IT'S ALMOST CHRISTMAS! ONLY 2 SLEEPS TO GO!
I've been getting into the Christmassy mood by doing lots of
baking. Last week I made Stollen for a Christmas party (it had its fair share
of mishaps and I forgot to take any pictures); it didn't all get eaten so I
ended up having stollen for breakfast for the whole of the last week of my uni
term (living the life :p ). Then the other day I decided to have an experiment:
I needed to make lemon curd as part of my Grandma's Christmas present, I wanted
to make some biscuits so that I could play with icing, and I wanted to make
some thing nice to take for dinner at my friends house. The result of these
things ended up with the creation of gingerbread and lemon curd tarts (as well
as some star shaped biscuits and a jar of lemon curd)! Then last night I iced
the lovely gingerbread biscuits.
The Gingerbread:
I used a BBC Food recipe with a few tweeks: 4tsps ginger not
just 2, 1tsp mixed spice added, a little bit of water added (as I didn't have
enough golden syrup). These additions were largely personal taste: I'm a big fan
of ginger, so I always add more to things :)
I managed to make 12 tarts (round) and a lot (I haven't
counted, although I probably should in case they get eaten by one of my
brothers) of star shaped biscuits.
If I use the recipe as a pastry again (for the tarts) I'll
probably not include the bicarb as the biscuits rose a little bit and had to be
squished before putting the lemon curd in.
The Lemon Curd:
I used a Delia Smith recipe for my lemon curd (but used half
quantities). It made enough for a largish jam jar full, all the tarts, plus
plenty of scrapings for my brothers to steal.
The Tarts:
On the Great British Bake Off, one of the contestants made
Key Lime Pie with ginger pastry. Because of my love of ginger and knowing that
shortbread can be used instead of pastry for some tarts, I decided to attempt
to marry two of my favourite foods in little jam tarts.
They turned out amazingly. They might not look much, but
they were delicious :-) and really easy to make too!
- Roll out the gingerbread as thinly as possible. Cut into circles and place into a floured jam tart tin.
- Bake for around 3 minutes at 180 degrees.
- Put around a teaspoon of lemon curd in each tart.
- Bake for a further 5-8 minutes until the lemon curd is bubbling and the gingerbread is crisp and golden
Icing:
At some point at uni, I'd bought a bag of royal icing sugar,
which has dried egg in the powder already, which made making the icing stupidly
easy: just add water, like normal runny icing. But make sure that it's stiff
enough to pipe. I then had a good play around with my (barely used) piping set
and decorated all the biscuits.
HAVE A VERY MERRY CHRISTMAS!!
V x
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