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Thursday, January 5, 2012

Homemade goodies!

Over the past month my husband and I have been busy in the kitchen turning fruit (both home grown and bought at the farmers markets) into tasty treats.

Some of the apricot jam, lemon curd and cherry jam we made.  We also made cordial for the first time - two different types, homegrown elderflower cordial and homegrown rhubarb cordial.  The elderflower tastes just as good as the boutique one from Tasmania.  The rhubarb is really different and tastes great mixed with soda water (and made a nice change from rhubarb cake or rhubarb and apple crumble like I usually make with our rhubarb!).

A couple of years ago we got kilos of free apricots and after we got tired of making jam we made some rustic pies that we froze and then cooked from frozen during the winter.  They were great, so when we had some spare apricots on the weekend I thought I would make another pie.

It is super easy and it is so nice on a cold evening to have a home cooked dessert with no effort!  Make your favourite pasty (I use Stephanie Alexander's shortcrust pastry) line a baking dish with it, sprinkle ground almonds over the base, top with apricots and a sprinkling of sugar.  Finish by folding over the edges of the pastry and freeze.  The next day take the pie out of the dish and seal it in a bag until you are ready to cook and eat it, then just put it back in the dish and straight into a hot oven.  Serve hot with custard or ice cream.  It worked really well for us a couple of years ago so I hope it does again!

We also had some spare plums so I made a plum pie, but used ground hazelnuts instead of almonds.  The plums have a lot more liquid than the apricots, so I'll guess we'll have to wait and see if it works!

1 comment:

  1. Lemon curd is kind of old fashioned, but making a bit of resurgence. We use this recipe http://www.sbs.com.au/food/recipe/11426/Lemon_curd

    As a guide we generally have around 200mL of lemon juice and 4 eggs comes out at around 200mL as well. So this recipe makes around 750mL of lemon curd (three old honey jars for us!).

    It is great on crepes, but we also put it on sponge cakes (with cream and fruit). We have it on toast or nice fresh bread. I haven't had it on scones, but imagine it would work well with them too.

    We like the zesty change from standard sweet jam and it is great when you have lots of spare lemons! If you decide to make and you don't like it, send it our way and we'll have it!!

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