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Fixing the blog up! :)

Because I’ve been asked for this recipe and I thought I should try to increase my food blogging (yes, yes, because I’m so good about blogging everything else). What this is, is a very robust, hard to screw up, incidentally-gluten-free* chocolate tart. The pastry shell is based on a 17th-century “pye” recipe and uses only nuts, egg white and a little sugar, which I got from Ann Willan’s Look & Cook Perfect Pies and Tarts

*Incidental, because there are no substitutions made– the recipe has no gluten and none of the usual starch substitutes, eg. potato flour, gluten-free flour, gram flour, etc.

The base recipe is this (below the cut):

200g of whole, shelled nuts (hazelnuts and almond both work).
60g of caster sugar
1 egg white

Filling:
275g dark chocolate, chopped into little bits
375g double cream
2 whole eggs
1 egg yolk.

In a blender, blitz the nuts and sugar until they’re ground pretty fine, but there are still some crunchy bits for texture.

Variation1 – I’ve used almonds (tried and tasted, good result), hazelnuts with a tsp of cinnamon (tried and tasted, good result), hazelnuts and mixed spices (not tried, but might be good for winter, sort of lebkuchen-ish), almonds, walnuts & cardamon? (not tried but it’s a classic combination. Maybe a little bitter?), almond or hazelnuts and nutmeg (not tried, but it’s nutmeg, so it’s good by default).

In a medium sized bowl, whisk the egg-white until frothy, then stir in the nut & sugar mixture until it’s all incorporated. Shape it into a rough ball, wrap it in cling film and slightly flatten it, and put it in the fridge for half an hour.

Meanwhile, butter a 23cm fluted pie dish and put the a baking trap in the oven and preheat to 190C.

Take the pastry out of the fridge. It’s too sticky to properly roll, but you can flatten it– use a rolling pin and flatten it out as much as you can. I tend to do this on the cling it went into the oven in, so that I can more easily flip it over into the pie dish.

Now, using either a cold metal spoon dipped in water or your hand, press the crust into the pie dish. I usually start with the spoon, then use my fingers to make sure it’s properly in the corner and covering the sides. It will look slightly rustic, but that suits the crunch texture of the crust.

Put it in the preheated oven on the baking tray for 10-15 minutes, until it’s started just starting to brown and it feels drier, less sticky. No need to chill it again (or prick the base or weigh it down). Now take it out of the oven and leave it to cool on a wire wrack.

Filling.

Put the finely chopped chocolate in a medium-sized bowl.

Variation 2 – all untried, but you could use flavoured chocolate (like Green & Blacks Maya), or you could add something to the chocolate here (ground ginger, for example)

In a heavy based saucepan, over a low to medium heat, bring the cream just to the boil. Pour over the hot chocolate and stir (with a spoon or whisk), until it’s thoroughly mixed.

Variation 3 – Fresh mint (tried and tasted, good)– roughly tear a large bunch of fresh mint and put it in the saucepan with the cream. Bring just to the boil, then take off the heat and leave covered for at least 15 minutes to infuse, then put back on the stove and bring just to the boil again. Strain the cream over the hot chocolate with a metal sieve. Other options (not tried, but I think they’d all work), you could try infusing with cardamon, cinnamon or even fresh basil or just adding a tbsp of kahlua or brandy. One thing, if you are infusing with something leafy, you might want to be a little more generous with the cream, since they seem to trap a lot, even when you squeeze them out pretty thoroughly. I used abut 75ml extra when I was infusing with mint.

In another medium-sized bowl, beat the eggs and egg yolk together. When the chocolate mixture is tepid, pour into the eggs and stir thoroughly to combine.

Pour into the pastry shell and put in the oven.

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until it’s set on the outside, but the centre still feels soft.

Take out and let cool. Just to note, the surface of the chocolate isn’t 100% smooth– it’s slightly rough and you might notice a few microbubbles with (as far as I can tell) oil– possibly from the nuts, but maybe from the chocolate or even the cream. I just lay a piece of kitchen towel on the top to soak them up. It fits in with the slightly rustic feel of the pie and the crunchy base, but if you don’t like the look if it…

Variation 4- … you can decorate the surface with chocolate leaves. Melt about 100g of chocolate (white looks good, or you could do a mix), take some (non-toxic) leaves– rose leaves work very well. Brush the underside with melted chocolate and leave to set. When they’ve set, peel off the leave and arrange on the top of the chocolate tart. Or you could sift icing sugar on the top, or cocoa powder, or put chocolate curls over.

