Classic French Strawberry Tart

This strawberry tart was the dessert for my recent "Summer Lunch for Four": crisp almond pastry, a vanilla bean crème pâtissière, topped with fresh, super sweet strawberries. What a divine combination. This is a version of that classic strawberry tart that pretty much every French pâtisserie sells, but is so lovely when made fresh that it's totally worth the effort to make it yourself!

Classic French Strawberry Tart

I followed a Nigel Slater recipe that I found online - it was surprisingly hard to find an entire recipe for this type of tart, perhaps because the individual elements (almond pastry, crème pâtissière) are canonical recipes of French pâtisserie, and available widely.

But, back to Nigel's recipe. The base is a sweetened rich almond shortcrust - best made by hand rather than in a processor, so you don't overwork the gluten in the flour and make it tough. It's super short and crumbly, which makes it soooo delicious, but is quite tricky to roll out. Nigel suggests pressing the dough together in a log shape, slicing it thinly and pressing it into a tart tin.

Making the almond pastry

I found this method worked really well - it looked a little messy in the tin, but was fine once filled with the custard and strawberries.

Ready for the oven

Baked

To split up the work, I made and baked the pastry tart the night before we wanted to eat it, and made the crème pâtissière on the morning of our lunch party.

Here's the crème pâtissière. Mmm... vanilla beans. Sometimes I lighten crème pâtissière with whipped cream (like when I made mille feuille or a croquembouche), but I think in this case it's nice to have an intensely flavoured and thick custard against the strawberries.

Crème pâtissière

Crème pâtissière in the tart shell

Strawberries. Boom.

The whole tart can't be assembled too far in advance (a couple of hours, max), and is best served straight away while it still looks pretty and the pastry is still crisp! (Having said that, I found that the remaining leftover slice made a delicious, if rather ugly-looking, snack the next day).

Classic French Strawberry Tart

The crisp pastry, crumbling messily into the rich, vanilla-flecked custard, with the sweet-sharp floral strawberries is just incredible! Super summery and perfect for dessert, for afternoon tea, or for any occasion, really! Find some great berries and make this tart!

Classic French Strawberry Tart

I loved this with strawberries, but I'm dying to try it with fresh raspberries! As soon as I can get my hands on some fabulous (and not too pricey) raspberries, I'll be making it again.

Classic French Strawberry Tart
Recipe adapted from Nigel Slater

Ingredients
2 x 250 gram punnets of strawberries
For the Almond Pastry
150 grams plain flour
100 grams cold unsalted butter
50 grams almond meal
50 grams caster sugar
1 egg yolk
For the Vanilla-Bean Crème Pâtissière
250 millilitres full cream milk
1 vanilla pod, split and seeds scraped
4 egg yolks
75 grams caster sugar
2 tablespoons plain flour

Method
To make the pastry, place the flour in a large mixing bowl. Chop the butter into small pieces and rub into the flour using your fingertips until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Add the almond meal and caster sugar and stir through. Add the egg yolk and mix using your hands. Roll into a large sausage shape. (If it is a warm day, you may need to refrigerate the dough to let it firm up).
Slice into thin rounds and press into a 20cm fluted tart tin with a removable base. (N.B. this recipe makes more dough than you need for a 20cm tin - bake the remaining dough into biscuits. Delicious!)
Prick the dough all over with a fork, and refrigerate for thirty minutes.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 180C.
Bake the tart shell for 15-20 minutes, or until lightly golden brown and cooked through. Allow to cool slightly in the tin before gently transferring it to a wire rack to cool.
To make the crème pâtissière, place the milk and vanilla pod into a small saucepan, and bring to a simmer. Turn off the heat and allow to infuse for 15 minutes.
Whisk together the egg yolks, caster sugar and plain flour. Pour approximately 1/3 of the hot milk mixture onto the egg yolks, and whisk to combine. Tip the mixture back into the saucepan, and cook over a low heat, whisking constantly, until thickened. Remove the vanilla pod and tip the custard into a shallow bowl. Cover with greaseproof paper (to prevent a skin forming) and refrigerate until cold.
To assemble the tart, wash and hull the strawberries, and dry on a clean tea towel or paper towel. Scrape the cold crème pâtissière into the pastry case. Top with the clean strawberries. If you aren't eating it straight away, loosely cover with glad wrap and place back in the fridge. I wouldn't leave it longer than an hour or so, though, as the tart is very fragile and is best served straight away!

