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mostly pie and books
Oct. 24th, 2015 02:12 pmI'm baking an apple pie at the moment, based on a recipe from my recently acquired copy of Paul Hollywood's Pies and Puds. I adapted the crust slightly by adding a teaspoon of cider vinegar--a trick I got from one of Rose Levy Beranbaum's books and which makes a very flaky crust--omitted the cheese layer Hollywood adds to the filling, and added a little bit of nutmeg. Just nutmeg, no cinnamon or anything, because I wanted a pie I could eat with cheese even though I didn't want cheese actually in the pie. I also got ambitious and decorated it with pastry leaves and grapes. The leaves look fantastic, far beyond the slight effort it took to make them. (Use a round cutter to cut out pastry circles from the dough scraps, then use the same cutter to cut from each edge to the center, making two leaves. Score to make the vein pattern.) It just now occurs to me that I could have made pastry apples instead of grapes, but oh well. It looks pretty and makes me feel almost like a person who can bake.
Pies and Puds is full of recipes I want to attempt, such as bacon and egg pie; cheese, potato, and onion pie; "Hollywood's Temptation" (a riff on the Swedish dish Janssen's temptation) which features potatoes and smoked salmon in filo pastry; choux buns with mushrooms; lemon and lavender posset with lavender biscuits; and so on. I'm especially drawn to something called Bedfordshire Clangers, which are individual pastry rolls with a ham filling at one end and an apple and pear filling at the other, so you've got your main course and dessert all in one neat package. There's also a game pie recipe, which falls in nicely with my tentative Christmas dinner plans.
( more about baking, possibly more than anyone wants to read )
In life outside of baking, work is . . . work. This week was a bit of a nightmare as we received a ridiculous amount (pretty much a truckload) of Christmas stuff that we can't display yet but have no room to store, also because corporate haven't authorized extra hours yet even though there's a lot of extra work to do. I was so tired yesterday that I went to bed at about 5:30 pm--this is slightly less ridiculous when you consider that I get up M-F at 4:00 am--and slept until almost 8:00 am. I was awake for about an hour at around midnight, but still.
There's not much else going on. I re-read my four preferred Jane Austen novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, in that order) again, and loved them as I always do, and then wished again that there were m/m slash AUs where Darcy courts Bingley and Mr. Knightley adjusts his snobbery enough to realize that he loves his steward, William Larkins. M/m isn't really possible for S&S* or Persuasion, but if there was an AU where Elinor doesn't marry Edward and Colonel Brandon doesn't marry Marianne and the two of them are unconventionally best pals for life, I'd be happy.
*Brandon/Willoughby could be attempted, but I hate Willoughby more with every re-read. Colonel Brandon is too good for him by far.
I've also read Philip Purser-Hallard's The Pendragon Protocol, which is sort of like Kingsman with fantasy elements and more intelligent politics, and enjoyed it enormously. Need to get the second in the series.
We had a book sale at work and I got copies of several of Mark Hodder's novels for cheap. The Burton & Swinburne series ought to be perfect for me: Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) and Algernon Swinburne investigate weird crimes in a steampunk alternate Britain. Alas, the one I'm reading is not well written at all--how is it even possible to make Burton and Swinburne boring?--and I'm having to slog my way through. I keep hoping it'll get better.
ETA: Some pie has been eaten. The filling is delicious. I used four Golden Delicious apples and three Honeycrisp, and the combination is gorgeous. The nutmeg added just the right aroma without overwhelming the apples--much better than cinnamon.
Unfortunately the juiciness of the apples rather overwhelmed the pastry. The edges were lovely and crisp, but the bottom crust especially got soggy. I should have cut the apples a bit thicker and also used more starch in the filling. The recipe didn't call for any, but I used a bit of tapioca starch. Not enough, apparently. Also, to compensate for the high altitude I baked the pie at a slightly lower temperature than called for, so that the crust wouldn't brown before the apples cooked. This may have been a mistake. Using Honeycrisp may also have been part of the problem--it's a very juicy apple--but the taste is too good to want to change.
Definitely not a bad pie, but there's still room for improvement.
Pies and Puds is full of recipes I want to attempt, such as bacon and egg pie; cheese, potato, and onion pie; "Hollywood's Temptation" (a riff on the Swedish dish Janssen's temptation) which features potatoes and smoked salmon in filo pastry; choux buns with mushrooms; lemon and lavender posset with lavender biscuits; and so on. I'm especially drawn to something called Bedfordshire Clangers, which are individual pastry rolls with a ham filling at one end and an apple and pear filling at the other, so you've got your main course and dessert all in one neat package. There's also a game pie recipe, which falls in nicely with my tentative Christmas dinner plans.
( more about baking, possibly more than anyone wants to read )
In life outside of baking, work is . . . work. This week was a bit of a nightmare as we received a ridiculous amount (pretty much a truckload) of Christmas stuff that we can't display yet but have no room to store, also because corporate haven't authorized extra hours yet even though there's a lot of extra work to do. I was so tired yesterday that I went to bed at about 5:30 pm--this is slightly less ridiculous when you consider that I get up M-F at 4:00 am--and slept until almost 8:00 am. I was awake for about an hour at around midnight, but still.
There's not much else going on. I re-read my four preferred Jane Austen novels (Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, and Persuasion, in that order) again, and loved them as I always do, and then wished again that there were m/m slash AUs where Darcy courts Bingley and Mr. Knightley adjusts his snobbery enough to realize that he loves his steward, William Larkins. M/m isn't really possible for S&S* or Persuasion, but if there was an AU where Elinor doesn't marry Edward and Colonel Brandon doesn't marry Marianne and the two of them are unconventionally best pals for life, I'd be happy.
*Brandon/Willoughby could be attempted, but I hate Willoughby more with every re-read. Colonel Brandon is too good for him by far.
I've also read Philip Purser-Hallard's The Pendragon Protocol, which is sort of like Kingsman with fantasy elements and more intelligent politics, and enjoyed it enormously. Need to get the second in the series.
We had a book sale at work and I got copies of several of Mark Hodder's novels for cheap. The Burton & Swinburne series ought to be perfect for me: Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) and Algernon Swinburne investigate weird crimes in a steampunk alternate Britain. Alas, the one I'm reading is not well written at all--how is it even possible to make Burton and Swinburne boring?--and I'm having to slog my way through. I keep hoping it'll get better.
ETA: Some pie has been eaten. The filling is delicious. I used four Golden Delicious apples and three Honeycrisp, and the combination is gorgeous. The nutmeg added just the right aroma without overwhelming the apples--much better than cinnamon.
Unfortunately the juiciness of the apples rather overwhelmed the pastry. The edges were lovely and crisp, but the bottom crust especially got soggy. I should have cut the apples a bit thicker and also used more starch in the filling. The recipe didn't call for any, but I used a bit of tapioca starch. Not enough, apparently. Also, to compensate for the high altitude I baked the pie at a slightly lower temperature than called for, so that the crust wouldn't brown before the apples cooked. This may have been a mistake. Using Honeycrisp may also have been part of the problem--it's a very juicy apple--but the taste is too good to want to change.
Definitely not a bad pie, but there's still room for improvement.
