Category: Uncategorized

The Story so far…..

Bake On!  10 – Miniature Pork Pies with Quails’ Eggs – Season 2 Episode 5

Ingredients

Method

Step 0 is find lard. Don’t waste your time at Safeway, head to a Mexican market, they have it by the bucket.

This was my first time making hot water crust pastry. I was very wary of burning my hands with boiling water and lard. It was odd because normally when making pastry you’re moving quickly so the dough doesn’t get too warm and you don’t want to over work the dough.

 

 

For hot water crust, you move quickly so the dough doesn’t get too cold and you almost can’t over work it.

 

You have to roll out the pastry fairly thin and then cut out circles of the correct size  for the top and bottom.  I always find something in the kitchen to act as a guide.

 

 For the filling, cook the quails’ eggs in a pan of boiling water for two minutes then refresh in cold water, peel carefully and set aside.

Put the onion, pork, bacon and parsley into a bowl, season with salt and freshly ground black pepper and mix until well combined.

Spoon a little of the mixture into each lined pie case, place a quail’s egg in the centre and spoon over a little more filling.

Brush the edge of each pie case with a little beaten egg, place the lids on top and crimp the edges together to seal completely. Make a small hole in centre of each pie and bake in the oven for 40 minutes.

 

When the pies are cooked, set them aside to cool for 10 minutes. If making the jelly, dissolve the stock cube in the boiling water. Soak the gelatine in a little cold water until soft then squeeze out excess water and whisk into the warm chicken stock.

(N.B. I did not do jelly because I was planning to eat them for dinner)

Verdict: B+ It was fiddly and the first time with hot water crust was odd. I did enjoy the crust and would use the pastry again. The quail eggs were annoying (sorry state bird!). They were difficult to peel and they had an odd taste, sort of sour.

I would bake this again, if only because my family really liked them, but I would probably omit the eggs unless I was really trying to impress someone.

Next Time: Chocolate Roulade

Spoiler – I totally finished this on time! I didn’t even have to stay up late!

Husbeast created the horn and wings. In fact, little falcon made her own horn out of Sculpey (dad made a back up horn, cuz he’s smart like that).

In the finishing sprint, I opted for fabric glue.  I didn’t want to be up until all hours. The priority was “Get it done.”

I don’t have any pictures from school on the 28th, but I do have them from the Halloween parade on the 29th. Let’s here it for costumes in broad daylight – so easy to photograph.

I’ve just begun playing a new-ish mobile game called Ingress. It’s been out on Android for a while but only became available on iOS this week. Ingress is an MMO that allows you to interact with a world map based on where you are in real life – landmarks such as churches and public art installations appear on the map and can be tapped in order to gain territory around them, as long as you are physically within about 40 yards of them. Likewise, a currency called XM is scattered liberally around the streets of the map, and you pick it up by physically walking by. You spend XM to build up friendly landmarks, which then give you weapons that you use to break down enemy-held landmarks and eventually take them over.

The game so far is rather rough in some ways while weirdly polished in others. The tutorial is hidden away in a menu and I required multiple attempts at it before I understood what I was trying to do, yet the map is gorgeous and the missions in the game are fully voiced. The best thing about Ingress is the combination of watching your little phone scanner screen moving you around the map and realizing that there are probably other players out there who may notice you moving toward their territory – in real life, wandering around peering at your phone concernedly like you are trying to use a Swedish GPS app – and prepare to retaliate.

Ingress is free to download and play, and as near as I can tell does not bother you for money. The game will occasional reward a successful hack with an in-universe news item via YouTube, so it’s possible that they are making their money off of YouTube views somehow. Or it’s possible that Google is just fronting the whole thing as an experiment. Either way it costs you nothing to download Ingress and try it out; I’m enjoying the creepy vibe and strange mix of Foursquare and Watch_Dogs.

-ssr