Mum is visiting, due to her birthday treat dinner in Dinings. In fact, Mum should be at home at the moment, if certain person hadn’t screwed up her return plane tickets. Certain person did, however , so certain person had to buy two return tickets last night and 200 quid later she could get over it. This afternoon, to make life sweeter, we made karpatka.

The two pastry bases needed to make it are similar to the classic choux pastry. Mum used a glass of water that she boiled and melted half a margarine in it, took it off the heat and added a glass of plain flour mixing vigorously. After it all cools down a  bit, 5 eggs are added, one after another, all worked in before the next one is added. The pastry is to be nice, smooth and shiny. A teaspoon of baking powder and the pastry is ready to be divided in two and baked for about 50 minutes each in 180 Celsius, if still moist inside, needs to go back in to dry out.

The filling is made by cooking budyn, a Polish simple powdered dessert similar to custard, made with milk. For our filling I prepared budyn according to the instructions on the packet PLUS a table spoon of plain flour, it has to be quite thick. When cooled, I blitzed it with half a margarine and some vanilla sugar.

The cake is finished off with a generous amount of icing sugar.

Sunday’s all about good dinner. Must be home made, planned, tasty and worth putting on the blog. Today it was pasta again ( I’ve been wondering, if I had to choose what my last meal on earth would be, it’d be between Italian, some awesome stuffed pasta or Japanese, but I’m yet to try the wagyu beef nigiri with truffle salsa on top, so good thing I don’t need to decide just yet ).

It was supposed to be ravioli, but when Florek rolled out the pasta for me, my fingers somehow shaped it into tortelloni, for a change. The stuffing was very simple, just sauteed, finely chopped shitake and cup mushrooms with some onions and parsley on butter, seasoned with salt and white pepper.  Boiled for about 3 minutes.

The white wine sauce was suggested by Nick, who always seems to have a selection of good ideas up his sleeve whenever we discuss food at work. What an excellent and simple sauce! 2 chopped shallots quickly panfried on butter with a handful of fresh thyme, 250 ml of white wine in ( we went to Majestic to stock up today,  among other things we got 2 bottles of a lovely fruity Iona sauvignon blanc, it was a great and refreshing thing to have in the evening! now I regret we only got 2 of those), 200 ml of double cream added when the wine reduced a little, a touch of dijon mustard, some black pepper, lemon juice, strained and poured over pasta with some freshly grated parmesan. I loved the flavours.  Really did. Could have had more!!! 🙂