*Bawl* The oven that killed my tart

I'm so depressed.. the blasted oven has done it again.. *bawl*

I've been slaving the whole night to make a lemon tart for morning tea tomorrow. It's a special occasion, my boss is turning 60. A few of us were going to bring something for a special morning tea to celebrate her birthday.... not anymore!!! Look at what it's done:...

The blasted oven has ruined my tart :'(

What's wrong with it? Well.. it's quite burnt around the edges, the lemon custard/curd surface is in patches (it's not suppose to be this way.. it didn't do it to me the first time). Just when I thought I had the temperature controlled at 160 c in the stupid oven, I opened the door to check the tart and it'd sky rocketed to 190 c, boiling the bloody custard instead of slow cooking it and left it in messy patches. (can you hear my cries of anguish??)

I'm desperately trying to think of ways to save it, It's already 11:30pm.. way past my bedtime and unless I slave the night away there is no way I am going to be able to bring something decent into the office tomorrow.. damn oven. I was so looking forward to it too. As if it wasn't bad enough that I had a mini disaster the first time I made this, now it's happened again .. bah....!

Am I ever going to get this right...??

Dreaming of a new oven, friands and SHF23

Friands: Raspberry surprise and Green tea Chocolate surprise

I dream of an oven.
An oven that does not turn off whilst in the middle of cooking;
One oven that does not have faulty seals that tampers with the circulation of hot air in the oven;
One that when you turn the temperature knob to 180 deg C will heat the oven at 180 deg, not 200 deg;
An oven with a working display screen;
And an oven light that will allow you to watch over the little goodies in the oven, as they bake.
I dream of the day that I can remove the hanging oven thermometer that I purchased for the oven..
I dream of the day my goodies will turn out well browned in all places, not just in patches where a large pocket of hot air lies..
I dream of an oven..

Ok, so that dream hasn't come through yet. But that doesn't stop me from fantasizing about it. :)

I have access to two ovens. One at the rental place that I'm currently living at (with my number one piggy/taste tester: the Housemate) and one at the boy's place. The oven at our place (being me and the Housemate) is an ancient electric wall oven with: non working display, an oven light that is broken and unreplaceable (not irreplaceable because the heat's in the oven probably permanently welded the light into its socket) and door seals that are way overdue for replacement. If you stand close enough to the oven, you could probably feel the heat eminating from the loose seals on the oven door. When I make roast veges in the oven, you could see see the moisture building up at the top of oven where the door meets the oven and steam rising through the gaps. LOL It's hilarious!

The second oven, is a gas oven. Yes, the notorious gas oven that turned off on me in the middle of my lemon tart and when I was baking the green tea butter cookies. It's clean, white, about 10 years old, the lights are working and it's almost perfect, except for the fact that the fire turns off whenever it feels like it. Oh and did I mention that the timer on the oven is faulty.

I am plagued by bad ovens. I can't wait til the day I own my own home with the kitchen of my dreams. I digress!

Friands also known as Financiers, are a type of French tea cakes similar to Madeleines. Spongey in texture, the difference between the two is that Friands contain almond meal (or almond flour). My friand experience was from my colleague Jules (whom I always share my goodies with and vice versa), who made them for her children. She made a double chocolate friand, in which she used cocoa powder and chocolate pieces in the friand to double the taste and texture. It is from this that I drew my inspiration for these friands.

I've been scouring the internet for friand recipes and have come across a few different ones. Most of them have your basic ingredient "beurre noisette" (brown butter), egg whites, almond meal (almond flour), vanilla extract and some flour, but all in different quantities. I have chosen to try two of the ones I've found to see the effect of difference quantity of egg white, almond meal and beurre noisette makes to the tastebuds.

Raspberry Surprise

So called because of the "raspberry surprise" inside.

This is an adaptation of the Strawberry Friand that jenjen from Milk & Cookies.

Ingredients:
2/3 cup unsalted butter
½ cup all purpose flour
1 cup almond meal or almond flour
1½ cups icing sugar
¼ tsp salt
6 large egg whites, lightly beaten
1 tsp pure vanilla extract

Melt butter in a saucepan and simmer over medium heat until browned, be careful not to burn the butter. Set aside to cool. Preheat oven to 200°C.

