Fantine

I was calmly listening to 'Woman's Hour' this week when, to my alarm, a small boy came over the airwaves explaining how he was cooking a hundred recipes in his school holidays as part of a school project. 'No, no, no!' I thought, 'not only am I going to be asked till the end of time whether I'm copying Julie out of Julie & Julia, but now I'm being beaten to my rather modest target by a pre-pubescent! I must up my game!!' To which end: puff pastry.

I went for Lorraine Pascale's puff pastry recipe from Baking Made Easy. Now I know the name of this show belies the fact that this is difficult, but bear with me--what I have learned this week is that puff pastry might not necessarily be hard, but it does take time and patience.

You start by rubbing cold butter into flour and mixing in cold water to make a light dough--easy peasy, when done in the food mixer. After which it needs a rest in the fridge for just under half an hour.

A block of butter ready  to be melded in...

The next stage is filthy, though: it basically entails enrobing almost an entire packet of butter in the refrigerated dough, carefully rolling it into a rectangle, folding it in on itself, rolling out again, and repeating the process. At this point it gets soft, so it has to go back in the fridge again.

The rolling and folding is repeated twice more, before it is rolled out and chilled--yet again--before use. See a kid's attention span would be far too short for all that. Ha!

I'd decided that I wanted to make apple turnovers with the pastry, so I carefully cut up the pastry before I chilled it once more and made the filling from this recipe. Apple turnovers had been on my mind all week: I've been reading Les Miserables for the past fortnight or so, thanks to friend C who emphatically recommended it, and apple turnovers are mentioned in the context of a vulnerable woman being abandoned by a heartless cad whom she loved. Perhaps it was a deep-seated sympathy that made me fancy one--possibly it was because their mention in the book reminded me of my dad bringing them home for a treat when I was little.

Enough whimsy. They ended up being cuboid instead of triangular, as I stupidly cut the pastry into rectangles instead of squares. Once out of the fridge, the pastry becomes very soft really rather quickly--so I was speed stuffing and there was a bit of apple-filling leakage on the way to the oven, but nothing too unsightly. And the pastry worked! It was slightly greasy (which presumably had something to do with all that butter), but I was very pleased as a first attempt. It rose in crispy layers, and cooked underneath. Win.

So, in going all out to beat a nine-year old, I have only cooked one recipe! However, coming up I have jam, crab, and sour dough bread (I am maturing the starter for this at the moment--it smells and looks like baby sick). Over and out.