Nigel Slater's Chicken, Bacon and Leek Pie with a minty broadbean salad

I have really been loving Nigel Slater's Dish of the Day - it's his latest cooking program (it's finished screening now, but it was on Lifestyle Food in Australia and I'm sure will be repeated often), which focuses on his weekly shop, and the different recipes he comes up with throughout the week. I like his style, his enthusiasm, his no-nonsense, unpretentious presentation - in this program, it's all about the food. (Obviously things have changed a bit since his series Real Food (1998), which had excellent recipes, but was also hilariously erotic and full of double entendres. Yes Nigel, let's melt that chocolate "until it is smooth... and sexy", with a saxophone solo playing in the background. Hehehe.) On Dish of the Day, most of what he makes looks delicious, and even when he makes recipes that I wouldn't fancy eating myself, it's always an entertaining and enlightening show.

Compare this to say, Bill (Granger's) Kitchen: Notting Hill, another cooking show that was screening over the same period. I like Bill, I've visited his cafes, own many of his books and enjoy cooking from them, but the Notting Hill series seemed all about showing off his fabulous lifestyle, rather than him making good recipes or imparting any food knowledge, even more so than his previous Sydney-based series. (Just off the top of my head, this series sees him visit London Fashion Week, take a trip to Sweden, set up an impromptu food truck dinner party and generally traipse around Notting Hill).

Ok, so let's get to the topic of the post: Nigel Slater's chicken, bacon and leek pie. I saw him make it on the show, and could not get into the kitchen fast enough to make it myself!

He poached chicken thighs and legs (i.e. marylands) in milk, then pulled the meat off the bones. He sauteed pieces of streaky bacon in butter, then added sliced leeks, followed by the chicken. He added flour, mustard and some of the poaching milk to make a creamy white sauce, then wrapped this delicious mixture up in all-butter puff pastry and baked it until crispy and golden. Oh wow!

I made the pie that same week, guestimating amounts based on what Nigel said on the program (he doesn't use strict weights or measures), and it turned out really well. Hooray! Of course, after I made it and I was writing up my version of the recipe for this post, I googled it and found that the original recipe, with precise weights and measures, is already online - d'oh! I was pleased to see, however, that my version was pretty similar to the original recipe - clearly I had been paying attention to the program!

Making the pie is a little fiddly and time consuming, and I spent a pleasant weekend afternoon pottering about the kitchen making it. Perfect weekend activity for this cold weather, don't you think?

Here are the chicken pieces, about to be poached in milk.

Chicken marylands poaching in milk with onion, peppercorns and bay leaves

Another important ingredient: bacon.

Peter Bouchier dry-cured streaky bacon

I saw this Peter Bouchier bacon at the David Jones food hall in the city, and it looked so lovely that I just had to buy it, despite it costing over ten dollars a packet (approx. eight rashers). And you know what? It's frikking amazing! The flavour and smoky aroma is just beautiful, and you can really see that it's made from proper pork - it's a world away from the pale, watery bacon you can get at the supermarket. I'd much rather fork out for bacon like this, and just eat it (much!) less frequently. Seriously good stuff. It also made the kitchen smell so nice as it was frying - bonus!

Making the filling

Assembling the pie

I love how the assembled pie looks like a big petit beurre biscuit!

Puff pastry!

Puff pastry!

As you can see, this recipe makes a very flat, sliceable pie. The pastry-to-filling ratio is very high, which is my idea of heaven. In a totally decadent move, I used two sheets of Careme puff pastry, which are 375 grams each and have many, many buttery layers. Yum.

Pie!

However, if you prefer less pastry (who are you even?) I've got two options for you. First option: use one sheet of Careme puff pastry, but cut it in half and roll both pieces out very thinly to cover the same amount of filling. The second option would be to use a different brand of puff pastry (all butter please, and certainly not reduced fat), which tend to be thinner. Pampas, for example, is about 170 grams per sheet and doesn't puff up nearly as much.

