desserts: December 2006 Archives

This is a classic recipe, which we have practised at school.  It is based on one by Julia Child in ‘Mastering the Art of French Cooking’ (1961).  It may not be trendy, but I like it.  Hope you do too.

To make your water bath extra safe for your delicate custards, line it with a towel.  This protects the bottoms of the custards from getting too hot.  Don’t discard the vanilla bean (they’re expensive).  Instead wash and dry it, then add it to a jar of sugar and leave for a few weeks, shaking occasionally.  This makes delicious vanilla sugar, which you can use the next time you make a custard.

Sorry for the lack of Christmassy recipes.  I could document the saga of my Christmas pudding and Christmas cake for you (candying own peel - 6 days; tracking down suet in a city where nobody's heard of it - 10 days; working out what to do with a huge hunk of fat cut straight out of a cow - 3 days; preparing pudding and cake ingredients - 1 day and night; baking cake - 5 hours; steaming pudding - 8 hours; feeding cake - 10 days), but I suspected not many would care to replicate this bizarre use of time.  Am I wrong?