In a bowl, combine flour, almond meal, icing sugar and salt. Fold in the lightly beaten egg whites and then add the vanilla and browned butter. Mix well.


To the recipe, I added Raspberry Coulis (frozen)

? Frozen Raspberries
1 Tbsp Lime Juice*
1.5 Tbsp of Caster Sugar

Melt frozen raspberries, lime juice and sugar in a saucepan. Cool mixture and place into ice cubes mould and freeze.
*I used Lime juice because I had 1/2 a lime lying around but you could substitute it for lemon.

Freeze a small bowl or plate in the freezer before you remove the frozen raspberries to prevent them from melting too quickly.

Half fill friand moulds, drop a cube of raspberries and top it up with more friand batter. Fill it up to about 1cm before the top and tap/knock the mould a little bit to remove any trapped air in the pan.

Bake friands for 10 - 12mins at 200 deg C. Remove from oven and cool.

Note: If you're like me and do your baking at night during the weekdays, be sure to remove the friands from the moulds before you nick of to bed! Or you'll have a nice handful removing it the next day. :(

Makes about 6 friands.

The verdict: The friands from this recipe was delicious! Moist, spongey and not to sweet at all. The raspberry surprise added a lovely blend of sweet and sour taste to the friands. Best raspberry friand I've ever had, and I'm not a big fan of raspberry either.


Green Tea Chocolate Surprise friand

For this friand, I adapted the Financiers Recipe form Joy of Baking

Ingredients:
1/3 cup (5 tablespoons) (85 grams) beurre noisette (will need 1/2 cup (113 grams) unsalted butter)
1/4 cup (35 grams) all purpose flour
1/2 cup (50 grams) almond flour (meal) or ground blanched almonds
3/4 cup (90 grams) confectioners' (powdered or icing) sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
3 large egg whites
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1 tbsp of matcha (green tea powder) melted with about 2.5 tbsp of hot water.
6 squares of dark chocolate

Preheat oven to 177 deg C and bake almond meal for approximately 6 - 8mins until browned. Turn the temperature up to 200 deg once it is done.

Melt butter in a saucepan over a medium low heat. When melted, turn up the gas and let it come to a boil and continue to cook the butter until it looks clear and the milk solids have dropped to the bottom of the pan and have turned dark brown. Remove from heat and strain through cheesecloth lined strainer. You should have more than 1/3 cup of butter. Let it cool.

Meanwhile, combine flour, almond meal, icing sugar and salt. Fold in lightly beaten egg whites, vanilla extract, butter and matcha.

Grease friand moulds with left over butter. Fill half the moulds (like in the raspberry friand) with the batter, drop in 1 square of dark chocolate and top it up with more batter until it's approximate 1cm from the top of the mould. Lightly tap mould to remove any trapped air in the pan.

Bake for 10-12mins.

Makes 6 friands.

Heat friand in the microwave for about 5 - 10secs before serving.

The verdict: I'm not sure baking the almond meal beforehand makes any difference to the friand. Maybe it's just me. Although this recipe seems to bring out the almond texture in the friand a bit more compared to the previous one. The added complexity of straining the beurre noisette kind of threw me off a bit. Considering it tastes the same with the raspberry friand when I didn't even strain it. Perhaps it's the proper way of doing it, but I don't think I fancy this recipe very much.

The chocolate however, was yummilicious. I love green tea and would normally put on more than what I've prescribed above but since I didn't want the green tea to over power the taste of the friand and chocolate, I was a bit conservative with the amount of matcha I added. That led to the chocolate overpowering the matcha effect. As you can see, the middle of the friand seems a little undercooked. It was fine when I tested it with the cake tester. Pity, it still tastes yummy and didn't taste undercooked at all.

Little surprise that this will be my entry to Sugar High Friday 23, themed "Surprise" hosted by Alanna over at A Veggie Venture. :)


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Trackback link: SHF23 at A Veggie Venture

Touch up, cooking blues and Lemon tart

Been meaning to touch up the blog's look for a while and just got around to it. I like the rounders template but was going to do something to jazz it up a bit as it was "too blue/true blue".

Me thinks I've caught the 'cooking blues'

Haven't cooked a meal this week and it's already Tuesday.. ok.. maybe just Tuesday. But haven't felt like cooking lately. Lately, being from last week. Come to think of it, I think I only cooked twice last week.

