Spiced quince and apple pies

Quince time! Maybe the greatest time of year?

I don’t know, it’s a big call. But really, stewed quinces are so great – on cereal, for dessert served with (soy) ice cream. So versatile! It’s times like these I get a little bit sad that our own quince trees are performing a bit less brilliantly than would be ideal. Possibly an alert to add quince tree TLC to the list of gardening jobs?

That aside, my aunty and uncle brought over a bag of quinces the other day, so the kitchen is well stocked, and today was one of those days where you just need to do some baking to cheer someone up. Good combination, I thought.

With a bit of browsing of the internet for inspiration, I decided on pies. Mostly because I have been making way too many cake-type sweets recently, and no one in my house is eating them at a satisfactory rate to allow me to keep baking more. I also remembered spotting a small ball of pastry in the freezer the other day, which, given the super-tight study schedule I have put myself on, I decided would save me a lot of time. (Please note that I am aware writing blogs isn’t exactly exam revision, but you know… sanity break…)

Armed with slightly-old-but-still-passable short crust pastry, I began my pie adventure.
With a little bit more internet inspiration, I decided that following a recipe was way too hard, and to just basically stew fruit with spices and stick it in the pastry. Can’t really get much simpler than that. I did come across an interesting spice combination on my search though, in the form of Chinese Five Spice. Apparently you can get this in supermarkets, and it’s a combination of ground cinnamon, cloves, fennel seeds, star anise and peppercorns. I didn’t have this, but I used a similar mix of spices because even on a page, they look great together.

I mentioned in a recent post that I recently acquired some honey from my friend’s hives in suburban Adelaide. I can not describe just how awesome this honey tastes. Especially in tea, but also especially just generally. So the honey makes another appearance in this recipe. Veganise it by replacing with sugar.

These are happy pies for my darling sister. She is pretty great. I hope she is feeling better soon.

Spiced quince and apple pies
Makes 6 mini pies (cupcake sized)

If you don’t have any slightly-old-but-still-passable pastry in your freezer, you could buy some or use this recipe.

Short crust pastry:
170g margarine (dairy free) – I used lite nuttelex (but nuttelex is a bit sus, so if you decide butter is more ethical, go with that)
340g plain flour
pinch of salt
cold water

Rub the margarine into the flour, add salt and just enough cold water to bind into a dough. Roll into ball and leave to rest in fridge for 20mins.

Filling: note that spice measurements are approximate – add to taste
2 small quinces, peeled, cored and diced
1 apple, cored and diced
2 heaped tablespoons delicious honey (or sugar or other sweetener)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon ground cloves
1 pinch fennel seeds, ground
2 stars of anise
water

Make up pastry, and allow to rest in the fridge while you make the pie filling. Preheat oven to 180C and lightly grease a six-cup muffin pan.

Place all filling ingredients in a medium sized saucepan, and add water to about half the level of the fruit. Stir together well, and bring to the boil on medium heat. Continue to boil, stirring occasionally until fruit becomes soft and all liquid is gone. Allow to cool slightly and remove stars of anise from the mixture. (This may take a bit of searching.)

In the mean time, roll out pastry between 2 pieces of baking paper to around 2-3mm thick. Cut circles the appropriate size to fit your muffin pans, and line each cup. Save a little pastry for lids or lattice on top.

Fill each pastry-lined cup with filling, and top each with strips of pastry in a lattice, or whatever other creative design you please. If you have a lot of pastry left, you can make lids for the pies, but remember to puncture some holes in them if you do.

Bake for 15-20 minutes or until pastry is golden. Allow to cool slightly in pans before removing. Serve warm alone, or with some kind of vanilla ice cream or dairy-free substitute if that’s how you roll.

Honey-glazed earl grey and persimmon muffins – Sweet Adventures Blog Hop

This is something new for me. The Sweet Adventures Blog Hop (this month hosted by 84th & 3rd), is a monthly dessert link-up, whereby you submit a post relating to the month’s theme, and then become linked up with everyone else who does so in a neat little list, so you can read everyone’s wonderful recipes.

The theme for May is ‘What’s your cup of tea?’ – and if you have a little click on some of those links above, you can see the list of delightful adventures going on around this theme.

I have to admit to getting a little bit experimental with my entry here. Firstly, I don’t think I’ve ever eaten a persimmon, let alone cooked with one. It was just one of those times where there were a few pieces of fruit in a bowl in the kitchen, looking a little bit sad, so it made sense to put them out of their misery and turn them into something a bit more appealing.

I can’t say I’ve ever used honey instead of sugar before either. However, I met up with a lovely uni friend today, whose Dad is a newly registered apiarist, and is selling his honey from hives in their suburban Adelaide backyard. How could I resist the sweet calling from happy hives?

And lastly; tea. The magic ingredient that is rather integral to this whole undertaking. I probably need to refine my methods for extracting the tea flavour (because there was some crazy stuff happening in my kitchen this afternoon), but I’ve had a think, and refined it for ease of replication in the recipe below.

