Can I borrow an 8 cup baking tray?

After my apple crumble I decide that I'd like to do another bake to up the anty a little. My choice is a blackberry, cherry & walnut bake with dark chocolate custard - you can hear the fat in your thighs right?
I have a few of the same ingredients from the apple crumble, but still head up to the shops to get what I need.
The list is as follows:
- Self raising flower
- Frozen blackberries
- Frozen cherries
- Crumbed walnuts
- Slivered almonds
- Almond meal
- Cornflower
- Lemon
- Dark cooking chocolate
- Thickened Cream
- Vanilla beans x 2

I head straight to the 'flour' aisle and find everything I need, including my crumbed walnuts and slivered almonds ( I have a mass collection of left over nuts in my pantry now). The lemon, dark cooking chocolate and thickened cream I find without hassle, but when I find the vanilla beans I see that there are 2 beans for $8. $8?!?! Psht, no vanilla bean for my custard - I'm on a teensy bit of a budget this week.
Next I head to my frozen food aisle and find that their are neither blackberries nor cherrys. Urgh.
I remembered seeing canned blackberries and cherries went I bought my apples last week, so I decide to grab those - surely they wont make TOO much of a difference.

Loaded up with all my bits and bobs I head home, read the recipe over approximately 3 times and set out to make a delicious 1950s housewife bake.
The first step is to mix the blackberries, cherries, cornflower and lemon zest together. Now I think I assumed correctly in the fact that the frozen berries obviously wouldn't have any syrup in them. So I drained out my tinned berries as best I could, but there was still a whole heap of syrup - I decide to see how I go with this.

After mixing it all together and popping it in what I thought was an '8 cup baking dish' I quickly realize that my dish is way too big. Too late now though. We'll just have to see how I go with this too.

My next instruction was to put all the other dry ingredients and the butter together to make the dough for the top of the bake. 

 Then when it was all crumbly, I put the milk in

After the dough was made I spread it over the berries. The recipe said to allow for gaps and to pop this on top sloppily and not to try and make it look perfect - easy for me!

 The next step was to add my slivered almonds and walnuts, looks tasty already!

So off to the oven my bake goes and what do you know it, the oven hasn't been pre-heating because I didn't push the button all the way, so the light was on but there was no heat. Fantastic. So I give it ten minutes then pop it back in. Hoping that all goes well.
Pulling myself away from my slight setback, I decide to give this custard a go. The recipe states that I need to put the cream and milk into a saucepan over low heat and get it to a hot stage, but not boiling. I re-read this a couple of times thinking..saucepan? Why on earth would I use something so large. Deciding to just go with it, I pull this out -

 Quite obviously a fry pan. I also decide not to transfer it to a saucepan because I thought "surely there's not a huge difference?"
The next step is to get the yolks of 3 eggs. I've never tried this before, but saw them doing a competition for it on Masterchef. I give it a crack (get it?) and managed to do a pretty good job! Whipped those babies up and added the rest of my ingredients.

 The next step is to add my fry pan milk *shudder* as you can see in the picture it got stuck to the bottom of the pan. Yum.

 In the end the custard was shocking. It developed this weird yellowy oily residue on top and went all gluggy and I'm not going to lie, it looked a little like poop. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and tried it. It didn't taste so bad! Not amazing, but not bad. The consistency and oily stuff freaked me out so I ended up tipping it out - not entirely sure that the lack of vanilla  beans had anything to do with it, but I'm glad I didn't spend $8 on them when they would have been tipped down the drain.
It looked like this -

Mmm, poop custard.

I guess it was received well because by the time I came home from work it had all been eaten - so that's good! The bake itself was really tasty, but I think a smaller baking tray would have been ideal.

See you next time!

bon apetit. 

harper.

What I learnt:

- The difference between a fry pan and a saucepan

- Custard is a very sensitive food to make, maybe concentrate on that more than trying to get good photo of it being made

- Always double check the oven is actually on

Can I borrow some ice cream?

Todays recipe was a Salted Caramel Apple Crumble. Whenever my Nan from Perth flies over to visit she makes like 10 dishes of her apple crumple and it's simply amazing. We all gain 5kg kilos in the crumble itself, so this desert was a bit of a challenge.
I set off to Woolworths again, swiped Mums staff card and came home with everything I needed.
The recipe is based in a series of "you can make amazing recipes with canned fruit" which suited me fine because I didn't want to cut up almost 1kg of apples (my Nan does this in the lounge room whilst watching the bold and the beautiful - I'm not judging her but I don't think I've quite reached that level of senility yet!)
The recipe calls for:
1/2 cup pure cream. 1/2 cup brown sugar, 85g butter chopped, 1 tablespoon of sea salt 2x 770g cans of sliced apple and vanilla ice cream to serve.
For the crumble it requires: 1/3 cup of brown sugar, 1 3/4 cups of rolled oats, 50g of butter chopped, 1/2 cup shredded coconut and 3/4 cup of pecans chopped.
Learning from my previous cooking mistake, I checked what I already had in the cupboard and found we had a few of the basics - win!
So my ingredients looked like this so far:

After reading over the recipe a couple of times, it took me a little while to figure out that there were TWO lots of sugar going into two separate parts of the recipe, but once I sorted this out I was good to go.
The first step was to put the cream, sugar and butter into a saucepan over a high heat and to let it simmer for 2 minutes.

So I'm looking at my saucepan, two minutes have past...and it still looks like this ^

What the hell? Its on a high heat. Check. I've stirred it. Check. I re-read the recipe. Check. I type into Google to check that I've got the right definition of simmering in my head...yep I sure do. What is going on?!
I smell gas. Hmm...how peculiar.
I lift up the saucepan and apparently at some point or another the flame on the stove has gone out and I've been "simmering" my ingredients on gas.
Cooking 1. Harper 0.
With the dumb move behind me I reignite the stove and away we were, simmering in no time!

P.s I learnt this nifty trick. Don't you hate it when you're wooden spoon is covered in gunk and you don't want to put it down anywhere?

How good is that?

Anyway, moving on! The next step is to add the 2 770g of apples to the mixture. I feel that is a lot of apples but decide not to stray from the recipe. After stirring them around into the delicious looking caramel I pop them into my dish. 

Now that the apples are done. Its time to start working on le crumble. Pretty much all of my left over dry ingredients + the butter just get mixed in a large bowl - pretty simple stuff. However the measurements of butter are getting me. I don't have any scales so I'm pretty much winging it with these - something that I'm definitely not capable of just yet.

After mixing it all together by hand - definitely one of my favorite things to do, the mixture gets poured over the apples. At this point I can sort of tell that I should have used more butter because its SUPER crumbly and isn't gooey enough to hold all the dry ingredients together. But I freak out thinking the oven has been on for too long and just throw it in there hoping it'll all work out.

25 minutes later the top has got a lovely golden glow to it and my kitchen smells like delicious home cooking. It looked like this:

It does look a tad brown in the picture, but it was cooked perfectly all the way through. As expected however, I really needed to add more butter to get the crumble a little stickier on top - but it's all a learning process!
Until next time lovers,
bon apetit
harper.

What I learnt:
- Always check the stove
- When the recipe suggests what to serve it with, go with it. Ice cream would have really topped this dish off but I had to stinge out and go with cream, didn't I?
- Buy a set of scales and don't be afraid to use butter!