Birds put the turd in custard!

[venta]

Last week, I was stopping overnight at a friend's house and - because she did - I watched the Great British Bake Off. Those of you who know me will be staggered to hear that, this week, I voluntarily watched it in my own house.

(For those of you who don't: I basically never watch telly. I struggled a little to find the GBBO on the V+ box's catch-up TV menus because, er, I don't think I've ever interacted with them before. And we've had the V+ box for four years.)

Having mentally filed GBBO under "reality TV", without having ever seen it, I was surprised to find that the contestants all appeared to be normal, likable people. And the judges - though sometimes harsh - seemed out to offer honest criticism rather than ritual humiliation. I could still live without all the dramatic pauses and close-up face shots, but overall I enjoyed it.

And, like (I imagine) a substantial portion of the country, I set on this weekend to make custard tarts to the GBBO recipe.

Now, I'm not claiming that I'm better at baking than the contestants; they all seem streets ahead of me. However, I'd be following a much more detailed recipe at leisure with no pressure, no cameras, and no prospect of a judgemental Liverpudlian at the end of it. And custard tarts don't sound that hard - plus, of course, having watched the programme I was well-educated on what could go wrong.

However, I didn't realise that I was going to have to face a whole different set of challenges. For a start, contestants on the GBBO don't spend the first ten minutes clearing out a cupboard trying to locate their ground almonds. Mine have apparently vanished, but I did get distracted dealing with some elderly dried apricots which had slipped down the back and gone extremely Wrong.

Ah well, it's possible to make the pastry without the ground almonds. Just a bit of extra flour. No problem.

Then the plain flour jar ran out. Never mind, I'll get the new bag from the Spare Things Cupboard. Except the bag in the Spare Things Cupboard turned out to be self-raising. Arse.

Now, at this stage the smart money would have been on the bag of bread flour. I, as you might have gathered, am not the smart money. Instead I thought hey! I have a great idea! I have some coconut flour. I'll make up the weight with that, thus replacing the flour and the almonds in one fell swoop.

So I did. Bearing in mind that I was only making a half-quantity, I had to wrangle that most annoying of things, half an egg, but the pastry came together nicely and went into the fridge to chill.

I was feeling fairly smug. Here I was, pretty well on schedule, and I was even managing to get Sunday dinner ready at the same time. Take that, GBBO! I was mildly dented by not having a 4 1/2-inch pastry cutter but, after considering increasingly peculiar options, had located a small pottery pudding bowl of the right(ish) diameter. No fluted edge but hey - also no judges.

I rolled out my flour, I cut out a disc, I tucked it neatly into the muffin tray. Now, some of you may be ahead of me here. Why do I have coconut flour in the cupboard? For making gluten-free cakes. What makes pastry stretchy and malleable and tractable?

Gluten.

Arse.

My pastry cracked. I tried again. It cracked, and fell apart. It was just not possible to tuck a case into a muffin tray without it ripping. Arse.

I bodged three cases into the tin as best I could. Then I decided that life was a bit short, the pastry cases weren't likely to succeed, and that I should give up. I put the remaining pastry into the pudding bowl, and squodged it up the sides to make a giant tart case. My custard went into the three dicey-looking cases and the pudding bowl case, and the remainder went into silicon muffin cases to bake.

My oven remains a mystery. I'm still not sure when to adjust the temperature down, or indeed whether it truly is a fan oven. The skimpy instruction booklet lists various specific foods, and whether or not you should adjust the temperature - but no overall guidelines if you are not baking, say, a Victoria sponge or a whole trout. The answer turns out to be that I should have adjusted it; 200 was way too hot and my custard boiled.

Anyway... two of the three pastry tarts came out of the tin with only a little persuasion and crumbling. We had them for pudding after Sunday dinner. The third was clearly a lost cause, so we decided we both had space for another half-pie and ate it out of the tin between us. The pudding-bowl pie has yet to be sampled.

The coconut flavour was really lovely, actually. If the pastry could be made to behave, then I think it would be a good idea (I hope that using the right amount of flour and swapping the ground almonds for coconut flour will work.) Certainly if I could just make the pastry stretchy enough to go into tins without a trauma, it should be fine - once baked, it was perfectly decent.

Comments

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I like the sound of coconut flavour in the pastry! Not used coconut flour myself, but as you say if you're just subbing it for almonds and not also for flour, that should ameliorate the tearing problems.

How do you make your custard?

(I mean, how do you personally like to make it, not 'how does one make custard', if that's not obvious :-)

[venta.livejournal.com]

I've never made custard-for-custard pies before, so I slavishly followed the recipe (linked above). Beat eggs and sugar, stir in warm milk, pour into pastry cases as is without further thickening. Add nutmeg :)

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Ooh, interesting, I hadn't looked at the recipe. I've not made custard without some sort of thickener. I guess being baked thickens it up?

[venta.livejournal.com]

It doesn't so much thicken as set - which I imagine (with little justification) to be a different process going on. I think creme anglaise is made without any sort of thickener, but then I usually reckon creme anglaise is a bit on the thin side :)