Tarte Tatin

A new day, a new French desert to make for the first time. This time, a Tarte Tatin, made using Raymond Blanc's Simple French Cookery. 

I didn't make my own pastry this time:

Caramel, with butter added:

8 apples, peeled, halved and cored, placed on top of the caramel:

Brushed with butter and sprinkled with sugar, then into the oven at 190° for 35 minutes:

Pastry cut to size in the meantime, after being chilled:

Apples partially cooked; time for the pastry:

30 minutes later:

Left to cool and turned out:

Crème Brûlée

Continuing with the French deserts, and to use up the egg yolks left over from making macaroons, I tried my hand at making crème brûlée. I used this recipe, with two-thirds of the ingredients. 

Heating the cream

Beating the sugar and eggs

Adding the cream to the eggs and sugar 

Into the ramekins

And then the oven 

 45 minutes later

Time for caramelising under the grill

And they're ready to eat :D

 Not bad if I do say so myself!

Macaroons, nearly

This nice Friday morning in France I decided to challenge myself and attempt to make macaroons. I followed this recipe, and here are the pictures:

Ground almonds and icing sugar into the blender

Separate the egg whites and yolks

Whisking the egg whites

After adding the sugar

Sifting in the ground almonds and icing sugar

Piping onto a baking sheet

Into the oven

And they're cooked

Making the chocolate ganache

And the finished macaroons

Unfortunately, the macaroons were somewhat hollow :( but they still taste good :)

I'm intending to try again while we're still house-sitting and so we'll see how they go!

Crème Renversée au Caramel

Making good use of the oven while we're housesitting, I decided to make a crème caramel. Here's the process:

Making the caramel

Putting the caramel in the ramekins

Boiling the milk and sugar with a vanilla pod

Adding the custard mix (after adding eggs) to the caramel in the ramekins

And into the oven

55 minutes later at 160°C and they're done!

Then just to let them cool and then refrigerate. So, tonight we'll see how successful my journey into making crème caramel has been.

Working with linen

I have a new cross-stitch to do, this one also being an Isabelle Haccourt Vautier, entitled "Sampler des 4 Saisons".

Gathering the supplies

All the cross-stitches I have previously completed have been done on Aida, so this will be my first cross-stitch worked on linen. I have a piece of 32 count Belfast Linen -colour Dirty- to work this design on, and hope that it will go well.

So far, the cross-stitch seems to be going well, although I am finding that I am working slower than I did on the previous project.

Adventures into blocking

I learned to knit when I was a child, I don't remember how old exactly, but probably somewhere between 7 and 11. Then I did a little knitting at 17 as part of a school textiles project before putting down my needles until three years ago when I started knitting 'properly'.

I have, however, never blocked anything. 

But, with the Birthday Blanket being my main knitting project (currently, at least) I thought it important that it was done right, which means learning how to block!

This was today's task:

First, I made a 15cm square template out of card to make a masking-tape grid on the bed. I figured this would make it easier to make sure the squares were all blocked to the same size, and I'd be able to reuse the grid as many times as I needed to get all the squares blocked (there are currently 65 knitted).

I then ran some lukewarm water in the bathroom sink, and put in two squares (I wanted to start small).

After letting them soak for 25 minutes, I took the squares out of the water, squeezed as much as I could out of them and then rolled them in a towel.

Then, I blocked them onto the bed, using my grid :)

This all seemed to go fine, so I put more squares in to soak and repeated the process in small batches until I ran out of pins. 

Apparently I can block 15 squares at once.

Now, just to let them dry so that the other squares can get blocked!