My aunt (dad's sister) is here from KL and since she arrived the two cousins (her two daugthers living in Melbourne) have been bugging me to shout yum cha! My mum is not really into yum cha so she suggested that we have a big seafood banquet thing at home instead. Her argument was that instead of giving the restaurants a big packet for bad service, we should host ourselves and have an even bigger banquet for half the price! So as a result, we had dinner at my parent's on Sunday and my parents cooked the mains, I brought dessert, the cousins brought the wine and my aunt and grandma brought their appetites!

In my parent's typical style, they made an absolutely huge and faboulous 'Chinese Malaysian Seafood Feast'. I say Chinese Malaysian because I think the cooking style is fairly different to your regular HK/China Chinese cooking. There is a lot of spice influence in Malay cooking that gets translated into Chinese cooking in Malaysia. I think they call this 'Nyonya' style cooking. It's not to say that my parents cooked it Nyonya style, but the influence was there in some of the dishes.

Deep Fried Curried Cuttlefish, Rockling in XO sauce, Crab meat w/ mustard greens and garlic ginger sauce, Stir Fried Scallops with Ginger and Spring Onions, Lobak (meat pieces with water chesnut and spring onions wrapped in tofu skin), Fried Prawns in loads of spice (have no idea what was in it, my dad's new fried prawn dish) and a Roast Duck (Ok this was really out of place but another typical dish in our family gatherings)

Unfortunately, no photos.. everyone devoured everything before I got a chance to take a photo because they were all starving. However, I do have a photo of my takeaway lunch for yesterday hehe..

Clockwise from the top: Lobak, Rockling and XO Sauce, Left over Fried Prawns (not my Dad's special, they were all gone) and Deep Fried Curried Cuttlefish
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For dessert, I made a Lemon Tart and some White Chocolate Pistachios cup cakes with white chocolate ganache (which I will post next time with my Green Tea version).

Long have I searched for a Lemon Tart recipe that is similar to the Laurent or Brown's Lemon tart, one with a custardy filling instead of the thick cheese cake like texture of some. At last, I have found it! The latest recipe is one I copied from a magazine at a restaurant while I was waiting for my meal. I think it was Elle from back in 1999! If I recall it was a recipe used by some famous chef in some famous hotel somewhere hahah.. But it's definitely awesome!

I elected to use a Jamie Oliver shortcrust pastry base instead of the one in this recipe because I love the richer taste of the base. (plus even if I over cooked it, it still tastes good and crispy! hehe)

I had some problems with the baking the tart though :( Alv's ever untrustworthy oven turned off on me again. The recipe specifies a baking time of 50mins at 160degrees. I think the oven turned off on me half way through the cooking time as when I went back after 50mins the custard was still quite wobbly. Then I thought of baking it again at a higher temperature but covering the tart so as not to further burn it, but then because the curd hadn't cooked completely, the foil that touched the surface ruined the curd because parts of the curd stuck to the foil. :'( In the end I baked it for another 15mins at 160degrees and left it in the oven to cool.

The tart is best baked the day before and refrigerated overnight before consumed.

I must say it's the best lemon tart I've had since the Laurent's or Brown's hehe. Smooth, sweet yet lemony with a melt-in-your mouth lemon custard filling and sweet crust was absolutely delicious!! Best one I've made so far, and I've made quite a few this year. Luckily I saved a piece for Jules (my colleague whom I always share my treats with and vice versa) because my dad took the rest.

Too bad the filling kinda melted a bit. I forgot to refridgerate it when I got to mum's and as you can see from the photo, the curd was kinda melting a bit. I'm saving my white chocolate cupcake post to go with the other cup cake. Hopefully, there will be more opportunities to blog now that Alv has replaced the old wireless router. : )

Lemon Tart
*Source: Elle Magazine, 1999

Pastry:
*Elle Magazine version
100g Butter
150g Sugar
1 Egg
250g Plain Flour

Combine Butter and Sugar, Mix Well. Add Egg and Mix well. Add plain flour and combine until the mixture forms into a ball. Shape into a disk and refrigerate for 30mins. After 30mins, roll out pastry onto a 28cm tin. Bake blind for 10mins at 200degrees (preheated). Remove baking beans after 10mins and bake for another 10mins before letting it cool. Reduce oven to 160degrees

