In the kitchen

My Mum used to refer to that temptation to go out and buy something new as having money “burning a hole in your pocket”. Our American friends have an expression of “Jonesing” for something. Both phrases express that combination of intent and desire, of craving, perhaps, and it’s somewhere along those lines that resulted in Ed Balls’ recipe for Treacle Tart sitting on the kitchen worktop for a week or so. The recipe was shared by Dan Walker on his Facebook page recently and the comments which arose were another factor in the story.

Of course, I had to give it a go.

The recipe is very specific in some respects. The pastry dough - a rich, sweet pastry with lemon zest - is left in the fridge for fifteen minutes before rolling out. What might I do in those fifteen thumb-twiddling minutes?

I’m not sure if it was last year or the year before that I spotted a little gingerbread house sitting on the rim of a coffee mug. I did what I frequently do and saved it to my Pinterest board and promptly forgot about it. However, I’ve been using my Pinterest page a bit more these days because a new course I’m teaching requires the students to collect images as part of their assignment and so I came across it again. I searched for a set of cutters available anywhere but AliExpress and bought them from a seller on eBay. In spite of sounding like - and appearing to be - a UK seller, they shipped from China.

So, whilst the pastry was resting in the fridge, I made a batch of gingerbread following KimJoy’s recipe. Why can I not just do one thing at a time?

Fifteen minutes gone, it was time to take the pastry out of the fridge and roll it to line the tart tin. No size of tin was mentioned, so I used my “normal” one and returned it to the fridge for an hour, as instructed.

Which gave me time to cut out the gingerbread shapes. Fiddly!

An hour later, the tart case went into the over to bake blind for fifteen minutes whilst I prepared the filling. Good grief - how much treacle (golden syrup) ?! wow Four eggs, 500ml of double cream….this is not for the faint of heart!

The end result is well worth it though, and I can see why so many people waxed lyrical about it. Strangely, it’s not that sweet at all, for the lemon offsets the cloying sweetness of the syrup. I’m not sure it’s a treacle tart, either, and think it’s more of a cross between an egg custard, a bread and butter pudding and the sort of treacle tart I know. Whatever it is, it’s delicious.

And the gingerbread houses?

Safely baked and tucked away in a small tin, ready for assembly one day soon. I had imagined they’d be a cute addition to a coffee cup when friends drop in for a chat. Except I doubt that’s going to happen very much for a while, is it? A good job I baked just a quarter of the dough and put the rest in the freezer, then.

Back to the Treacle Tart however.

There was an unlooked for bonus, because there was almost twice as much filling as would fit in that tart tin. This morning, I made another batch of pastry, went through all the resting and chilling whilst I cooked Sunday lunch and then put a second treacle tart in the oven which looked pretty much identical to the first one.

Wow. Here’s hoping it freezes well!