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