Fresh fruit tart revisited

It's been a long time since I've made a fruit tart, because you have to plan ahead for the crust and for the pastry cream.  (Also, my fridge is small and once you put in an 8" tart, a bowl of pastry cream and the fruit for the topping, there's no room left!) The plus side of making a fruit tart is that there's virtually no work to do on the day of serving except assembly work: just scrape the cream into the tart and pile the fruit on top. It's the perfect make-ahead summer dessert. 

For a friend's birthday, I decided to revisit the fresh fruit tart that I made a couple of years ago. This time, I used different recipes than in my previous post. Jon brought back his copy of Jacques Pépin's Complete Techniques from the US, and I gave Pépin's pâté sucrée (tart dough) and crème pâtissière (pastry cream) recipes a whirl. 

Verdict: 

The crust was rich, sweet and crumbly, yet still was sturdy enough to hold both the filling and to travel (hand-delivered in a box) across town by train! I would make the pâté sucrée again but would reduce the amount of sugar, and perhaps play with the flour amount by adding some almond flour. 

The crème pâtissière was far too sweet for my liking. I would reduce the amount of sugar by half but otherwise, this recipe was a keeper. I threw in some Cointreau and lemon zest in, too. Despite its name, pastry cream is really just a thick custard - no cream involved (unless you substitute some of the milk for cream).

Here's the separate parts of the tart, all ready for assembly: pastry cream, chocolate tart and fruit. 

I melted some chocolate the day before, spread it over the tart, and let it cool. The chocolate layer helps prevent the fruit and cream from turning the crust soggy. If you don't like chocolate (!) you can brush the tart with a thick layer of eggwash during the last 10 minutes of baking instead - that will also waterproof your tart crust.

Fresh fruit waiting to be assembled. 

This is the fun part. I'm not very artistic, so I just arranged the fruit in a roughly circular pattern. 

The finished product. Chill until ready to be served. It only lasts about 1 day before the crust gets too soggy (even with the chocolate barrier), so eat this tart right away!

Raspberry panna cotta

Panna cotta (Italian for "cooked cream") is one of my favourite desserts - lighter than a crême brulée, yet still creamy and milky-rich in your mouth.  Basically it is an Italian-style milk custard jelly, yet it's so hard to find good panna cotta when eating out as most places make their panna cotta too firm. Great panna cotta should be wobbly and soft, with a very luxurious and yielding mouthfeel, it should be rich yet light at the same time. Too often when eating out you get panna cotta that's nothing more than milky Jell-O, and that's just not good.

I've recently purchased a copy of the BBC Good Food Cookbook; it's got some interesting ideas for different dishes which I plan to test soon. This is the first recipe I've made from this dish (albeit with some major alterations/improvisations due to not having double cream or lemons and having leftover sour cream at home)*. I haven't made jelly in a long time; I think the last time was making Jell-O gummy worm vodka shots several years ago for a X'mas party (long story, don't ask!).

*The original Good Food Cookbook recipe was for lemon pannacotta with blackberries.This is a simple vanilla panna cotta with raspberry/blueberry topping.

Basic vanilla Victoria sponge cake

How many things that you learn in school are actually useful and delicious? At my high school in England, we all had to take two years of home economics (aka cooking) lessons. An elderly lady with a bouffant white hairdo oversaw my very first attempt at making Victoria sponge in a large lab kitchen. I remembered liking home ec lessons a lot - too bad there wasn't an option to continue them for GCSE!

I don't make plain vanilla sponge very often and have gone through a period of not being able to make a light airy sponge for the past few years. I blamed the humidity in Hong Kong for turning my attempts at sponge cake into dense bricks, but honestly, I think it was because I was trying to be too fancy and relied on complicated recipes. I've finally come full circle and accepted that there are some things in life you just shouldn't mess with, and Victoria sponge is one of them.

This sponge cake recipe is a good base for cakes and cupcakes.

Fresh fruit tart

I've never had that much luck before with making pastry for tarts. I've tried various recipes, including a chocolate tart recipe (with chocolate pastry crust) from Jamie Oliver that came out too greasy and also too puffy, despite the blind baking.




This time, however, it went all quite smoothly. I made one big tart (8") and two mini (4") tarts.
Here's what I did:

1. Make the tart dough (pâte sucrée). I used this recipe, but with a few minor alterations:
   
   • Instead of 100g flour, I used 70g flour and 30g cornstarch/cornflour. I'm not sure how big of a difference it made, but I like to add a bit of cornstarch as I think it makes cookies etc slightly more tender. I might try the original recipe next time (no corn starch) for comparison purposes.
   • Almond powder = ground almonds. I used ready-ground almonds but I suppose it would be better to grind your own at home (add some sugar if doing so to avoid your almonds becoming almond butter instead of powder).
     
