. It happens – I have a brainwave about a combination of flavours, forget the pain caused by the last macawrong, do a lot of online research into an alternative recipe and method that might just work this time, and schlepp over to Brunwick to buy another lot of almond meal at the inestimable Royal Nut Company.

This time wasn’t the time it worked.

This time, I found a recipe in the LA Times by none other than my favourite Dorie Greenspan, supported by an article she’d written with interesting notes about Pierre Hermé.

It was quite different to recipes I’d tried in the past, involving beating only half the eggwhites, then adding a sugar syrup heated to 125C to them, then just mixing the unbeaten remainder to the almond-and-icing sugar mix before adding the meringue and stirring.

Another interesting variation was layering the laden baking sheet on top of a spare one, and sliding the doubled setup into the oven.

And yet another was baking the macarons for 4 minutes at the preheated 180C, then quickly opening and closing the oven, and repeating.

What could go wrong with a recipe based on one by the man who ‘spent years studying the intricacies of macarons’? Mind you, I feel I’ve done the same by now, and that’s not working out so well.

I converted Dorie’s ingredients thusly, and figured out exactly what her ½ cup/4 eggwhites should weigh.

150g almond meal

150g icing sugar

½ US cup eggwhites (120g, or about 4)

½ teaspoon vanilla extract

150g white sugar

3 tablespoons water

Dorie didn’t say so much about what ‘mix well’ meant, so with my BodyPump-exhausted arms I counted one hundred melanges in French, or at least to fifty twice over so as to avoid the numbers getting all complicated (quatre-vingt-dix-sept – why did I take up learning this language?), due to something David Lebovitz said about them in his macaron post.There is such a bewildering array of approaches out there, and research that can be done and stones turned. Perhaps I overstirred for this recipe?

The only other variation was not adding the food colouring until I’d mixed well and then halved the mixture to add the different colours and flavours, and I can’t see how this could have affected anything.

I was trying for a magma-like consistency, but I’ve never really been close enough to magma to know what that is. I knew it wasn’t good when it flowed from the piping bag without any squeezing from me, and proceeded to spread flatly as pancake batter across the fibreglass sheet.

Here’s another thing. The first tray was totally flat. The second and third, for all their failings, developed little feet! Under the same conditions. Why bother being scientific when the universe is such a bitch?

Even the ones that developed little feet were impossible to remove from the fibreglass sheet in one piece, which is something I’ve only ever experienced back when I was using baking paper. They had to be scraped off, and I stuffed angry handfuls of them in my mouth until I felt ill and soaked the rest off in the sink and watched all that eggwhite and almond meal and carefully sifted icing sugar going down the drain. 

As obsessive as I feel keeping on going with trying to perfect this, it's that I think I’ve hit on a pleasing flavour combination. The addition of lemon zest and lavender oil to the two portions lifted the shells from being something quite boring and tasteless on their own to very eatable, even without the variations on white chocolate ganache I had planned for them.

Amazing reading online about failed macarons, such as this marvellous and informative post by Not So Humble Pie and all her commenters. Some people stuff them up so badly the macarons chirp like birds as they cool! I felt better after reading that, although less good when I read that a description mirroring my result was due to a phenomenon known as broken meringue. Have I been breaking all my meringues all these years?

By some beginners luck, I once made these work – the second or third time I tried, and even the first few were a good 70% better than this. I get 10% more sucktastic at macarons every time.

I aim to attempt these again next weekend, and have separated the eggs to prove it. The whites will sit out on the bench all week, just like the chefs do it, however counter-intuitive and against all food-safety it may seem. Meanwhile, I’d love to go to this workshop that Dorie went to, in Paris, wouldn’t I just.

Sticky pecan-cinnamon buns

 Adapted from Dorie Greenspan’s Baking (p51), and Thus Bakes Zarathustra’s The awkward girl who bakes  (I was initially drawn to her blogpost title, why could that be?)

 Put 2 sachets yeast and 1/3 cup each of bathwater-temperature milk and water (I put both together in a Pyrex jug and zapped it in the microwave for 30 seconds) in the mixer bowl and stir by hand to dissolve the yeast. Add 600g plain flour and 2 teaspoons salt, and give it the dough hook on medium-low for a minute or so, just until it’s a dry, shaggy mass. 

 Scrape down the bowl, add 3 eggs and ¼ cup sugar and mix on medium until the dough forms a ball, about 3 minutes. Add 340g room-temperature butter in chunks, waiting until each looks to be incorporated into the yellow sticky mass before adding the next. By now it’s a soft oozy dough. 

 Set the mixer on medium-high and leave it for about ten minutes, by which time the dough should be pulling away from the sides of the bowl, and, in my case, creeping above the hook to take over the motor.

 Cover with Gladwrap and leave somewhere warm to double in size, which could take 40 minutes but was more like two hours in my freezing house. That’s okay – plenty of time to feel the warm brioche dough, which is up there with kitten-belly fur in tactile delight.

Punch the dough down in the bowl, recover with Gladwrap and refrigerate, punching it down again every half hour or so until it stops rising, about 2 hours, then leave in the fridge overnight.

Separate the dough into two equal halves, and only use one half – the other can be frozen, or there’s nothing like a little brioche to whip out, for which Dorie originally wrote this recipe. I put the full recipe here as it’s tricky to halve 3 eggs, but you can try to make just the half-quantity if brioche dough in the freezer doesn’t float your boat.

