This is something I made ages ago but, it appears, neglected to write up.

I have poached pears in red wine a fair few times in the last twelve months, and half the time ended up throwing away the sweetened, spicy red wine poaching liquid. That seems such a waste, and so recently it occurred to me, as it did with the strawberry / rosé wine combo, to turn the liquid into a jelly.

Then that thought led to the thought of making trifle, using the pears, their poaching liquid as the jelly, homemade custard and whipped cream.

Heart attack waiting to happen!

So poach 4 peeled, whole pears in 200mls red wine, 200mls water, 200 grams sugar, and flavour with everything your spice rack can throw at it. I used 1 cinnamon stick, 3 cloves, 4 cardamom pods, a few slices of ginger root, a bay leaf. Boil the pears gently until you can easily run a toothpick through them – time will depend on how ripe they are. Once they are there, turn off the heat until cool then refrigerate overnight.

The following day, core and slice the pears into individual serving bowls. Soak gelatine leaves in cold water, strain and reserve the poaching mix, and bring it back to the boil. Add the gelatine to the poaching mix, stir well, and pour the jelly over the pears. Allow to set.

Make custard – Delia’s quantities were not quite enough for four portions, in my experience. Allow custard to set.

Shortly before serving, whip cream and add to top with sprinkles as preferred.

Can’t quite believe it, but I didn’t take any pictures of this!

Inspired by Chris Noth’s Kitchen Secrets, this week I made a mini pièce montée / croquembouche – which is a French celebration cake made out of a pile of profiteroles.

To mix things up a bit, I used this profiterole recipe (I did need all the eggs, ignore the comments!) and this mocha custard filling.

I made the profiteroles, filled them, and then made a pile by sticking them to the plate with a caramel made of sugar and sherry.

The learning points from the cooking:

You can make profiteroles in advance, but best fill them on the day.

I need a lot more practice piping.

Profiterole filling needs to be completely lump free if you are to have a hope of getting it through a piping nozzle.

Don’t try and make caramel out of unbleached sugar. If you use white, bleached caster sugar, it’s much easier to see when it is turning into caramel. If you use unbleached sugar, it starts off caramel coloured and you have no idea when it is turning.

Here’s a picture:

In a rare happening, I volunteered to make the main for this week’s outing, and so this week’s pudding is not a pudding at all.

What I actually wanted to was lamb shanks, as I have recently discovered these. Well, I ate them ten years ago, in Bistrot les sans culottes ((Nicholas Parsons shouldn’t climb trees)) and much more recently I discovered you can get them in the butchers, they are not particularly expensive, they are delicious, and they are easy to cook.

However, for once I was catering for 6 not 4, and I wasn’t sure I had a pot big enough to cook six lamb shanks, so I decided to do a Lancs hot pot instead.

A dish for that many would have entailed quite a lot of vegetable chopping, so I got the food processor out and fitted the slicing attachment. There is always the danger, when chopping veg for stews in the processor, of chopping too finely and ending up with an unrecognisable mush. I sought to avoid this by using the slicer instead. I used the fine slicer – and next time I will use the coarse slicer instead.

This nicely filled my 5 litre orange le Creuset wedding present pot, and it cooked on the oven floor. I was undermining my veggie Valentines menu by cooking this at the same time for the following day.

In the end, only four of us were there to eat it, but the leftovers hotted up nicely the following day, so it did do six generous portions.

750 grams lamb chunks
olive oil and butter for
3 small onions
4 sticks celery
3 carrots
garlic to taste ((I am rapidly becoming one of those annoying people who ‘likes garlic but it doesn’t like me’))
handful mushrooms
1 large bottle, Manns Brown Ale
3 large potatoes (I had baking potatoes to hand)
Oxo cubes and Worcester sauce

In your stove-to-oven casserole, brown the meat and remove from the heat. Chop the veg and brown it bit by bit, caramelising the onions as much as possible, then return all the veg and meat to the pan.

Add the bottle of beer, two oxo cubes dissolved in a little hot water, and a good glug of Worcester sauce.

Slice the potatoes finely and layer on top of the stew.

Cook the lot for 90 minutes at 180. Or longer, or shorter. Or do what I somehow managed to do, which is actually whack the dial on the oven up to 250 and not notice for 40 minutes. This seems to be a pretty forgiving dish.

Shortly before the end of cooking time, remove from the oven and brush the potatoes with melted butter or dripping. Whack under the grill to get a nice brown finish on the spuds, and serve.

Delish.