Pastry:
*Jamie O's version
#Makes 2 x 30cm/12 inch tart moulds

250g butter
200g icing sugar
medium pinch of salt
500g flour
4 egg yolks
4 tbsp cold milk/water

Cream butter, sugar and salt in a food processor. Pulse in the flour and egg yolks until mixture combines and appear like coarse breadcrumbs. Add cold water/milk. Gently work dough together to form a ball of dough. Lightly flour and push, pat and squeeze dough into shape. (you want to get the dough into shape with the minimal amount of kneading to retain the short and flaky texture)^

Roll pastry into a large log (or two), wrap it in clingwrap and let it rest in the refridgerator for at least 1hr. Jamie's method for lining mould is to thinly slice slivers of pastry lengthways around 5mm and place the slivers in and around the mould and around the bottom of the tart (like a jigsaw puzzle) and then pushing and leveling the sides together. Once the tart is lined, place the tart in the freezer for about an hour before baking it in the oven at 180 deg C for 15mins. (or you can bake it blind)

^Over working the dough will cause your dough to be elastic, making the pastry chewy and shrink when you bake it in the oven

Filling:
6 Egg yolks
250g sugar
250ml lemon juice
250ml thickened cream

Whisk Egg Yolks and Sugar until pale and creamy. Add in Lemon Juice and Cream and mix well. Pour lemon filling onto tart pastry and return to oven for 50mins. Cool and refrigerate overnight before serving.

ps. Sorry about the poor instructions, I was trying to copy everything before the food arrived.

Stuffed up chicken

What happens when you accidentally use Cayenne Pepper when marinating your "Cajun Chicken" for your Cajun Chicken Caesar?

1. You start choking when the chicken's being pan fried and start wondering whether it's time to throw out that old frying pan that looks past its time. (because you think it's the toxic from the worn out teflon)
   
2. Get out of the kitchen and leave your boy friend to keep frying that toxic stuff
   
3. Chuck a tanty and yell at your bf to turn on all the exhaust fan in the house
   
4. ALL OF THE ABOVE

If you were me on Monday, you'd be picking option d. ALL OF THE ABOVE.

Monday night, didn't finish work til 7 and by the time I did all the food shopping for dinner and got home it was about 7:40pm. Exhausted from a hard slog at work and late Sunday night (coz we went to watch Coldplay LIVE @ Rod Laver Arena, then went for supper and didn't get home til 12:30am or so), Freezing because the heater's not fixed (YET) and Starving because I hadn't eaten since my last snack at 4 (or was it 4:30pm); I got everyone to help out with the cooking because we were all on the verge of starvation.

Mish fry the bacon, boil the eggs, Alv bring me the 'Cajun' spice from the pantry etc etc etc..

Lesson #1: Do not get anyone who is not familiar with kitchen to get you a spice from the pantry.
Reason: There are so many bottle of spices in there you never know what might happen.

As you can probably figure out by now, I ended up putting Cayenne Pepper (EXTRA HOT) instead of Cajun into my chicken. I put loads of them too because:

a) Cajun spice has a bit of salt in it, so I figure if I put enough of it, I don't have to bother with any S&P.
b) I was hungry (I think this needs no more explanation)
c) Everyone was complaining of hunger (nothing worse than 'kids' complaining that they're hungry)

I only realised it was Cayenne Pepper when I was putting stuff away all the while Alv was still frying away, me = choking.. in tears..

Sigh, so I was slap dash with the cooking on Monday and the chicken was so spicy that we couldn't eat it. I've got a pretty high tolerance of spicy dishes, but even I couldn't eat it! Felt like it would be a waste to toss everything, we glad wrapped it and stuck it in the fridge.

So for last night's dinner, I bought a packet of those stir fry sauces from Continental (Honey Soy, Ginger and Tamarind) and re-fried the chicken w/ red capsicum, spring onions and the sauce. I was hoping the tamarind would tame it down a bit but fat chance. The chicken was still spicy but it was still edible.

Lesson learnt: Never be slap dash with "looking at labels!"

Today, when someone asked me what I was having for lunch.. for some reason I blurted out "Stuffed up Chicken". I guess that pretty much fits the description.

I think the next time I'm running late I'll just tell everyone "Maggi Mee for dinner". At least that way I won't be choking to death and in tears...