   • You should really make this ahead but due to lack of time, I didn't leave the dough overnight to develop. Instead I let it chill 1.5 hours in the fridge before rolling out into the tart tins, then let it rest another 30 minutes in the fridge before baking.
   • My major discovery/revelation was that you don't need to mess about with beans, rice or pie weights to blind-bake your tart case. I just followed the suggestion of pricking the dough with the tines of a fork multiple times (both on the sides and bottom). This technique is called docking, and the little holes created by the fork allow the steam to escape and stop the dough from rising too much. I think the end result was not as perfectly presentable as using beans or pie weights, but the convenience factor won me over.
     
2. Make your filling. I used a pastry cream/crème patissière recipe by Martha Stewart. The taste was good but the consistency/texture was a little too liquid/custardy for my liking. I might try a recipe with more cornstarch/flour next time to make a more solid filling.
3. Melt some chocolate to line the bottom of the tart. Dark chocolate is traditional, but I didn't have any so I melted some milk choc buttons in a metal bowl over a saucepan of simmering water. I then spread the melted chocolate into the tart case (which was already blind-baked and cooled to room temp.), then spread it around with a spatula to cover the entire base of the tart. Let stand until the chocolate has cooled and hardened. This serves two purposes: A) it's yummy chocolate! and B) the chocolate layer keeps the wet filling from making the tart case soggy and helps prevent any possible leaks from the little holes made by the docking process.
   
   
   
4. Once your filling is chilled enough, you are now ready to assemble your fruit tart.
   
   • Pour the pasty cream onto your tart slowly - you don't want to add too much and risk a spill/overflow! Remember that your fruit will sink slightly and displace some of the filling, so don't fill it up too much, about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way up the crust is about right.
     
   • Add whatever mix of fruit you like. I made two kinds: strawberry-blueberry and mango-banana.
     
   • Just before serving, dust with icing/confectioner's sugar or cocoa using a fine sieve.
     
5. As you can see, the tarts I made don't look beautifully perfect - the crust is a bit straggly and uneven, but the taste and texture got a thumbs up from everyone at work. The only thing I would focus on next time would be to improve the pastry cream which was a little too liquid.
   

Going bananas

The supermarket here sells the usual Cavendish bananas but they occasionally stock other varieties, including the popular "emperor" bananas (small and sweet bananas with thin peel and little thready fibre) which you can find across Asia. Red bananas, on the other hand, are relatively more exotic (at least for me in Hong Kong). The supermarket here labels these as "Moroccan red bananas" but it seems that these are grown in Asia as well.

As for the flavor, they're a bit firmer and less mealy/mushy than regular Cavendishes. While they're still sweet and have the familar banana flavour, I thought the red ones had a little more tartness and complexity to them which I don't find in the normal yellow Cavendish.

Have you ever wondered why you can buy different kinds of apples, pears, potatoes and melons, but across the (developed) world, you usually can only buy one kind of banana (the Cavendish)? The reason for the domination of the Cavendish banana in supermarkets is mainly because of its hardiness/ability to withstand long-distance transport and ease of propagation. However, the whole banana issue is pretty complex - when you are dependent on only one single type of banana, you render the commercial crop vulnerable to pests/disease [viz. the Irish dependency on potatoes that caused the potato famine in the 1800s]). Also, the Cavendish is a relatively bland flavour, but it is popular because it is easy to ship and keeps for a long time. This means that consumers have sacrificed variety and taste in favour of convenience and mass production.

I find this kind of social info pretty fascinating because I believe that we take so many conveniences for granted in our 21st century lives.

For example, in Hong Kong, Sunkist oranges from California still dominate the market, even though it would probably be simpler and more cost-effective to buy fresh oranges grown in Asia/closer to home. Also, how can oranges/apples/strawberries shipped thousands of miles across the Pacific arrive in stores so fresh and sold at such a relatively low cost? Oranges from California at 40 US cents each? Apples from Washington state for US 30 cents each? I suspect that some of these costs, e.g. pollution and waste, is being passed on to the public and on to nature and is not being reflected in the supermarket sticker price.

And why doesn't China start growing high-quality perishable fruits such as strawberries, blueberries, and other "Western" fruit? I'm sure there is a huge market in Asia for reasonably priced "luxury" fruits. I would totally buy blueberries grown in the region rather than blueberries flown all the way from Chile (which is what you currently get in the stores here for US$0.60 - $1.20 per 125g carton - how can they sell them so cheap?!).

Actually there are many types of bananas: at my parents' home in Hong Kong, they grow the common banana (or "big banana" in Cantonese), which is fatter and shorter than the Cavendish. It's also tart with only a mild sweetness which I like as it's not overwhelming. The ones my parents grow also occasionally produce black seeds. When was the last time you saw seeds in your supermarket banana?

Confession: my parents merely tend the banana plants, which grow wild in many places in Hong Kong. It's mainly transplanting the offshoots [bananas can reproduce by seeds which are genetically different or by offshoots which are clones] to avoid overcrowding, harvesting bananas and chopping down the trunks/stems to make room for new plants once the fruit is harvested as each plant usually only produces a single hand of fruit.

