Well this Friday's baking has once again spread over the weekend and has had mixed outcomes. I think I'm going to need quite a bit more practice before I can bring you some fine examples of gluten free short crust pastry worthy of using in sweet and savoury pies. Just as well there are many more Friday's to come! Anyway I shall share with you my success's with dates and walnuts.
As you may remember I was waxing lyrical about my Mum's date slice so on Friday morning I pulled out my old collection of Mum's recipes that she'd typed up and printed out many years ago. Back when they had dot matrix printers and I was still at high school! I'm not exactly sure of the origin of these recipes but they are mostly likely a collection of old hand written recipes that have come from various old cook books or have been handed down from my Nan or other people that Mum decided to type up.
Well what I remember as being called 'date slice' was actually 'date meltaway' and it didn't have any walnuts or a recipe for the lemon icing. Not to mention the recipe was a bit vague on details like the temperature of the oven and how long you might cook it for. Also it seems that Mum also liked to tweak recipes as well. Hmm maybe that's where I get it from? The notes indicated that Mum did one and half times the pastry recipe but didn't say how to use one and half eggs! Mum also increased the date mixture to a packet of dates, although I'm not too sure what size the packet was. I thought her substituted lemon for sugar was a great idea as it would go well with the lemon icing. Anyway I gave it a go, substituting self raising flour for gluten free SR flour with a dash of xantham gum. Unfortunately, I only had about 300g of dates so I added some walnuts but I think mum would have used a 500g packet of dates. I also tried substituting Nutalex for butter and soy milk for milk to make the recipe dairy free as well which seem to work OK although it looked paler. Anyway here is what I came up with.
Date and walnut slice with lemon icing (Adapted from Jan Ewings's recipe for Date Meltaway)
500g pitted dates , roughly chopped
3/4c walnuts broken pieces
juice and rind 1 lemon
1 1/2 cup water
pastry
2 1/4 c GF self raising flour
2 tsp xantham gum
3Tbs butter (nutalex)
3Tbs milk (soy milk)
3Tbs sugar
2 eggs
lemon icing1 1/4 c pure icing sugar, sifted
30g butter melted
1tsp lemon rind
lemon juice
1. Preheat oven 180C, oil slice pan
2.To make date and walnut filling, in a saucepan cook dates and walnuts with water, juice and rind until a thick paste is formed.
3. To make pastry, sift flour and xantham gum and whisk in sugar. Melt butter and milk, mix in lightly beaten eggs. Stir wet mix with dry mix to form a dough.
4. Split dough and roll slightly larger half to line base and sides of slice pan. Spread over date mix and roll other slightly smaller half of dough to form a top to the slice. Press edges together and brush top with milk.
5. Bake in moderate oven until golden, approximately 20-25 minutes. Pastry should have come away from the sides of the pan. Cool on a rack.
6.To make icing, mix melted butter into icing sugar and rind, add lemon juice to form a slightly runny/spreadable icing.
7. Spread over cooled slice and allow to cool completely until icing is set. Cut into small pieces and store in an airtight container.
As you may remember I was waxing lyrical about my Mum's date slice so on Friday morning I pulled out my old collection of Mum's recipes that she'd typed up and printed out many years ago. Back when they had dot matrix printers and I was still at high school! I'm not exactly sure of the origin of these recipes but they are mostly likely a collection of old hand written recipes that have come from various old cook books or have been handed down from my Nan or other people that Mum decided to type up.
Well what I remember as being called 'date slice' was actually 'date meltaway' and it didn't have any walnuts or a recipe for the lemon icing. Not to mention the recipe was a bit vague on details like the temperature of the oven and how long you might cook it for. Also it seems that Mum also liked to tweak recipes as well. Hmm maybe that's where I get it from? The notes indicated that Mum did one and half times the pastry recipe but didn't say how to use one and half eggs! Mum also increased the date mixture to a packet of dates, although I'm not too sure what size the packet was. I thought her substituted lemon for sugar was a great idea as it would go well with the lemon icing. Anyway I gave it a go, substituting self raising flour for gluten free SR flour with a dash of xantham gum. Unfortunately, I only had about 300g of dates so I added some walnuts but I think mum would have used a 500g packet of dates. I also tried substituting Nutalex for butter and soy milk for milk to make the recipe dairy free as well which seem to work OK although it looked paler. Anyway here is what I came up with.
Date and walnut slice with lemon icing (Adapted from Jan Ewings's recipe for Date Meltaway)
500g pitted dates , roughly chopped
juice and rind 1 lemon
1 1/2 cup water
pastry
2 1/4 c GF self raising flour
2 tsp xantham gum
3Tbs butter (nutalex)
3Tbs milk (soy milk)
3Tbs sugar
2 eggs
lemon icing1 1/4 c pure icing sugar, sifted
30g butter melted
1tsp lemon rind
lemon juice
1. Preheat oven 180C, oil slice pan
2.To make date and walnut filling, in a saucepan cook dates and walnuts with water, juice and rind until a thick paste is formed.
3. To make pastry, sift flour and xantham gum and whisk in sugar. Melt butter and milk, mix in lightly beaten eggs. Stir wet mix with dry mix to form a dough.
4. Split dough and roll slightly larger half to line base and sides of slice pan. Spread over date mix and roll other slightly smaller half of dough to form a top to the slice. Press edges together and brush top with milk.
5. Bake in moderate oven until golden, approximately 20-25 minutes. Pastry should have come away from the sides of the pan. Cool on a rack.
6.To make icing, mix melted butter into icing sugar and rind, add lemon juice to form a slightly runny/spreadable icing.
7. Spread over cooled slice and allow to cool completely until icing is set. Cut into small pieces and store in an airtight container.
This evenings attempt at another recipe for pastry in a hope to make a medium sized chicken pie with the remaining filling were foiled by a mistake I made early on. I had intended to scale down a Maggie Beer recipe but had got confused with the quantities of butter. Unfortunately attempts to get things back on track didn't work as ingredients were added out of sequence and its important to get them right, especially when using xantham gum as a binding agent. Such a shame and a waste of ingredients but alas it's bound to happen on occasion. Anyway hopefully its not a mistake I'll be making again! But we'll leave that for another baking day, but not this week as I think it needs a bit of time and patience to get it right. Oh well we had the chicken filling with rice, not quite the same but edible anyway. Well that's about it for this week. Enjoy!
Well I had intended to have little chicken pies for lunch but the finished product was terrible. Rather, the pasty was appalling but the filling was tasty but because they were small pies with a large amount of pastry to filling they were inedible. So the untasted pies got throw away. Ah if only we had chickens! And the leftover filling was saved for another attempt at a pie over the weekend.
This Friday we'd taken the evening off from entertaining and instead used a wedding gift, a gift voucher for a French restaurant in Avalon, to have an evening out together. Yum ,I had Morten Bay bugs in a creamy garlic sauce, Duck Confit with roast vegetables while Neil had a Goat's Cheese Souffle and a creamy rabbit casserole all finished of with espresso and Creme Caramel. Very tasty indeed although I think we both weren't used to such rich and creamy food. Anyway its given me plenty of inspiration for french inspired gluten free dishes indeed, such as a gluten free souffle.
This morning I was back in the kitchen to make a loaf of bread. This time I was inspired by the date and walnut slice that I made on Friday and decided to make a loaf of date and walnut bread. On the way back from my swim I picked up some more dates and walnuts to add to the Real Bread mix, about a cup of each. The resulting loaf is a bit darker in colour and rather tasty indeed, especially while still warm and spread with a bit of butter. Two slices went down a bit too easily for morning tea!
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