Short Crust Pastry

Normally, to make short crust pastry, you mix together plain flour with half it’s weight of fat (butter, lard or vegetable substitute like Trex) and bind it together with a little water (just as much as needed to make it clump together into one ball).

However, inspired by a great comment made by, Rob, in response to my banana bread, I opted to use a Nigella recipe (from How to Eat) where the water is substituted for the juice of half an orange. In fact, it was because the recipe did this that I wanted to try it.

Remember, you can vary the amount of pastry you make to suit the size tin you have.  This recipe had a very thin pastry base – I’d have liked it a little thicker. I suggest you make half as much pastry again if you’d like a thicker base to your pie.

• 140g plain flour
• 70g cold unsalted butter cut into small 1cm cubes (or ½ lard and ½ butter)
• Juice of ½ an orange (cooled in fridge)
• A pinch of salt
• Preheated oven to 200°C

I blitzed together the flour, fat and salt, before slowly adding the juice until the pastry bound together.

Nigella prefers to do the following:

1. Place flour and butter into a bowl and place it into the freezer
2. Transfer into the food processor and mix on slow speed until the flour and butter become blended and granular.
3. With the food processor on, gradually add the cool orange juice until the pastry came together.

I tried Nigella’s suggestion of rolling the pastry between two sheets of cling film (to cut down on mess and make the pastry easier to handle. However, I felt this was more hassle that it was worth – the cling film kept splitting into shreds which I had to pick out of the pastry.

Use the rolled pastry to line a greased 20cm pie tin.

Cover the pastry with tin foil or baking paper and add baking beads (or dried pulses as a substitute) to stop the pastry rising in the oven. Bake for 15 minutes.

Remove from the oven, remove the foil/baking paper and beads from the tin. Then use more foil/baking paper to cover the edges of the proto-pie (to stop them burning) and put back into the over for another 12 minutes.

Rhubarb Filling
• 800g rhubarb
• Juice of the other ½ of the orange used to make pastry
• 2 tbsp plain flour
• 2 egg yolks
• 150g caster sugar
• 30g melted butter

This makes a lovely light sharp filling, with the rhubarb pretty much unadulterated. The rich egg yolk mixture sets the filling.

1. Trim rhubarb and chop into 1cm pieces, halving thick stems lengthways if necessary.
2. In a saucepan, very briefly heat the rhubarb with the orange juice (if you do this for more than a minute or two, the ensuing rhubarb mix will go completely mushy. Do it for less time and the rhubarb will stay more intact).
3. Strain the rhubarb mix, retaining the juices.
4. In a separate bowl, mix 150g sugar with the plain flour and melted butter. Add the beaten egg yolks and enough of the rhubarb juice to make a smooth runny paste.
5. Spread the rhubarb around the blind baked pie case and pour on the paste.

Meringue
I’m not a fan of pavlova but love soft gooey meringues, hot out of the oven.

• Two egg whites
• 120g of sugar
• ¼ tsp cream of tartar
• Whisk the egg whites top form soft peaks (I used an electric whisk).

1. Add the first 1/2 of the sugar (60g) and whisk together until glossy.
2. Add the second ½ of the sugar (60g) together with ¼ tsp of cream of tartar, folding them in with a metal spoon.
3. Spread the meringue mix over the pastry case and rhubarb, making sure that it is completely sealed and there are no gaps for rhubarb to bubble up through.
4. Use a spoon to make some pretty meringue type patterns on the top of the meringue.
5. Sprinkle a teaspoon of caster sugar over the top and bake in the oven for about 15 minutes until the peaks are bronzy and brown topped.

This was a truly lovely pie. The orange in the pastry was subtle, but did make it beautifully light and fruity. The rhubarb filling was sharp and refreshing, with a lovely curd like texture – semi-set and gooey. The light sugary sweet soft meringue complemented tartness of the rhubarb and the subtle orange pastry set the whole thing off wonderfully.

Pie Debate:
After finding out that I’d missed national pie week, I’ve been researching pie technology a bit more. Now I may need to reconsider what I define a pie to be. I would say that this rhubarb meringue pie is a Pie because it has a pastry base and meringue lid to seal in the filling. So a pie has to have a pastry base (ruling out anything with just a pastry/potato top) with a lid to seal in the goodness.

On the back of my previous success with Peanut Butter and Date Flapjacks, I decided to try another experiment with the date syrup. I’m not a huge fan of desserts in general but ever since we finished the flapjacks I’ve been having a craving for something similar. Usually I tend to leave the making of desserts to Jenny but I thought I’d have another go.

Ingredients

Syrup

• 1lb plums
• 3tbsp date syrup
• a knob of butter
• 1tbsp golden caster sugar

Crust

• 2 oz butter
• 3 oz plain flour
• 1tbsp ground almonds
• 2 oz porridge oats
• 1tsp cinnamon

This was my first crumble but there really wasn’t much to it. I loosely followed some other recipes.

Method

1. Pre-heat oven to 180C
2. Stone and quarter plums.
3. Melt the knob of butter in pan, add the plums, date syrup and sugar. If very dry and a touch of water. Simmer for 20-25mins with occasional stirring until you get a pulpy syrup.
4. Rub butter and flour to get ‘breadcrumbs’. Mix in sugar, almonds, cinnamon and oats.
5. Pour plum syrup into a baking dish, top with crust. Baked for 30mins, until slightly golden.

The crumble ended up pretty good. The plum and dates were extremely rich and needed the extra think crust layer. We served it with vanilla ice cream which worked pretty well. Creme Fraiche would be nice too. The only downside to this dish was that there wasn’t enough. We ended up eating it in one go. Next time I’d double the quantity to (serving 4) so we can eat it two days in a row.

A while ago now, whilst visiting some of the local asian shops I found a jar of Date Syrup. Being quite into Dates I decided to buy some without anything particular in mind to use it for. It’s sat at the back of our cupboards for a few months now, partly because I keep forgetting its there but also because I can’t find many recipes that use it.

I’d been promising Jenny for a while now that I’d make some peanut butter biscuits, again that’s not happened either. Today I decided to experiment and mix the two together – rather than biscuits I made flapjacks, making use of the many packets of seeds and oats we had.

Ingredients (10 bars)

• 4 oz Butter
• 1.5 oz Muscovado Sugar
• 2 tbsp Date Syrup
• 2 tbsp Peanut Butter (unsweetened is good, flapjacks are sweet enough)
• 2 tbsp Sultanas
• 5 oz Porridge Oats
• 1 tbsp Sesame Seeds
• 1 tbsp Sunflower Seeds

Method

There really was nothing to this:

• Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Cover baking tray with grease-proof paper.
• Melt the butter in a big pan.Once melted, add the sugar, syrup and peanut butter. Let it all dissolve into a smooth paste.
• Add the sultanas, oats and seeds, mix it all together.
• Layer the mixture onto the baking tray, 1/2 inch thick. Cook for 18mins.
• Let the flapjack cool for 15mins, cut into bars.

Rather than the overly rich and sticky flapjacks you’d get these turned out to have quite a wholesome, almost malty taste. They’re also slightly crumbly – perfect for having with some (ice) cream.

Some notes on Date Syrup

The Date Syrup was pretty much as you’d expect – dark, rich, sweet, syrupy. Although it’s sweet, it’s not sickly – something I could tolerate – less sweet than golden syrup. I definitely intend to use some more of the stuff, I think it works really well with nuts, I might try some sort of cake with Walnuts. It might even work with some sort of Moroccan Lamb dish.