As per Nigel's suggestion, I served the pie with a minty broad bean salad. I defrosted a packet of frozen broad beans in boiling water from the kettle, and then skinned them. I made the dressing by whizzing up some fresh mint leaves with extra virgin olive oil and lemon juice, and tossed the lot with some baby spinach and rocket leaves. (If you weren't serving this salad with the pie, then some goats cheese would make a lovely addition).

Broad bean salad

Nigel Slater's chicken, bacon and leek pie with minty broad bean salad

Yum, yum, yum! This pie was such a stunner! So buttery, bacony and all around delicious! I found that leftovers re-heated amazingly well in the sandwich press at work.

Interestingly enough, Nigel suggests this recipe as an economical way of eking out expensive free range chicken bought from the butcher. However, once I added the expensive bacon and two sheets of fancy pants Careme puff pastry to my free range chicken pieces, the pie ended up being more expensive than a whole free range or even organic chicken. Oh well, I figure if you're going to eat something this calorie-dense and time consuming to make, you may as well go all out and fill it with wonderful ingredients you're really, really going to love. I think of this pie not as self-sacrificing budget cookery, but a really lovely, all-out, once-in-a-while treat. Definitely a dinner-party contender (although you're a better person than I if you're able to share it). Enjoy!

Chicken, Bacon and Leek Pie
Adapted from Nigel Slater's Dish of the Day

Ingredients
2 chicken marylands
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 bayleaf
1 small onion
1 clove
Milk (enough to cover the chicken pieces)
6 rashers smoked streaky bacon
30 grams butter
1 leek
3 tablespoons plain flour
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
2 x 375 grams packets of puff pastry (I used Careme)
1 egg, beaten
A little grated Parmesan cheese, for the top

Method
Place the chicken pieces into a pot in which they fit snugly. Add the peppercorns and bayleaf. Stud the onion with the clove and add it to the pot. Pour over enough milk to cover the chicken. Bring to the boil, then turn the heat down to a simmer and cook for 25 minutes or until the chicken is cooked through. Lift the chicken out to a separate plate to cool down. Once the chicken has cooled enough to handle, flake the chicken meat and skin into pieces, discarding the bones.
Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 200C and place a baking tray in the oven to heat up.
Cut the bacon into postage-stamp sized pieces, and fry them in the butter until crisp. Finely slice the leeks, add them to the pan and cook until softened.
Add the chicken to the pan with the bacon and stir to combine.
Add the flour and cook for 2 -3 minutes. Add two ladlefuls of the cooked milk, stirring all the while so the sauce doesn't go lumpy. (No need to be precise about the amount, just keep adding enough milk to make a thick sauce that holds the meat together). Add the Dijon mustard. Allow the mixture to cool slightly before assembling the pie.
Roll out one sheet of pastry onto a large piece of baking paper. Top the pastry with the filling, leaving a 2 centimetre border. Brush the border with beaten egg, and top with the second piece of pastry. Crimp the edges to seal. Brush the top with more beaten egg, then score a pattern into the pastry with a sharp knife. Poke some steam holes in the top. Grate some Parmesan cheese over.
Use the baking paper to transfer the pie to the tray in the oven, and bake for 35-45 minutes, or until the pastry is golden brown and cooked through, and the filling is piping hot.
Serve with a green salad.
Serves 6-8

Christmas Roundup! I've had a lot of fun over Christmas this year. I'm not religious at all, but I do love all the secular aspects of the holiday season, all the ritual and tradition: the food, the gifts, the food, the decorations, the food, the time off work, the food, spending time with family and friends... and the food! (That was shamelessly quoted from the latest episode of Miranda!)

Of course, I'll still be doing my Unblogged Files for December (I'm pretty proud of myself for keeping that up the whole year, by the way!), as well as a "2012 in Review"-type post, summarising my blog this year... but to try and keep December's Unblogged Files to a reasonable length (and because I clearly love round-up posts!) I've decided to do a little Christmas round-up post too!

The Christmas season started with a party at a friends' house, to which I brought my mince pies. I loved the spread of baked goods - super cute!

Christmas Spread

I did get teased for requesting a cup of tea at 10pm on a Saturday night - how very Miranda of me! - but you just can't have mince pies and shortbread without tea!

