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Kamis, 14 Mei 2020

Easy Jam Tarts

Mei 14, 2020

When I was a child, it was a real treat when my mother made us jam tarts! It didn't happen very often, to say the least. I don't know why. They are not really very hard to make. She tended to only make them if she had leftover pastry . . .

And usually any leftover pastry went to make Petes de Soeur (um . . . Nun's Farts) or weiner rolls. Weiner rolls were much more popular with my dad so they got made the most often. My mother would roll the scraps out thinly, spread them with mustard and wrap them around hotdogs before baking.

To be honest, we all loved them. So nobody was complaining. Not at all. They were like the ultimate hotdog. I have tried them with fancy mustards through the years, but really . . . old fashioned French's American mustard is the best.

I found myself having quite a few small pots of Bonne Maman jam that needed using up. I had gotten them for Christmas, and so today I decided to use them to make us some jam tarts. I didn't make really large ones. Just tiny bite sized ones.

I cut them out using the 2 inch flower cutter from my old Tupperware cookie cutter set. (I think I have had that for about 40 years or so!) I used my brioche bun tins to bake them in. They worked wonderfully.

My jams were Plum, Apricot, Cherry, and Strawberry. Four tiny pots did all 30 tarts. Believe it or not.

The thing you want to remember about jam and baking is this . . . hot jam expands! You don't need an awful lot in each tart. About 1/2 tsp in each of my small tarts was perfectly ample.

I have learned the hard way through the years that hot jam on hot tins is no fun to clean up afterwards . . . and the tarts end up sticking to your pan. Better to have less jam and to be able to remove them without them breaking up.

These were lovey and to be honest, because they were so tiny, you didn't feel really guilty scarfing down two or three of them . . .

Have I ever told you how much I love pastry?

And jam? Well I love both of those things immensely!

So I think you can tell that I really REALLY loved these!

Easy Jam Tarts

Yield: 30 small tarts

Author: Marie Rayner

This is one of Todd's favourite treats. Crisp buttery pastry filled with dabs of sweet jam. You can do a rainbow of tarts if you have a few different types. Do NOT overfill the tarts. A little dab will do you!

Ingredients:

For the pastry:

140g all purpose flour (1 cup)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 TBS butter
2 1/2 TBS lard
3 to 4 tablespoons of ice water

You will also need:

jam to fill them (I used apricot, cherry, plum and strawberry)

Instructions:

First make the pastry. Mix flour with salt, and cut in butter and lard, until you have pieces of fat in the flour about the size of peas. Add ice water, one TBS at a time, tossing it in with a fork until pastry comes together. Form in to a ball, flatten, wrap in cling film and chill in the refrigerator for about half an hour.
Preheat the oven to 200*C/400*F/ gas mark 6. Have ready some tart tins. I sprayed mine with some canola cooking spray to keep anything from sticking. As I was using individual tins, I placed them onto a baking sheet.
Roll your pastry out, using a floured rolling pin, and on a lightly floured surface to 1/8 inch thickness. Using a 2 inch cutter (I used a flower shaped one) stamp our rounds and use them to line your tart tins. Gather up any scraps and repeat until all of your pastry is used.
Fill each tart with about 1/2 tsp of jam. Bake in the preheated oven for about 10 to 12 minutes, until crisp, golden and the jam is bubbling. Let cool in the tins for a few minutes before removing to a wire rack to cool completely.
Enjoy with a hot cuppa. Store any leftovers in an airtight container.

Did you make this recipe?

Tag @marierayner5530 on instagram and hashtag it #EnglishKitchen

Created using The Recipes Generator

I cooked us a fantastic roast chicken recipe today, so you might want to get yourself in a roasting chicken this weekend. I promise you won't be sorry. It was the most delicious chicken we have eaten in a while! (And we eat chicken a lot!) Oh, and get a couple lemons and some fresh thyme also. Just a heads up!

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Selasa, 11 Februari 2020

Baking pastry Traditional

Banbury Cakes

Februari 11, 2020

I have a real fondness for the traditional recipes of this country I have come to love and adopt as my homeland. As a child in Canada I often repeated the rhyme taught to me from my nursery rhyme book about riding a horse to Banbury Cross and seeing a lady on a white horse, with bells on her fingers and rings on her toes. Banbury is a real place here in the UK, and the home of these delicious cakes I am sharing with you today.

The recipe is one I have adapted from one of my favourite little baking books, Meg Rivers Home Baking. Published in 2012 it is filled with lovely recipes. Every one I have ever baked has turned out wonderfully perfect and she does give measurements in both linear and metric. I trust it and recommend this book highly.

