Floating Islands

Week 3 Great British Bake Off technical challenge was floating islands with spun sugar. I'm not keen on meringues but I wanted to keep up with my challenge of completing all of the technical challenges. I found the recipe here and it looked fairly straight forward. 

First step was to prepare the poaching liquid, I combined the milk and the cream and placed them in a saucepan. I didn't have an vanilla bean paste so I scrapped the seeds out of a pod instead. This was heating and left to simmer. 

Milk and Cream

Meanwhile I whipped up the egg whites until firm and added the caster sugar one spoonful at a time. I then continued whisking the mixture until it was forming stiff peaks. 

Stiff Egg Whites

Using spoons I shaped some islands and put them in the liquid, I then left them for 4 minutes to poach, with the lid on. After this I was supposed to turn them and poach for a further 5 minutes, however, the islands refused to turn over and kept balancing themselves back the same way. I had to cook them in batches as the pan wasn't big enough for more than 5. With the lid on the mixture started to boil so the first batch puffed up and then popped and lost their shape. 

Bad first batch

With the second bunch it went slightly better and by the 3rd 5 I managed to have the heat so low, lid off, that they finally looked better. 

Looking better

The Creme Anglaise was just a case of adding egg yolk and sugar to the already heated milk mixture. I didn't whisk the yolks as much as I should have so my custard was much yellower than it should have been but it thickened up nicely. The thickening stage took longer than I expected but it did get there and ended up a nice thickeness.

Yummy custard

I served one island with some custard. I didn't bother doing the spun custard with this as I wasn't that excited by the recipe as it was. 

Ready to eat

The verdict: I found the cooking stage of the islands challenging as I struggled to get the poaching mixture to the right temperature without it boiling. When I eventually got it right it was much easier. The custard tasted really nice, a little sweet for my taste, but this was needed to balance with the islands as I found these lacking in flavour and just really eggy. This isn't something I'd have again and it's not something I particularly enjoyed.  I'll have to see how Gary enjoys them. I give them 4/10. The 4 is only for the custard. 

Lemon Custard Tarts

After attempting a previous lemon custard tart recipe, seen here, and not thinking it was amazing I decided to try making one of my own combining a few recipes and experimenting a little. 

The first step was to decide what type of pastry I wanted to use. I've had really good comments about my puff pastry but it's quite time consuming so I wasn't sure I wanted to spend the day making it. The other option was sweet shortcrust pastry. I decided that I would do puff this time because I wanted the recipe to be as good as it could be. The recipe for the pastry can be found here. Of course you can use shopbought pastry as well, either puff or shortcrust. 

I rolled out the pastry and, using a 9cm cutter, cut out circles. The custard recipe will make around 12 tarts. These were placed in a muffin tin, covered in greaseproof paper and filled with beans. I baked these, blind, for 15minutes. 180oC. 

Meanwhile I made the custard filling. I decided to do this similar to a previous recipe as that worked really well. For vanilla custard tarts with a chocolate swirl look here. I needed to be careful that the mixture didn't curdle, lemon and milk is not usually a good mix. 

For my first attempt, which didn't work, I tried adding lemon juice and zest in with the milk and heating it. I then strained it and thickened to custard. This mixture seperated and tasted awful so I won't be attempting that again!! 

My second attempt, which did work, was the method I settled on:

Ingredients: 

90g Caster Sugar

3 Egg Yolks

1 tbsp cornflour

250ml Semi skimmed milk

Zest of 2 lemons

Place the zest and the milk in a saucepan and heat up until the milk is just boiling. 

Mix together the sugar, egg and cornflour until a smooth paste. 

Strain the milk through a sieve, to remove all the lemon zest, and place it back in the saucepan. 

Add the paste and whisk, heat gently always mixing. This will start to thicken up quite quickly, as soon as it does remove it from the heat and allow to cool slightly. 

Lemon Custard

Once your pastry cases are cool, remove the paper and beans. Fill with the custard mixture. Place back in the oven, 180oC, for 10minutes. 

Tarts in the muffin tin

Once done allow to cool and enjoy!! 

Ready to eat!

The verdict: I really enjoyed these tarts, and it's not just because I made them up!! I thought the lemon was strong enough to have a fresh flavour but not so strong that it was over powering and sharp. The tarts had a lovely sweetness to them. I could happily have eaten the whole batch. I'm still not overly keen on pastry so for me I would probably make a big tart so there's a large custard to pastry ratio, however, I'm sure others would disagree with me on that one. I give the recipe 10/10! Yummy!! 

Lemon Custard Tart

My custard tarts have been really popular at Gary's work so I decided to try this variation that I found in Annie Bell's Baking Bible. 

The recipe was different from what I was expecting. I thought I'd make a custard and make it lemony, however, this was a liquid until baked in the oven. I guess a baked custard. Anyway, the recipe was again very easy, as I've come to expect from Annie Bell's recipes. 

First step was to make the pastry, this was made by combining all the ingredients in the food processer and then chilling for an hour or so. The pastry is the pressed into a cake tin. This bit was quite challenging because the case needs to be 6cm high but I got there in the end.

Pastry Case

The case was then baked blind and left to cool. 

The custard was made by combining all the ingredients and then pouring into the pastry shell.

Ready to go in the oven

This was then cooked for around 1.30hours and left to cool.

Baked Custard

The verdict: This recipe has produced mixed verdicts. Both Gary and I thought that the tart was nice, however, in places it was very eggy. I think it seperated in the oven and so some areas tasted of just egg whereas others had been nicely combined and tasted really good. The lemon was a nice flavour, not too strong, but no one knew that it had orange in it. My sister and mum thought that it was really nice and happily demolished the whole tart over the weekend. I would give the tart 7/10.

Finished pie and eaten!!

Chocolate Custard Tarts

I set about finding a custard recipe as I had left over egg yolks from the macaroons. I found this recipe on.. yep you guessed it.. the BBC food website. It can be found here. And this is the recipe I made the puff pastry for.

Once I'd made the puff pastry the next step was to roll it out and cut it to size. This recipe was for muffin size tarts to I cut the pastry using a 9cm cutter and placed these in a muffin tin. I then filled then with greaseproof paper and baking beans. This was then baked blind in the oven for 15 minutes. 

Pastry in the oven. 

Meanwhile I made the custard. Mix the egg yolks, sugar and cornflower in a bowl until it's a smooth paste. Set this to one side. Heat up the milk, with the vanilla pod and cinnamon stick, until boiling. Remove from the heat and add to the egg mix through a sieve. Mix this together and return to the heat. Stir continuously until the mixture is thick. 

Heat up the cream until about to boil. Remove from the heat and add the chocolate. Stir until melted and leave to cool slightly. 

Pour the custard into the cooled pastry cases. Add some chocolate into the centre and swirl in slightly. Cook the tarts in the oven for a further 10 minutes. 

Cooked tarts

The verdict: I really enjoyed these tarts, I thought the pastry was much better than shop bought and the custard also tasted really good. I could taste a subtle hint of cinnamon but fortunately Gary, who doesn't like cinnamon, couldn't. The cases rose slightly too much in the oven, the beans weren't heavy enough, so there wasn't as much custard as there could have been. This is a shame as more custard would have been nice. The chocolate mix was also a little thin, due to not using real chocolate, so next time I'd make that with real chocolate. The recipe was really easy to follow and I felt like I knew what I was doing through every step. I would certainly recommend these and I will be making them again. In fact I have left over pastry so most likely it'll be sooner rather than later. I give these 8/10.