Ultimate apple pie

Today we visited Andy's friend and his family and I brought this ultimate apple pie.

I've been thinking about what to make without eggs the whole week because Andy's friend doesn't eat eggs, and I eventually settled on the ultimate Autumn & Winter classic, apple pie.

We cut the pie after the amazing food Andy's friend's wife cooked for us. The prawn curry and mushroom rice was so tasty! I loved it when we had the pie, their 5 year-old boy grabbed the pie, ate it and gave me a big smile. Not only that, he tried to eat my piece too! I take that as a big compliment for my apple pie. :D

Thanks so much to the Kumar for the lovey time.

Ingredients:

Puff pastry 1 (see here)

Apple confiture 150g (see here)

Apple 5

Sugar 50g

Lemon juice 1 tbsp

Raisin 2-3 tbsp

Almond slice 2-3 tbsp

Apricot jam 3 tbsp

Water 1 tsp

1. Cut apples into small pieces, and cook with sugar and lemon juice in a pan over medium heat until the liquid from the apples is reduced and thickened.

2. Preheat the oven to 190ºc. Make puff pastry. Roll out the pastry onto tart tin.

3. Spread apple confiture on the bottom of the pie. Put cooked apples and raisins on top. Sprinkle almonds.

4. Decorate the top of the pie with remaining pastry. Bake in the preheated oven for 40 minutes or until the pie is golden.

5. Mix apricot jam and water and put in the microwave for 30 second. While the pie is hot, glaze the pie with thinned apricot jam.

Chestnuts Swiss roll

From my older posts some people might know by now that I'm a big fan of Swiss roll. And here we are again..., another day with a slice or two of mouth melting Swiss roll.

This time I went for a taste of Autumn and Winter, chestnuts! I added a good amount of chestnut jam in the sponge as well as in the butter cream in the middle.

I probably put a little too much of butter cream in the middle (because I'm a greedy monkey...) so I struggled to roll up the sponge a bit but it did taste amazing...

Even though I knew exactly how much butter and sugar went into the whole cake, I could not resist the second piece... (well anyway, I have a policy that I don't care about the calories when it comes to cakes and sweets...)

Have you seen my other Swiss rolls and the recipe?
Grape jam Swiss roll
Blackberry and cream cheese Swiss roll

Happy Anniversary!

Happy Anniversary!

Two years ago, we flew to Las Vegas and got married. Lots of things, some of which I've never thought of on our wedding day, have happened in two year. Baby... house... etc...

Thank you, Andy, for being the awesome husband, the best friend, and the coolest dad for Lana.

I love you. XXX

Three tier cream cake

For dessert at Steve's party, I made a super creamy vanilla sponge cake. I wanted the cake to be simple but also look a bit special, so I did three tiers. :)

I baked two sheets of sponge cake (the same sponge as the Swiss roll sponge), and made big Swiss rolls for the bottom and middle tiers. I put vanilla flavoured whipped cream in the middle and decorated also with a generous amount of cream.

It was creamy! Super über creamy! Cream with a nice and light sponge, just how I like it! I love cream...I am a cream monster. I must have had a quarter of the bottom tier...  It did definitely fill my cake hole.

Thanks to Steve for a lovely eveing and awsome fireworks!

Bread bowls

Yesterday we had a fireworks party at Steve's and I brought some edible bowls for his vege chilli beans (which was the best vege chilli I've ever had!)

The bowls were made of wholemeal bread. I covered a china bowl with foil and shaped the bread dough into a long thin sausage to wrap around the bowl. After the first bake, I took the china bowl and the foil out, glazed the bread bowl with egg and bake it again to give a nice shine.

The bread bowls looked like medieval pots... Andy kept coming back to the kitchen with a bowl and funny walk pretending to be a man from medieval times.

I had Steve's chilli in my bowl, went back for a second bowl before I ate it. ;) It felt quite liberating to eat the bowl but I was so full after destroying it.

Rye bread with dates

I made another rye bread with my rye flour sourdough starter. This time I added some dates and date syrup. Unlike last time I used rye flour only, which I think made the bread even denser.

I baked in a mini loaf tin and the bread came out so solid and dark that it looked like a brick. I thought "If I get hit by this, that could actually hurt me..." Cutting the bread was tough too. I felt like I was sawing the bread rather than cutting...

Anyway, the bread tasted good. Because it was quite hard, I needed to chew more, which made me eat less. (good good... :D) I also tried dipping into my pumpkin soup. That was amazing! The unique flavour and bit of saltiness of rye flour brought the sweetness of pumpkin very well.

All in all, these rock hard mini loaves weren't not bad at all. ;D

Sweet potato and apple pie

Winter is coming... It's time for nice comforting treats so I made these mini pies filled with sweet potato cream and apple confiture.

I make the fillings and puff pastry myself but if you can't find time to do all that, use a ready made puff pastry and apple jam. (I don' know if you can find sweet potato cream in a shop... maybe you've got a time to make sweet potato cream yourself?) Then all you've got to do is to roll out the pastry and put the jam and cream... and bake!
The super cute and tasty pies will be ready in less than a hour. Glaze the pies with thinned apricot jam to make it pretty. ;)

I like these mini pies a lot but I think Andy liked them even more... He kept going back to them. What a nice complement to a baker. :D