"Oh Blog, once again you have been neglected for far too long. I truly do apologize. Things have been so busy with school and work and moving. I have finally found a moment to myself, as I leisurely sit in front of the TV watching the Food Network ('Cupcake Wars', to be specific...aka TV gold)"...
Anyway, this week on Alphabake we are featuring two recipes that start with the letter 'P'. "Two recipes?!?," you ask? Yes, dear reader, and just to let you know, currently in my books the letter 'P' stands for "pain", "problematic", "pest", etc. Maybe I am being a tad dramatic, but you get the idea.
So, the first attempt to complete a recipe for letter 'P' was in the form of Peanut Butter and Sweet Banana Cookies from Anna Olson's Sugar: Simple Sweets and Decadent Desserts. It is a sandwich cookie recipe and unfortunately something went horribly wrong with the filling. It must have been something I did because I can't imagine anyone writing a recipe so that it would purposefully taste so horrid. Basically I had to caramalize some bananas and the sugar must have burned. I didn't have it cooking for very long at all but it turned dark so quickly. I used oil instead of butter because I didn't have any left and I think that might have lead to the rapid burning...but I'm not sure. Even though the filling was horrible, the actual peanut butter cookies were amazing on their own so I've posted the recipe at the end of this entry in case you want to just try making them (or even battle with getting the filling right).
About a week later I decided to try and tackle a new recipe. For quite a long time I had been eyeing one for Portuguese custard pies in Jamie Oliver's The Naked Chef Takes Off. They reminded me of my trip to Lisbon. I also recently saw them featured on Jamie's 30-Minute Meals so they couldn't be too time consuming, right? WRONG!!! Ok, they weren't too difficult but they definitely took way longer than thirty minutes to make--at least they were super tasty.
My main problem was with the pie shells. The recipe calls for store-bought puff pastry which was easy enough but it took me a while to figure out how to bake it. In the book he uses glass tumblers, turns them upside down, greases and flours their bases, and then stretches and places the dough on top. On his TV show he baked them in a muffin tin. Since I didn't have any tumbler glasses I started with the muffin tin method. It was hard to roll out the dough because it tends to shrink back, and after it baked it formed a very shallow pie shell that wouldn't hold a lot of custard. I happened to have another roll of puff pastry so I started over and this time I took the muffin tin and flipped it upside down and stretched the dough over the cup bases and that seemed to work pretty well. A couple of other small alterations I made to the recipe were that instead of using vanilla pods and fresh nutmeg, I used vanilla extract and ground nutmeg since that is what I had.
Once I figured out a good technique for making the tart shells, things were pretty simple (although making the custard filling took a little while) and the results were great. The pastry turned out really crispy and delicious and the slight citrus notes in the custard was really pleasant. They were slightly different than the traditional custard pies I tried in Portugal, but definitely caputured their essence. Enjoy!