Banbury cakes are like a round flakey puff pastry turnover, filled with dried fruits, butter spices and sugar. Very similar I think to Eccles Cakes. So they are not cakes in the "Cake" sense of the word, but rather small flaky sweet pies.

The recipe is said to date back to the thirteenth century when crusaders brought dried fruit and exotic spices back with them from their travels in the Crusades. Banbury Cakes are thought to be one of the oldest cake recipes in Britain. They are sweet, spicy, flakey and incredibly moreish when enjoyed straight from the oven. (Although I would let them cool a bit as the sugar is quite hot.)

They are also very easy to make. You simply make a filling of dried currants, raisins, chopped peel, butter, demerera sugar, butter, nutmeg and mixed spice. This gets place in the centre of squares of puff pastry and then folded and pressed above as explained in the recipe below.

If you read the recipe and then look at the photograph it will make perfect sense.

I like to use all butter puff pastry, which I rolled out to a 15 inch square. You don't want it to be much more than 1/8 of an inch thick as it would puff up too much in baking. The pastry then gets cut into 9 squares.

I like to cut my own peel for this. I buy it online, usually around Christmas time when I am making my Christmas Cake. Usually it will arrive with an assortment of whole preserved and dried citrus peels. Lemon, orange, grapefruit, pomelo . . . I used one each of three different peels which I chopped into small bits.

I used sultana raisins, which are also known as golden raisins, and dried black Zante currants. I would suggest if you cannot get dried currants, then you use dark raisins in their place, but do use currants if you can.

For years the growth and importation of black currants was banned in many places in the United States, but they are now making a comeback and are now grown in a few areas. I was able to find a source where you can buy them HERE.

You can also get them on Amazon, but I thought they were a bit pricier than my other source. Of course here in the UK, they are readily available. In Canada you can get them at Bulk Barn, Walmart and I found another source here.

So now you have no excuse not to make these deliciously historic cakes/bakes with black currants! You will find that they come in handy for all sorts. Lovely in cakes and bakes and cookies, salads, etc. and they are filled with goodness.

They actually contain more vitamin C than oranges, which I was surprised to learn. I always thought that oranges were the best source! It seems I was wrong.

In any case you are going to love these beautiful pastry/cakes. They are delicious!

Best eaten warm on the day, but meh . . . nothing has ever stopped me from eating and enjoying a bake again on the second or the third day. I am a pastry lover through and through.

Yield: 9

Author: Marie Rayner

Banbury Cakes

Crispy, buttery and flaky with a beautiful sweet sticky fruit filling.

ingredients:

500g all butter puff pastry (1 pound) chilled
120g demerara sugar (3/4 cup, turbinado sugar)
60g butter (1/4 cup)
120g sultana raisins (scant cup)
120g Zante dried currants (scant cup)
60g mixed candied peel, finely chopped (1/2 cup)
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg
1 tsp mixed spice (see note)
75g granulated sugar (1/3 cup)

instructions:

How to cook Banbury Cakes

Preheat the oven to 200*C/400*F/gas mark 6. Line two baking sheets with baking parchment. Set aside.
Measure all of the fruit, spices, peel and butter into a bowl along with the demerara sugar. Mix well together, using your hands, until the mixture begins to clump and you can shape it into balls. Shape into 9 evenly sized balls.
Roll the chilled puff pastry out on a lightly floured surface to a 15 inch square, no more than 1/8 inch thick. Cut into nine 5-inch squares. Place a ball of fruit filling into the centre of each square. Bring four corners up over the filling to meet in the middle and pinch shut. Pinch all of the 4 sides shut as well. Flip over and lightly flatten into a circle in the palm of your hand. Using a rolling pin, with the folds on the bottom, gently roll into circles which are 4 inches in diameter, and about 1/2 inch thick.
Brush the tops lightly with some water. Measure the granulated sugar into a bowl and lightly press the wet tops of the cakes into the sugar.
Place onto the baking sheets, leaving plenty of space in between. Using a sharp knife, make three slashes into the top of each.
Bake in the preheated oven for 25 minutes. Allow to cool on the baking sheets. Best eaten on the day.

NOTES:

MAKE YOUR OWN MIXED SPICE:
You can easily make your own mixed spice: Combine 1 TBS ground cinnamon, 1 tsp each of ground coriander and nutmeg, 1/2 tsp of ground ginger, 1/4 tsp each of ground cloves and all spice. Mix well and store in an airtight container out of the light for up to 6 months.