Advocaat- A liqueur made with beaten egg yolks, sugar and spirit. It is sometimes used in cocktails, especially the snowball. (Larousse, p3).
I decided (for some unknown reason), to make Advocaat and Rum-Raisin muffins. (I used a Nigella Lawson recipe from How to be a Domestic Goddess and substituted 3/4 of the milk for Advocaat). The texture of the resulting muffins was really light, but the taste... my mother described it as "mouthwash". Possibly due to a liberal use of nutmeg in the batter. As always, no photos of failures.
Next up was the low-fat pate brisee recipe from Alain Ducasse here. (Technically the recipe is for pate brisee, it just happens to be low fat.) Most people would question the benefits of this recipe, since the "real" full-fat version probably has a better flavour, texture and is easier to make. However, not everybody can tolerate the amount of fat in the traditional full-fat recipe (including myself), which is where this version really comes in useful.
The recipe works by cutting down the butter to 35g per 400g of flour, then adding 100g of potato starch to maintain the "shortness". I did not have potato starch readily available, so after some research (which concluded that potato flour was primarly used to satisfy religious requirements) I replaced it with cornflour.
My Pate Brisee: Makes about 600g- enough to line two 9 inch tart tins.
400g Plain flour
100g Cornflour
35g Butter
5g Salt
5g CasterSugar
2 eggs
100mls water (approx).
Rub the butter into the flours. Add the salt and sugar. Make a well in the centre, break in both eggs and mix, adding the water as you go. Take care not to over-mix.
Notes on working with this Pate Brisee dough: Care must be taken to roll it out as thinly as possible, otherwise the crust will be particularly dense and chewy. In most cases this dough can be used whenever "shortcrust pastry" is specified. If you're concerned that the lack of fat might be detremental to the taste of the tart, add suitable herbs/spices to the dough (at the point where the salt/sugar goes in). I think that if a vanilla pod and brown sugar were used instead of caster, the result would be indistinguishable from the full-fat version.
I did not roll the pastry thin enough, which is why a photo is not currently included - the tart I was making was a bit of a failure, really.
Edit: Since writing this, it has come to my attention that although potato flour and cornflour are in some respects interchangeable, potato flour swells in volume much more than cornflour, which would result in a different texture in the final pastry. I have yet to be able to try out the recipe using potato flour, but I suspect the result may be better.
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