That evening we were also treated to a fabulous Christmas pudding made by a friend's aunt. It was flambéed and served with a crème anglaise, made by another friend who is a professional trained chef. (Obviously this is where we got the idea to serve our own pudding with vanilla crème anglaise!)

Pretty flames!

Pudding with custard

As you know, my Christmas Cake this year was Nigel Slater's Christmas Cake. That's another thing I love about Christmas: dried fruit and spices galore!

Nigel Slater's Christmas Cake

We had a fab picnic in the Botanic Gardens - it was perfect weather too! (Yay for a Southern Hemisphere Christmas!)

Botanic Gardens

We had a great afternoon, drinking rosé, eating picnicky food (cheese, dips, salami etc.) and generally soaking up the atmosphere. Love!

Spread

Milk chocolate and salted peanut blondies

Mmm... gooey...

One piece

And of course, there was our big Turkey dinner, held on Christmas Eve at my parents' place.

Christmas Dinner

I also wanted to show you some of the cool foodie gifts I got! These cute and pretty ceramic pieces from Kikki K's new home range (I love the little bowl so much - it really makes me smile!), these fab "Delicup Lunch" containers from my brother in Japan, and The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook!

Gifts

I bought this cute Hario Mini-Mill Slim Plastic Coffee Grinder from Sensory Lab for Sandra, as well as a bag of Chompy beans. The guys at Sensory Lab were so nice and helpful when I went to buy it - despite being busy, they gave me loads of time and advice, and even ground up a few samples of coffee for me to take home, so that I could see what the different grinds are supposed to look like for different brewing methods. How nice is that? Thanks guys!!

Coffee Grinder

Christmas also means Christmas leftovers. Breakfast on Christmas day was leftover Christmas pudding, fried in butter (eep!) and served with a little quenelle of creme fraiche.

Leftover Christmas Pudding

I also used the leftover Christmas pudding to make Christmas Puddini Bonbons again. I've been whipping them out whenever people pop in. (As well as some fancy German Christmas biscuits that my Dad bought us, and some coconut rough that I got at the newly opened Yarra Valley Chocolaterie).

Sweetmeats

I made a couple of fun things with the leftover turkey, including the Best Sandwich Ever! White bread, turkey, crispy bacon, lettuce, avocado, tomato and cranberry.

T-BLAT Sandwich

And because sometimes even I can get tired of Christmas food: I made Fuchsia Dunlop's claybowl chicken, using leftover turkey. Essentially it's just cold cooked turkey, dressed in a mixture of sesame paste, soy sauce, black vinegar, sesame oil and loads of chilli oil, tossed with crunchy roasted peanuts and sesame seeds and topped with pungent coriander and spring onions. Spicy, low-carb and punchily flavourful - it's the antithesis of Christmas food, and totally delicious.

Claybowl Turkey

Last night, we had a lobster dinner at our place - I do hope this becomes a yearly tradition! Essentially it was a rehash of last year's lobster dinner, but I improved on the lobster salad recipe (blogpost and recipe to come), and I baked my own challah for the bun. (Yes, for realsies!)

Lobster Salad in Challah (And yes I do realise how wrong that sounds!)

And finally, today we had a little latke party at my friend Jess' house.  I know we were a bit late for Hanukkah, but there's never a bad time for latkes!

Potato latkes with applesauce and creme fraiche

Jess made fab potato latkes, and we had a go making apple latkes too. I'll blog them in more detail soon - you all need fried potato pancakes in your life! Jess does her latkes very simply: just potatoes, flour and egg. So delicious! Just quietly, I like them better than Nigella's latkes from How to Eat!

Hope you all had a great festive season and enjoyed some good food and quality time with those nearest and dearest!! What are your favourite things to do over the break?

Nigel Slater's Christmas cake, Pyengana Cheddar

It's the Friday night before Christmas, and I've taken Monday off work, so it's going to be a five-day weekend for me. Woohoo! It's been a hectic few weeks, but I finally have some time for a little rest! We're having our big festive family feast on Christmas Eve, and we already did all the shopping tonight after work. Gifts are (finally) all organised too! So for now all I need to do is curl up on the couch with a thick slice of Christmas cake and a mug of tea. Bliss!

