24/01/14

Looking back now, I think I may even be able to remember the feeling of that moment when my heart sunk, a solid weight in my chest that hung heavily for the rest of the day, maybe even the week. And what was it, I hear you ask, that has struck this fear into me so intensely? One word: pudding. It had been a nice gesture, a suggestion that I contribute something to the long-awaited dinner party that I had planned with new-found friends from work, the first of its kind. I had offered something culinary or monetary and while I would have been happy to chip in a fiver, I had already started considering tomato & mozzarella salad, perhaps some kind of tapenade with olives, even chancing a half price bottle of red from Sainsbury's. What I hadn't anticipated was pudding. Sure, I spend a lot of my time hidden in the cookery section & often moan about having to share the kitchen where I make my favourite recipes but those are all chickpeas & tinned tomatoes, pasta shells & sweet peas, certainly not pudding. I started to wonder, had I expressed too keen an interest in a workmate's birthday cake? Had they spotted me spooning that extra sugar into my morning coffee? I soon came to realise that neither of these were likely accurate & that neither really mattered - gracious guest as I was & (eventually) embracing the opportunity to be pushed out of my culinary comfort zone, I listened to my instincts & they called 'Muuuuuuum!' (pictured below, from our Liberty afternoon)

As mentioned in my previous post, I have inherited a handful of things from my mother, amongst them a couple of vintage knit dresses & a habit of talking to myself almost constantly, and the recipe for this pudding, albeit via Jamie Oliver (only serving to taint my romantic ideal of a generational family recipe book a tiny bit) was no different: peach clafoutis. Both symptomatic of my recent regression to childhood & suitable for the season, this typically French desert of baked fruit (traditionally cherries) in a sweet batter recalls my love of stodgy school dinners, of soaked suet jam roly poly & dense, sickly treacle sponge, while retaining some sophistication from its cosmopolitan origins. Having fixed up a clafoutis before as an indulgent Sunday afternoon treat with a mug of tea, I made my way through the backstreets of Haggerston on Friday night, baking dish & tins of peach slices intermittently *clink*ing together with every footstep, unexpectedly confident of my desert's destiny although less so of the location of my friend's flat. 

This recipe really is pretty perfect, especially if you're someone for whom the idea of dishing up desert is dreaded - a handful of ingredients, easy to put together & quick to cook, the latter particularly important as your kitchen is filled with the smell of peaches & caramelising sugar that seeps from the oven while it bubbles.

Peach Clafoutis

(Tweaked ever-so-slightly from Jamie Oliver's recipe)

Ingredients: 3 tbsps plain flour/

1 pinch salt/5 tbsps golden caster sugar/3 large eggs (beaten), 

450ml milk/50g butter/1 tbsp vanilla essence/400g tinned peach slices/

Method: Preheat your oven to 220 degrees./In a bowl, add the flour, salt & 3 tbsps of caster sugar to the beaten eggs. Mix well & put aside. Warm the milk in a saucepan until lukewarm, then stir this into the egg mixture, along with the vanilla essence.

Grease a shallow ovenproof dish with butter, put the drained peaches (Jamie uses halves, I prefer slices so they are more evenly distributed) on the bottom then pour the egg batter over them. Dot the remaining butter in knobs.

Pop in the oven to bake for 25-30 minutes, sprinkling the remaining caster sugar over the top five minutes before the end of the bake, until the egg has set but still has a slight wobble.

Serve up & tuck in...!

The pudding, you'll be pleased to hear, was a big success, so much so that I have been implored to make another for this week's fixture, gulp...! Faced with my main-course-heavy cookbook collection (looking at you, Nigel), I turned to the wealth of culinary inspiration on Pinterest to try & coax out my inner pastry chef. Here's what I found & what I'm currently trying to choose between for tomorrow evening: Blueberry Bread & Butter Pudding, Chocolate, Hazelnut & Raspberry Crumble & Butterscotch Pudding. All chosen for their ease of preparation, cost effectiveness & which photographs made me salivate the most during, err, 'research' for this post, I'm learning towards the crumble - what's your favourite?

from 'The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook' by Deb Perelman 

With increasing exposure to this type of cooking what with my near-on-troubling devotion to The Great British Bake Off (time for another Queen Mary, am I right?) & my recognition of talented cooks who can pull off both the savoury & the sweet (have you seen anything more tempting Deb Perelman's chocolate peanut butter cookies? (above) If you answered yes, you're lying), I have also come to realise that I lack many things that are required of pudding makers - the patience to wait for a cake to rise or dough to prove, the precision to minutely weigh out each ingredient to the milligram, & the persistence to make the same recipe again & again until it reaches perfection. It is for these reasons that I will likely never get around to writing my own cookbook & will stick to my slapdash approximations to chilli flakes & garlic cloves, although with a little practice & a lot of temptation, I might just find my fridge stacked with cooled pie crusts after all.

One step at a time though, eh? For this evening, I'll settle for what I do best - aubergine paneer &, err, sleeping. 

I'll be sure to let you know how it goes. 

Speak soon - O.