If you're interested in reading more about the commercial banana and the current challenge to the global crop caused by an infectious fungus, I highly recommend a recent New Yorker article from January 2011 by Mike Peed: We Have No Bananas (Scientists fight a devastating banana blight) -- subscription might be required but you can see a related short video for free on the magazine's Tumblr site (also pretty interesting).

Baked Blueberry Cheesecake

This was my second attempt at making cheesecake. The first time, I used a New York cheesecake recipe from the Joy of Baking website and while the results were OK, the cheesecake was more moussy and lacked the dense richness of true NY cheesecake.

This time, I decided to try a different recipe entirely and used the baked cheesecake recipe from Coco & Me, one of my favourite baking and all-round food blogs. My presentation's nowhere near as good as Tamami-san's, but not bad for an amateur, I guess :)

I added blueberries as they were very cheap and fresh(ly imported from Chile/USA) at my local market - HK$10 (about US$1.30) for two 125 punnets. It's a little disturbing how cheap they were but blueberries are usually quite hard to find here so I jumped at the opportunity to have some. (I'm determined not to feel tooooo guilty about the carbon footprint etc because I try to eat local/regional fruit & veg but they just don't grow berries in Asia yet!)

I made a couple of minor alterations to the cheesecake recipe:

• I upped the lemon juice a bit to 20ml and reduced the sugar slightly as I don't like overly sweet cakes.
  
• After baking it 30 minutes in the oven, I took it out to cool.
  
• Then I spread on the sour cream topping (combined 150g sour cream, 2 tablespoons of vanilla sugar) and baked it a further 10 minutes in the oven.
  
• Take out and let cool; decorate with blueberries and let stand overnight.
  

Unfortunately, I think I overbaked the cheesecake a little this time, as it was not quite wobbly enough when I took it out of the oven (cheesecake is very dense so it continues to cook for a bit after you take it out), but not bad for my second-ever attempt at cheesecake!



Post-script (the day after):
Finally cut into and tasted the cheesecake after a day of chilling and waiting. I was very nervous on account of having baked it for so long, and because I was bringing to a family dinner with lots of people on Lunar New Year Eve. The taste and texture was amazing (dense but not too heavy, not too sweet to obscure the fresh cream cheese taste) though I might bake it a few minutes less next time. I got rave reviews for the cheesecake, though I can't take that much of the credit: Thanks to Tamami for the cheesecake recipe, and to Joy of Baking for sour cream topping recipe!

Grilled Pineapple with cinnamon and honey

A farewell to the summer of 2009. What a summer it's been, with junk (aka boat) trips, BBQs (indoor and outdoor), several beach trips, a road trip in Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and last but most importantly, a lot of lovely warm sunny days spent outdoors.

On Monday there was a typhoon that swept through Hong Kong, shutting down offices and schools. I got off work early, and bought a pineapple at the supermarket below my house. It was the very first time that I had ever bought a whole pineapple in my life. I think it was a momentous occasion! :p

This is a very simple and popular recipe that was inspired by License to Grill with Robert Rainford on the Asian Food Channel.

Grilled Pineapples

• Fresh whole pineapple (skin removed, cored and cut into large slices)
• Honey (or you could use brown sugar or other sugar if you prefer)
  
• Cinnamon (though I suppose you could also add other spices such as ginger, nutmeg, etc but I like to keep it simple)

1. Set the oven to its highest setting (grill).
   
2. Place pineapple chunks/slices onto a roasting tray (as if you were roasting potatoes: don't overlap the slices)
3. Drizzle honey all over; turn to coat.
   
4. Sprinkle cinnamon on top and use a wooden spoon or other utensil to flip the pineapple over so both sides have a good honey and cinnamon coating.
5. Place in oven. Check occasionally, it should take about 20 minutes for the pineapple to go golden and bubbly. Don't worry if there are some black "burnt" bits on the edges where the sugar has caramelized -- it will be nicely sweet and crunchy!
6. When the pineapple is golden brown, with a few dark edges, taken them out of the oven to cool slightly.
   
7. Eat as is (don't burn your tongue!) or with vanilla ice cream.
   

Yum!

Bananas Foster

For Valentine's Day, my boyfriend cooked a 4-course dinner. :) We stayed at home this year, partly because we didn't want to deal with the crowds of people outside, and also because dinner at restaurants is always very expensive on Valentine's (and, in my opinion, a bit overpriced).

The menu:

• Californian caponata (gorgonzola cheese eggplant dip)
• Curried butternut squash soup
• Mushroom eggplant lasagne
• Bananas Foster

The other items didn't turn up too well on film, despite being yummy, so only I only uploaded the dessert photos. The bananas Foster were so simple, yet gorgeously rich and divine. Brown sugar, rum, cinnamon, banana liqueur, ripe bananas, paired with good vanilla ice cream. Delicious and simple. :)

Bananas Fosters recipe from Brennan's in New Orleans.

Lychees (Osmanthus Blossom type)

Giant Peach (from Japan)