For this year's Christmas cake, I decided to return to an old favourite: Nigel Slater's Christmas Cake. The recipe appears in his books: Appetite, (where it's simply, and aptly, titled: "A Big Fruit Cake"), and also in The Kitchen Diaries. Luckily for those of you who don't have these books, it's also available online - Nigel has posted the Christmas Cake recipe in his Guardian column.

The last time I made it was three years ago (see Christmas Cake post here) and it was definitely due for a repeat! (Just quietly, I like Nigel's Christmas Cake much better than Nigella's Classic Christmas Cake. Although having said that, I remember really liking her Chocolate Fruit Cake - so perhaps I'll give that a go again next year).

But, back to Nigel's cake: I baked it at the start of the month, and let it mature for twenty torturous days, only digging into it this week! Please, a round of applause at my amazing self-restraint. (Well, I did have a little sneak preview, but I'll tell you about that below).

Ingredients

I chose Calvados for my "feeding brandy" of choice - I got the idea from the lovely Gemma at Dressing for Dinner, and thought it sounded amazing. I still have the expensive bottle of Calvados I bought almost seven years ago for my Sarah Discovers How to Eat project - it's been with me through five jobs and three houses, and you know what? It was time to stop saving it and start enjoying it!

That's not to say that I'd be pouring the Calvados willy nilly - this is definitely a cake worthy of a $70 bottle of booze! I love the buff, cappuccino-coloured batter...

Obligatory whisk shot

I also really like the pleasing graininess of the different dried fruits. I found a packet of "fruit salad" dried fruits at the supermarket, which contained pretty much the perfect amounts of dried apples, pears, peaches, apricots and prunes, and were of an impressive quality. I just needed to add some dried figs and glacé cherries.

"Fruit Salad" mixed dried fruits

There are, of course, sultanas, raisins, currants and dried cranberries!

Cranberries, raisins, sultanas, currants

The whole cake is pretty easy to make - in fact, the hardest thing about it is chopping up all the sticky dried fruits. But it's worth it - look how pretty they all are - like gleaming jewels!

Christmas cake batter

Cake, pre-baking

I bought a deep 20-cm tin years ago, but have no idea where I put it, so I ended up using a normal 20cm springform tin and had quite a bit of batter leftover. I baked the remainder in mini-foil muffin tins. Cute, right?

Mini Christmas Cakes

This also meant that - muahaha! - I got to eat one on the same day it was baked! Christmas cake always smells so good baking, and it's so hard not digging in straight away! Of course, they taste better after having matured, but that freshly-baked aroma is just too tantalising to resist...

Mini Christmas cake on day of baking

Shall we have a look at the large cake, after its maturation time?

Christmas cake

I'm know there's a school of thought that prefers cute little mini-Christmas cakes, especially all tied up in pretty ribbons to be given as gifts. (And if there's a time to indulge your love of twee and dainty crafts, surely Christmas is it). However, I actually love the glorious, hefty stodginess of one large cake - especially when it's undecorated. It's so uncompromisingly old-fashioned and plain - no need for bells and whistles, white icing or the like. It practically cries out: "I am fruitcake, love me".

Christmas cake

Honestly, I know that one full-sized fruitcake is far too much for one household to eat over the Christmas period. Rather than trying to scale it down, however, I love the idea of gifting people generous wedges of the cake, wrapped up rustically in waxed paper and tied with kitchen string.

Christmas cake

As you've seen, I've been eating this cake with a sharp cheddar on the side. I fell in love with the sharp-cheese-sweet-spiced-pastry combo back when I made Heston Blumenthal's Eccles Cake with Potted Stilton. At the time, my friend Kate suggested Christmas cake with a sharp cheese as an alternative, and ever since then I've been looking forward to trying this out. (And if you think about it, it's not too different from having dried fruit on a cheeseboard.) Such a fabulous combination! I felt it was a rather grown-up, chic way of serving the cake. (If "chic" is really a word you can apply to fat wodges of British fruit cake and crumbly cheese!)

If you love fruit cake like me, then this truly is the one to try.

I am super, duper excited for Christmas!! Speaking of excitement, I was pretty chuffed when Nigel himself responded to one of my early tweets about the Christmas cake. Fangirl freakout!


I hope Nigel's right! I'm really looking forward to Christmas! I hope you all have a great little break!