The latest outing to Pudding Club was Eric Lanlard’s Tarte borguinione, a pastry shell filled with a chocolate frangipane and topped with red wine poached pears.

I first thought of making it back in March last year, when Lanlard’s Glamour Puds was on TV. I wrote about it on my blog and linked to the recipe so that I knew I could find it when I wanted it.

When it came to clicking it and finding the recipe, ach, horror of horrors, it was gone!

I found a copy here at Homemade Delights and made it according to those instructions. More or less.

Finally, I have also found the Lanlard version here on the C4 website.

It is a ramped up version of this tarte, which I made once a few years ago.

The night before: halve, core ((coring pears is difficult. Any tips?)) and poach three similar sized pears in 200mls of red wine, 250 grams of sugar and a cinnamon stick. Boil it up with the pears in and leave to steep until cold, then refrigerate overnight.

The following morning, blind bake a pastry case: 8oz of flour, 4oz of butter, 1oz sugar, enough milk to bring the dough together. Fridge for a bit then squidge it into the pastry case or roll out and press it in. Blind bake at 180 till golden.

Then make a chocolate frangipan out of 125g butter (it says use unsalted, but I never bother buying that specially), 95g caster sugar, 3 eggs, 125g ground almond, 55g cocoa powder. Mix together in the Kenwood and pour into the cooled pastry case.

Then slice the pears perpendicular to the stem and use a large knife to transfer the slices artistically onto the chocolate almond cream.

Bake at 180 deg C for 30 mins. If it’s going to be a while before eating, glaze it with heated seedless raspberry jelly.

Yum!

Rather helpfully, after I had made this last week, the Evening Post phoned, saying they wanted to do a full page spread about Come Dine With Me and could they take an action photo of me in the kitchen? I could helpfully pretend to have whipped up a tarte specially for their photo.

Here’s their story. Must buy a copy of the picture.

Something else I cooked over the festive season.

Made per this recipe.

I used bourbon biscuits instead of whatever the recipe says, as per her grasshopper pie recipe.

This makes rather a lot, and was definitely one of those for leaving half the leftovers with your host.

For the origins of Pudding Club, see here. For all the recipes in the series, click the tag.

Pudding club restarted in the new year, and I made a steamed pudding. I had planned to try and make my own Christmas pudding this year, and for much of the time I had all the right ingredients but no pudding basin. I toyed with the idea of re-using the plastic ones that supermarket Christmas puddings come in, but in the end, as with so many things Christmas this year, I prevaricated for too long and put it off till next year.

But with the idea in my mind that steamed puddings might be something I would like to tackle, I was thrilled to see a variety of pudding basins in Lakeland remaindered to sell. I plumped for a rather nice Mason & Cash affair with robins and snowflakes painted on it, at least partly because I couldn’t find the 2l metal with a sealing lid which I didn’t see until after I’d passed through the tills.

So to christen the basin, I decided to make a Sussex Pond pudding, following this BBC recipe, for once, almost entirely to the letter.

The one exception was the size of the basin. The recipe calls for a 1.5 litre basin; in the shop they told me the Mason & Cash affair was 600ml. When I measured it for myself, filled to the brim, it was more like 800. But it was definitely smaller than the recipe called for.

And yet, I made it to the measurements, and it all fit in perfectly.

Here’s the ingredients going in:

A good thick layer of suet pastry, butter and dark sugar at the base, then skewered ((the recipe suggests using a larding needle or skewer. I wonder how many more people have skewers than larding needles)) lemons on top, then the rest of the butter and sugar.

Into the basin, covered with a foil and parchment lid with a pleat in it, and tied up with string. I was dead chuffed with how this looked when it was completed as so often my craft attempts look far from good when done.

Then steamed. I used my stock pot and a smaller pudding pot to hold the basin off the bottom. I then steamed for four hours, with a view to allowing the pudding to cool completely, transport it to our friends, and then boil again for about forty minutes to warm before serving.

At this point it was a little nerve-wracking. The pudding was sealed in its basin and I had no idea whether it would turn out, whether it was properly cooked and how it would taste when it turned out.

It turned out just fine.

Then the question was clearly how would it taste? And would the lemons actually be edible, after all that cooking?

What happens is the lemon juice leaks out of the skewer holes, muddles with the melted butter and sugar and forms a dense syrup. With the pith from the lemons still there, this certainly ends up a very adult taste, sweet, lemony but with also a fairly strong marmalady bitterness as an edge to the flavour.

The lemons were not edible.

Some of us had it with custard; others with cream. Our toddler friends preferred the custard to the pudding.