Our weekend shopping yielded a pack of croissants and the necessary requirement of some strawberry preserve. The croissants we had for breakfast on Sunday were actually pretty awful but the jam was nice, a high fruit content preserve made from a mix of wild and cultivated strawberries.
I was pondering the preserve when I realised that I also had some free range eggs and a big bag of ground almonds. I asked the boss and yes, he would be thrilled if I were to make him a Bakewell Pudding for his tea. I turned the oven up.
The Aga takes around an hour to come up to temperature and so I returned to my desk, and the WWW – where I stumbled across the BFI Player. I brought it to Mr L’s attention and we spent quite some time browsing through the host of films at the BFI, becoming very excited about the excellent value for £4.99 a month, then discovering that most of the films are not available on subscription, then browsing the right (and much smaller) set of available films. I saw the time and realised how late I was in getting my baking done, so I dashed to the kitchen where I proceeded to:
- fail to find the right pie plate, so had to use a flan tin
- break my very posh and highly expensive Silpat rolling pin on the not yet fully thawed pastry block
- put the pudding in the oven without the jam
- return to my desk, where I immediately realised what I had done, so dashed back, emptied the pudding filling into a jug, dropped three spoonfuls of jam into the resulting messy pastry case, then poured the filling back in
It all went horribly wrong but the pudding came out tasty enough, though looking a little unusual.
The loss of my rolling pin is a disaster. I haven’t had it long at all. True, last winter a mouse nibbled the silicone coating from one end, but it remained the best rolling pin I ever used and was a whopping 50 cm wide.
How did it break? Well, it is a tapered shape and I was leaning quite hard on both ends as I tried to persuade a very hard block of pastry to flatten. The pin just yielded in the middle – it must have had a seam in it, invisible beneath the silicone jacket.
I do have an old wooden rolling pin that I can fall back upon but it’s a puny thing – and very short. Not much use for pasta, or for my 10″ tart tin. However, I have found a limewood French rolling pin, 70 cm wide, on Amazon. I have sent Mr L a link to it…
The car battery needed charging today. Thankfully it is a fine day, with little wind so not too inconvenient to have a window open and a power lead trailing. I however am here, instead of at spinning. It’s an opportunity to wield the vacuum cleaner, I suppose.
Was it ready made bought pastry?
Sad to say, it was. Once upon a time I gave up making my own puff pastry as Jus-Rol was so good. Now it is devoid of butter and not very nice at all, so I try to make my own when I can. It does require pre-planning though – not something to do on a whim.