I saw them being made on GBBO, obviously from scratch, puff pastry and all. I ordered the cute, metal horns from Amazon to make them with and today did, to have something sweet when my man comes home after 2 long weeks in Canada. I bought my puff though.

They were fun to make, to roll onto the horns, painted with egg yolk and baked till golden. When cold I piped in some vanilla whipped cream with fresh strawberries. I intended to dip the front in chocolate too, but forgot to buy chocolate. Next time I won’t forget, there will be plenty of next times, the horns are sheer delight.

Yup, they look like they’re ready for Halloween.  I admit, I didn’t do a great job mixing the food colourant with the rest of the ingredients, I wonder if kitchen aid would do a better job, only I wouldn’t be quite following the recipe. We’ll see. For now, we’re having tea and the scary macaroons stuffed with rhubarb filling. If I were to make improvements, I’d add more rhubarb, than the 280 g that I had. Experience now shows they taste best when the filling is sharp, lemon, yuzu kinda sharp, raspberries- the contrast with sweet almond cookie is then delightful. I made the filling with 280 g of chopped rhubarb, quickly cooked with 3 tbps of sugar till falling apart, then a packet of unsweetened budyn smietankowy mixed with 1/3 of a glass of water- in. All mixed together, nice, tasty, but a touch too sweet, this sharp contrast is missing today.

Still. Being eaten and quite quickly. 🙂

All my ambitious plans of flattening my stomach again are pointless. I love eating too much. I can’t just have 1 eclair, I have 3, with beautiful whipped vanilla cream and the coffee glaze dripping down my fingers. So much more pleasure than sweating on the floor with Ewa Chodakowska, hoping to lose 2 kg around the stomach. Sorry Ewa, eclairs 1, you- 0.

Eclairs were one of the challenges for the Bake Off contestants last Wednesday. Most of them were mixing plain flour with the strong one, hoping to make the choux more stable and drier. I tried that trick, I thought my choux was excellent, but whether it was due to that addition or not, not sure.

For the pastry I used 105g of flour, 30 g of which was  a strong one, 85 g of butter melted in 225 ml of water, a pinch of salt and 3 lightly beaten eggs. Until today I didn’t know I should really cool the flour/ butter/water mix before I add the eggs, now I know. The end result- smooth and shiny dough, ready for the piping bag.

I piped my eclairs quite small, that made me around 16 of them. The sight of eclairs rising in the oven is lovely, I was watching them with Izzie. One day I’ll teach her to bake with me.

They baked for about 25 minutes in 200 degrees, then I got them out of the oven, made a small hole in each and returned them in for another 4 minutes to dry them out.

When ready for dessert, I stuffed them with vanilla cream and finished with coffee glaze- just a double espresso with about 5 tbsps of icing sugar. Keeps nicely in the fridge, our eclairs are being enjoyed for 3 consecutive evenings. Yum.

I was looking for a recipe for chocolate muffins as a form of down payment to Florian, who finally, after months of nagging, begging, threats of suicide and slashing veins agreed to complete the thresholds in the kitchen.  The search engine on mojewypieki.com showed only 800 recipes for muffins, but I went with these, as I happened to have some plums and not enough chocolate to make the chocckie ones.

Easy, quick, yummy. For 12 muffins I used 2 tall glasses of plain flour, a tsp each of soda and baking powder, 120 g of sugar, 2 eggs, beaten, half a glass of sunflower oil, 300 g of soured cream and 5 medium plums, chopped in small pieces.Also, a handful of chocolate chips. All dry ingredients combined, all wet ingredients added, into paper muffin cases, baked in 180 degrees for 25 minutes.  Very pleasant indeed. 🙂

I’m pretty confident with macaroon making now. With good recipe (Dorota’s), good pastry thermometer and now excellent food colourants- Wilton’s- I feel I could make them for sale! Cocky!!!

It does take a good few hours in the kitchen, but the batch I’ve made today are perfect. The look excellent, they taste great, tomorrow Ewa and Co will be tasting them and giving their verdict. My stuffing was made with a good splosh of yuzu juice, alongside lemon curd and mascarpone. I’m very happy with the lot.

Yum, yum, yum. We’re half way through it. 🙂 Recipe from the latest GF, plums on offer in Ocado, which helped, as normally they’re a bit too pricey.

Also, the pastry is bordering on awesome. I used half a portion given in the magazine to make a small pie for us 2. So 113 g of cold butter got processed with 175 g of plain flour until looking like breadcrumbs. 25 g of icing sugar, 1 egg yolk and a splash of water to bind it. Chilled.

About 450 g of plums, stoned and chopped in quarters, along with 50 g of sugar and a tbsp of cornflour very quicky simmered, until they started giving away the juice. They they sat in a sieve over a bowl to let the juices go, about 30 mins.  Some marzipan got purchased too, golden marzipan from Sainsbury’s, very decent, unlike Dr Oetker’s bought last time. Not much to do with almonds.

When the pastry was chilled and ready, I lined my small round tin, sprinkled some ground almonds on it, then the plums, which had a small addition of almond extract. I’m not a massive fan myself and might just skip it next time. Chopped marzipan, around 100 g got scattered around the plums and then the top layer of the pastry, brushed with egg white and baked for less than 30 mins in 190 degrees.

I love the pastry. It’s buttery, flaky, not too sweet. I’m thinking it would be fantastic with apples.  It’s great. A keeper. 🙂