These muffins are not too sweet, and the flavours are pretty subtle; probably quite appropriate for breakfast, as they’re quite healthy too (low-fat and egg and dairy-free). You might like to ramp up the tea flavour a bit by making a strong brew, and be careful with the honey on top – if it runs down the edges of the muffins, it makes them hard to get out of the patty pans. This could be a good thing though, if you want an excuse to get every last bit of muffin from the paper… I’m sure some experimentation will work this one out – perhaps just a dollop of honey in the centre. For a first try at an invented recipe though, these muffins are not bad. I mean, I ate two of them when I was supposed to just be ‘tasting’ them, so…

Well here you go. Honey-glazed earl grey and persimmon muffins. My first attempt at entering the world of the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop.

Honey-glazed persimmon muffins

Makes 10 muffins

1/2 cup persimmon flesh, mashed (the persimmon I used was so soft, mashing wasn’t necessary)
1 persimmon, diced
1 persimmon, sliced horizontally (to get the star pattern)
1/2 cup soy milk
1/2 cup boiling water (to make tea)
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup honey
2 cups plain flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
3 earl grey teabags
extra honey to drizzle

Preheat the oven to 180C and line a muffin tin with paper liners.

Brew some strong earl grey using around 3 teabags, and 1/2 cup boiling water. Heat soy milk in a small saucepan with the hot tea-water and tea bags to extract some more flavour.

In a large bowl, whisk together flour and baking powder to remove any lumps. In a small bowl, mix mashed persimmon, 1/2 cup honey, tea-infused soy milk and water, and vegetable oil. Add wet ingredients to dry ingredients and whisk until combined. Carefully fold in diced persimmon pieces, then distribute evenly among muffin pans.

Ensure tops are level, then place one persimmon slice on top of each muffin. Drizzle a small amount of honey on top, preferably in the centre so it doesn’t end up around the muffin instead of on it.

Bake for around 30 minutes, or until golden brown and an inserted skewer comes out clean.

This post is part of the Sweet Adventures Blog Hop. Head over here and scroll down to see the list of other blogs taking part in the hop!

Experimenting with wholefoods

Orange/cardamon, and gluten-free choc-chip biscuits

The other day I made a fantastic recipe for Apple, Cinnamon & Quinoa Muffin Top Cookies from Oh My Veggies. The most exciting part for me (apart from eating them), was using quinoa. I’m a fan of quinoa, I’ve just never really got to the point where I’ve actually prepared it myself. Now the challenge of course was that the recipe called for 1 cup of cooked quinoa, and I, clutching my paper bag full of whole quinoa straight from the organic shop, had no idea how much dry = cooked quinoa. So I ended up just following the directions I had googled for cooking one cup of dry quinoa (yielding more once cooked), with the idea that I’d use the remainder in a salad or something.

Alas! Creativity got the better of me, and yesterday I found myself in the kitchen with a plastic container full of cooked quinoa, and a vague idea of trying to make biscuits. I’m generally more of a muffin/cupcake/bread type of baker, so I’m not sure why I thought I’d be capable of inventing a biscuit recipe. However, it actually worked out okay, much to my surprise and amusement.

Another love of mine is using chickpeas in baking. I’m not sure if I’ve already shared this, but there’s a great gluten-free cake recipe here (from The Smallest Smallholding), which uses chickpeas as the staple ingredient. I’ve also encountered some seriously delicious chickpea treats from Scullery Made, a regular at the Barossa Farmers Market (- if you’re ever out that way, seriously check them out – amazing baked goodies and beautiful teas).

So it was decided that I would embark on this adventure with both quinoa and chickpeas in tow. I really wish I could post the recipe here, but I didn’t actually measure anything out. It was a very rough experiment that I didn’t expect to actually yield anything worth sharing, but it was basically a keep-adding-stuff-in-until-you-get-the-right-consistency kind of job. If you want to get experimental too, by all means do! It is fun, and the worst that can happen is that you have to eat all your biscuit dough raw, which I’m sure we all acknowledge is not a bad thing.

So this was the result: two batches of biscuits, both dairy/egg free, and made using quinoa and chickpeas. I’ve included the ingredients (and measurements where I remembered), so you can experiment at will! I made the basic dough up all together, then divided it into two and added extras.

Basic dough
cooked quinoa (around 1 1/2 cups)
1 cup cooked chickpeas, whizzed in a food processor
rice flour (around 1/4 – 1/2 cup?)
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
honey (around 1/4 cup)

Orange and cardamon biscuits (inspired by The Mindful Foodie)
5 cardamon pods, seeds removed and ground to a fine powder
1 teaspoon cinnamon
zest and juice of one orange
wholemeal flour, to make up a moist dough

Mix all ingredients together. Form tablespoon-sized balls and flatten slightly on a lined baking tray, about 2-3cm apart. Bake at 170C until golden (around 20 minutes).

Gluten-free choc-chip biscuits
1/4 cup chopped chocolate, or chocolate chips
a touch more rice flour (1/4 cup?)
almond meal to make moist dough

*Note that this mixture was a lot moister/oilier than the orange biscuits. I had my doubts, but they actually worked brilliantly! Soft on the inside and crunchy on the outside :)

Mix and bake as above.

Happy experimenting!