 For the filling, mix 1/4 cup raw sugar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon and ½ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg in a bowl. Mash 40g room-temperature butter with a fork to spreadableness.

Find a 9"x13" baking dish and butter it generously. I could only find a smaller one, which meant the scrolls were a bit crowded and the central ones weren’t completely cooked through.

In a heavy saucepan, bring 200g brown sugar, 120g butter and ¼ cup golden syrup to the boil over a medium heat, stirring frequently. When the sugar has dissolved, stir in 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, and pour into the baking dish. Sprinkle 1 ½ cups pecans all over the sticky, oozy glaze.

Flour your dedicated Italian marble work surface, or if by some oversight you lack one, clear a modicum of space on your cramped benchtop. Roll the dough into a 40cm square, spread with a good chunk of just-softened butter, and sprinkle over the sugar mix. 

Roll the dough up tightly and slice into about 15* 3cm lengths. Fit the scrolls cut-side-down into the baking dish atop the pecans, leaving a little more space between them than I did here.

 Cover with baking paper and leave in a warm place until the buns have doubled to puffy softness.**

 Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 190C. Remove the baking paper and bake the buns for about 30 minutes, until they’re puffed and golden and bubbling with glaze. 

 Allow about five minutes for them to set a bit before clasping a serving platter over the baking dish and inverting – do it fast to minimise run-off. The glaze will still be verging on molten, so be careful. Eat while warm, obvs. Terribly rich and terrifyingly good.

 * Since I failed to find a dish large enough, and because I hoped to feed only three people, common sense might have whispered to me that perhaps I should bake a half-quantity. I clearly lack common sense, because we had way too many. Two buns are all that can be effortfully eaten and even those left me feeling beyond replete and verging on ill. The leftover portion, Dorie says, can be tightly gladwrapped and frozen, then thawed overnight and taken from there.

**At this point, I gladwrapped the dish and refrigerated it for the next morning, reasoning I could get up and leave it to rise on the heater and then bake it. But it needed at least two hours and a move to a just-turned-off oven to even think about rising again, much as The Guitar Teacher and Alida Irwin visiting from the country and I glowered at it hungrily. I do not think these are the best choice for breakfast unless you’re willing to get up at an ungodly hour, which was not the case this morning – Dorie recommends almost two hours for them to rise from rolling-out stage as it is. But I failed to read that last bit after Alida Irwin and I staggered home from a Friday night on the tiles. As it was, TGT and I didn’t eat these until midday, long after Alida Irwin had given up on my hostessing and left.

Lemon meringue pie

Pâte sablée: difficult, crumbly and messy, and a sore trial for one who may be described as all of the above – and who therefore favours completeness, coherence, truth and resolution in all things, apart from the occasional novel and film and blogpost. But enough about one, and back to the pastry.

It crumbled when slices were cut out, and kept on crumbling as it was eaten. But all that crumbliness made sense in a feisty texture that made all other pastries seem orderly variations on damp cardboard. It was buttery-biscuity-crisp, yet soft and light at the same time.

This was a Dorie Greenspan recipe from Baking (and can be found on her website); she advised against rolling due to the pastry’s fragility, and as one deprived of a marble worktop, I could get behind the suggestion to press it into the tart tin instead. But I was at a loss at the instruction ‘Don’t be too heavy-handed – press the crust in so that the edges of the pieces cling to one another, but not so hard the crust loses its crumbly texture’ (p444). In trying for a middle ground between firm, even coverage and heavy-handed crushing of the pastry’s crumble, mine was thick where the bottom of the tin met the fluted sides, and tapered to patchy thinness around the edge, and was anyone’s guess in the middle.  

I made a mistake in tin choice – the lemon tart I was following called for a fluted tart tin, but I was adding a meringue layer just because I was intrigued by the idea of using the back of a soup spoon to form little spikes, and so I should have used a pie dish with gently graduating sides and made life a lot easier.

One positive discovery was about sifting icing sugar, an activity I don’t love. I was trying to push rocks of the stuff through with the back of a spoon and not having fun when I had the fairly obvious idea of treating the sifter as a mortar and introducing a pestle to it. It turned out to be a brilliant idea, and I offer it up gratis to the portion of the world that hasn’t thought of it already.

The lemon cream was from a recipe Dorie named ‘The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart’ and that wasn’t hyperbole. The lemon filling differs from the usual lemon curd in that the butter (all 300g) is held back from the lengthy and arm-destroying whisking over the water bath, then added once the mixture has cooled for ten minutes and gone into a blender – hence becoming something more like an emulsion, and lighter and silkier in texture. 

Mine might have been silkier again if I’d strained the lemon zest out, but I left it in, thanks to Dorie’s re-thunk post and the new Microplane superfine zester that is the light of my life and the threat to my knuckles.

 I made a quick meringue that Dorie included with a key lime tart recipe, but was perhaps a little too quick with both the eggwhite beating and the baking in the oven – it was edging towards work time. A pity to rush the last stage of a process that had taken three days – crust sans baking one night and into the freezer, lemon cream the next, and finally baking and putting it all together before work. But the spike-creation was fun.

 

 Dorie says to serve or refrigerate; I did both, and refrigeration’s the better way to go. The first slice I cut out looked like this. Later ones were more upstanding.