Raspberry tarts
Last night was the grand finale for fruit tarts, perhaps luckily for my increasingly indistinct waistline, although sadly for my pastry-loving tastebuds. Hugh sure does put a lot of cholesterol in his recipes. I look upon this as a good thing but perhaps I should have undergone a series of Supersize Me-style tests before and after this project. Too late now ( I’ll tell myself). I’ve got a bit cocky by now about the success with which I’m not taking these recipes very seriously, and these raspberry tarts followed the same happy pattern. I keep finding that Hugh’s pastry recipes come out too dry (it’s hilarious to hear myself write that – WI here I come) so I always add extra eggs, water, cream or whatever is to hand, which I think is why I keep ending up with cakes more than pastry. I also realise that the dryness is more likely to be due to my lack of scales than his bad recipes, although I have been using an ace French measuring jug that has marks up the sides for each ingredient by weight, for example Farine 100g etc. You just pour in the flour, sugar or whatever, shake it around a bit and pour it in. I love this jug so much I use it despite it being full of cracks. I’m scared I won’t be able to find a replacement. Terrified. I suppose I should just look in the shops.
Anyway, I did channel my inner pâtissier(e?) at Hugh’s suggestion and glazed the tart/cake shell things with jam before filling them with the homemade pastry cream and berries. They were delicious. Really, really great, and the pastry cream was simple to make as I ignored such words as ‘clean’, ‘gently’, ‘strain’ and ‘chill’, none of which I have in my vocabulary. My flat filled with acrid smoke when I preheated the oven because yesterday’s supplementary tart filling had bubbled on to the floor of the cooker and was burning, to which my shameful solution was to open the oven door and all the windows, and let the goo mostly burn away before putting the tarts in regardless. They only had a slight taste of industrial fires about them. I’ll sort the oven out mañana.
Raspberry tarts
Raspberry barfs
Mine could do with a bit more snow, hey? And those neat little turrets around the edge. And some distressed floorboards underneath.
Conclusions:
- Learning a bit more about pastry has been really fun, very tasty and surprisingly successful
- All those tubs of cream, packets of butter and cups of sugar don’t go well with the fashion. Hypocrites! I knew it! I’m writing in
- I think there might be more pies next week but tomorrow I finally get a salad, thank you Yotam
I've always found it funny when people write letters to the Guardian's Weekend magazine complaining that the recipe ingredients are too middle class and the fashion only looks good on thin people. After all, it's just a magazine. Or is it? I decided to follow its recipes, fashion and lifestyle advice as closely as possible, to see if the aspirations promoted therein can really be achieved by the average reader who is not especially wealthy, not necessarily model thin and is obliged to work regular office hours. This blog has no affiliation whatsoever with the Guardian but I link to the Weekend magazine website for the purposes of illustration. 
Guardian Girl 
[…] I love Rosie Sykes for this. I also defrosted and heated through my previous beetroot salad and raspberry tarts to great success, making a full-on Guardian meal of loveliness for my bezzer mate and I. Fried […]
[…] went into a muffin tray followed by a hot oven and came out 25 minutes later resembling cakes. Why does everything I cook turn into a cake? I’m like a slightly rubbish, less rich version of King Midas. According to DL the buns […]
[…] The dregs of last week Posted in Brain & heart, Fashion, Interiors, Recipes, The Measure by guardiangirl on July 27, 2009 Last week was an altogether tricky seven days for following this godforsaken plan. I was tired, unprepared, trying to track down an iPhone in every spare moment (a feat that has still yielded no success thanks to the momumental mess-ups of first Natwest – which did everything wrong, and then Carphone Warehouse – which gave away my reserved phone after promising not to while I sorted things out with the bank. Here are the final dregs of things I managed to vaguely achieve despite the difficulty of cooking recipes, photographing complicated outfits and buying copies of foreign magazines to look at vampire photoshoots while also mantaining one’s daily life. You know the saying that punctuality is the virtue of the bored, or something? Well following the advice of lifestyle magazines follows a similar pattern. I’m certainly having to sacrifice a fair portion of my social life in order to do this project, as I keep having to rush home of an evening so I can make pastry. […]
[…] Bloody hell, not more pies! Just as I thought my cholesterol might be returning to within five cream cakes of normal levels. […]