Look, crochet! I have achieved slight dominion over that damn hook, thanks to the lovely ladies at Make Do Mend, whose class at the Gallery Cafe in Bethnal Green last week got me over the hump of frustration.

I’m still working on edges as if I’m not crocheting in the round – things go a bit trapezoid! But, after falling into John Lewis (perilously close to work) with one of my fellow librarians – also a beginner crocheter – to purchase some more yarn one lunch time, consulting a few videos about starting the round off, I have become a lean, mean granny square making machine.

I’m not sure what they’ll become yet but I’m enjoying seeing the improvement in shape and tension with each one – perhaps I’ll turn them into some sort of cushion or lap blanket!

How and when did you begin knitting/crocheting? was it a skill passed down through generations of your family, or something you learned from Knitting For Dummies? What or who made you pick up the needles/hook for the first time? Was it the celebrity knitting ‘trend’ or your great aunt Hilda? TAGGING CODE: knitcroblo1

My mom and her mother have always done something with yarn and I grew up with crocheted or knitted blankets – known in my family as Joseph blankets, due to their multicoloured nature – but oddly enough, I never learnt to knit or crochet from my mom or gran. I learnt to knit at Brownies in South Africa for my craft badge but never really got on with it as a kid. I picked it up again when I was about 13 and living in Ireland and knitted a few misshapen garter stitch bag-like things and scarves with random holes in them and then put it down again. Fast forward to age 22, when I moved from Manchester to the Czech Republic for a three month internship. Jam (the silent half of this blog…) had been talking about her knitting and got me interested again, so before I moved, I picked up Stitch & Bitch, some terrible acrylic yarn and some needles and started back down the route of relearning things like casting on in an actual usable fashion.

The first thing to come out of that was a two colour Garter Stitch scarf, which I no longer own and once I’d moved to Prague, I started cheerfully working my way through all the scarf patterns in SnB, particularly because my internship required spending three days a week in a town outside of Prague called Beroun, which meant a commute to knit on in the mornings. I got quite good at knitting related Czech and my knitting grew to involve hats, all done on straight needles because I couldn’t work out circs.

When I came back to Manchester, I kept knitting and moved on to shrugs, wristwarmers and socks and pretty much haven’t looked back since! My gran knitted blanket squares up to her death, although the squares from the year before she passed away show the ravages of dementia more and more and my mom tends to make crochet edged Joseph blankets for members of the family out of the many bags of squares my gran knitted before her death, which I assist with when I go home by sewing up the edged squares into strips.

A selection of early projects:

Blog about a pattern or project which you aspire to. Whether it happens to be because the skills needed are ones which you have not yet acquired, or just because it seems like a huge undertaking of time and dedication, most people feel they still have something to aspire to in their craft. If you don’t feel like you have any left of the mountain of learning yet to climb, say so! TAGGING CODE: knitcroblo2

A skill I aspire to is crochet – as I mentioned above, my mom makes Joseph blankets for the family by doing crochet edging around the squares my gran knitted and sewing them together with one big crochet border and I would like to join her in that endeavour because I like the idea of creating things that have a connection to my mom and gran and my family at large. I’ve just never got anywhere with crochet!

But, I am grasping the bull by the horns and have signed up for a beginner’s crochet class in a couple weeks! I will no doubt report back about that once it has happened.

I’ve been puttering along with my stash bust though. I’m currently knitting a Prairie Rose Shawl in some Malabrigo sock yarn in Botticelli as my commute knitting project and I’ve knitted Ysolda’s Ripley hat (I did the garter band with the closer fitting hat) in some Debbie Bliss Cashmerino aran & chunky for the gift box and a snood out of the remaining aran yarn (although, no photos of that one yet).

I’ve also finished my sewing class and the skirt that I was working on, although I need to trim the threads, wash and iron that before I can take photos. It was really good, actually to just have that safety net of someone else who knows what they’re doing being there. I’m already plotting my next skirt as my flatmate picked up an Amy Butler skirt pattern that is crying out to be made in some accidentally purchased floral cotton. I’m also planning to do some fabric buttons and a new belt for my spring mac.

And today, I started unearthing my rusty embroidery skills by making this feltcraft owl cushion. It took me about an afternoon to finish and some of that was spent youtubing things I couldn’t remember, like, uh, backstitch. My tension was also all out of wack with basket stitch so I ended up finishing the cushion off with a whip stitch.