Vanilla & Matcha mille feuille

I made puff pastry for Andy because he wanted to make a French biscuit that required puff pastry. (I forgot the name of it but the sweet and crunchy biscuits were very nice... so good that they were gone before we had a chance to take photos...)

With the left over puff pastry, I made mille feuille. One with vanilla custard cream and the other with matcha (green tea) custard cream. The puff pastry puffed up a little too much for mille feuille (I should have rolled the pastry thinner... ;( ... ), but they tasted great, anyway.

As I've mentioned many times in the past, I love green tea, and green tea custard is not an exception! It's so good... and a great variation of vanilla custard. Mix one tea spoon of green tea powder with one tea spoon of water, and add the mixture into the vanilla custard.

Enjoy an European style dessert and a taste of Japan at the same time! ;D

Chestnut tart

As I mentioned on the previous post, now I've got a lot of chestnut jam, I will be making quite a few chestnuts stuff. :D

First off, it's a chestnut tart! I put a generous amount of chestnut jam in the filling. The tart is simple but the combination of the sweet pastry and dense, moist, aromatic chestnut filling is for me a perfect winter treat.

A few slices of that and a hot milky tea in front of TV.., what else do we need...?

Ingredients:

Sweet pastry 1 (see here)

Chestnut jam 200g (see here)

Almond powder 100g

Egg 1

Sugar 50g

Cream 50g

1. Prepare the sweet pastry. Line the pastry on a 9 inch tart tin. Prick the bottom of the tart case with a fork. Rest it in the freezer.

2. Preheat the oven to 180ºc. Make the filling. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and mix well.

3. Pour the mixture into the tart case. Bake in the preheated oven for 45 minutes.

Chestnuts foraging

The other day we went for chestnut foraging. We found an awesome spot! Not only were there a looooot of chestnuts on the ground, but also some chestnuts were falling from the trees while I was picking them. We got four big shopping bags full of chestnuts (we could have got more..., but we thought we shouldn't be greedy...)

Back in the kitchen, I took the chestnut out from the spiky shells (ouch ouch ouch..., it was a real pain on our fingers!) and peeled the hard shells. The whole preparation even before cooking took 3 days!

Most of the chestnuts were made into chestnut jam. Now I've got 8 pots of jams to use for my breads and cakes!

I've already made some chestnuts bread. They are now back in stock on The World of Sweets - Bakery -, better be quick or they will be all gone! (... and the good new is..., the delivery is FREE* too!)

*Ipswich and surrounding areas only.

Croissant with raisin starter

After making the tiny croissants, I had an urge to make proper croissants.

This time I decided to use no yeast but my raisin starter. For the raisin starter, I do the same as the raisin yeast, then combine the liquid with the same amount of flour. I feed the starter for 3 days (I do 'water : flour = 1:1').
I've explained it very simply here but the makings of a starter is a bit more complicated than that and needs a great deal of attention... I'm still experimenting in order to achieve 'the one'. Anyway..., hopefully I will be able to share the details of the raisin starter on another post some time soon.

So... back to the croissants! The process of folding a sheet of butter is very similar to puff pastry. I have made an illustration below to show you how to do it. Hope that will help. ;) One thing to remember is to work quickly in order to keep the butter cold. We don't want the butter to melt into the dough.

After hours of preparation, I finally got my croissants! They weren't as airy as French ones, but still nice and crisp, very good indeed! I say they are more like 'Le Croissant au Japon' (forgive my french...;D). They were so addictive that I had a few for breakfast and five (or maybe more... I lost count...) for lunch... They didn't make it for dinner...

I shouldn't think about the amount of butter I consumed from them..., well, I don't care... I went for a run the following morning anyway...;)

Ingredients:

Raisin starter 200g

Flour 400g

Milk 200g

Sugar 50g

Butter 40g

Salt pinch

Butter (for folding in) 230g

1. Take the raisin starter out from the fridge to bring it to room temperature.

2. Combine all the ingredients and knead in the standing mixer for 10 minutes.

3. Leave it in the fridge overnight.

4. Prepare butter for folding in the dough. Wrap the butter with cling film and make a sheet of 20cmx 20cm square. Rest it in the fridge.

5. Take put the dough from fridge and roll it out to 40cm x 40cm square.

6. Fold the butter in (see below for how to do it). Chill in the fridge for 1 hour.

7. Repeat the process two more times.

8. Wrap the dough in a cling film and rest it overnight.

9. Roll out the dough to 3-4mm thickness. Cut each edge so that you have a nice rectangle shape.

10. Cut the dough into triangles. Make a small cut on the short side.

11. Roll the triangle from the wide end to the pointed end. Place the croissants on a baking tray, cover with a cling film, and leave them for 3-4 hours.

12. Preheat the oven to 200ºc.

13. Egg wash the croissants and bake in the preheated oven for 30 minutes or until the croissants are lightly brown.

Nata de coco

When I was a kid a thing called Nata de coco became massively popular in Japan and I loved it, but I haven't seen it for a while and totally forgotten about it until a few weeks ago... I went to a local Asian food shop and found a jar of Nata de coco. I was like..."...what's this? Na..ta...de...coco...?!, wow! Nata de coco!" I bought it immediately. :)

So..., what is Nata de coco? It is a sweet chewy coconut gel product, which is often served with ice cream, jelly, or fruits.  (I don't really know a great deal about it.. maybe you can go on Wikipedia...).

I made a tropical looking jelly with Nata de coco. I added a bit of banana flavouring into a coloured jelly (It's a blue banana!) and topped it up with cream, apricot jam and coconut flakes.

The unique texture and exotic flavour of Nata de coco reminded me of my childhood breakfast..., (my mum used to give this to us with yoghurt....) Aah, nostalgic... ;)

源氏パイもどき… (Genji Pie)

There is a snack called 源氏パイ (Genji Pie) in Japan, which is a sweet heart shaped small pie. So..., I made an attempt to create something similar to that with my left over puff pastry. (Have you seen my ultimate apple pie?)

I made long strips of pastry (approximately 1cm x 20cm), sprinkled brown sugar on them, and then rolled each short end so that they meet in the middle.

The pies became a bit thicker than the original 源氏パイ, but they were nicely crisp and tasted quite like it. Not bad... :D

Why not try them next time you have some puff pastry left? ;)

The tiniest croissants

With the leftover puff pastry for my Ultimate apple pie I made these tiny croissants. They were the smallest croissants I've ever made, eaten or even seen!

Look at the size of pine corn behind! They were so cute looking like a toy. I wanted to leave them on the table as a display but they went into my belly instead...