Custard tarts

This is the best custard tart in Ballarat, possibly in Victoria. Better than the Portuguese style in Journal cafe, better than Chinese Dan tarts. Rich, soft & flaky pastry. Sweet cool custard inside.
Plating Works makes these. They sell at the Lakeside Markets and in Wilsons - occasionally.

Custard tart, white nectarine, Queensland green tea. Perfect Autumn snack.

Buns and bao for Easter Monday

Easter Monday. 

Hot cross bun bakers in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne

with the father of one of the bakers..

 

In the  yum cha restaurant ready to eat bao (steamed, sweet, red pork buns) and other goodies.

I took the bakers' hot cross buns home to have for brekky tomorrow, but had to try one for supper.

The buns contain chocolate as well as fruit and spices .

Yum.

French bread!

For the last three months this beautiful little French bakery-cafe in Creswick has been baking REAL bread. Ballarat is bereft of good bread - it comes in from Geelong (La Madre) or Trentham (Red Beard) or Castlemaine (Himalaya) or Melbourne (Babka) ......
I can bake sourdough and wholemeal and flat breads, but I can't manage the perfection of a traditional French baguette.  It seems that you have to have a French baker to get traditional French bread.

Sorry about the fuzzy photos but I got a bit excited, having brekky in such style this morning.

It was so delicious to be inside in the warmth of an open fire, the scent of baking bread and coffee brewing around us, gazing at the rainy street outside.

We took a baguette and brioche home but Yin ate most of it while I was still fiddling around on the computer.

This is what's left, just before I make up a tomato roll for lunch.

I love good bread and good coffee.You'll find both at the Peche Gourmande.

Holy goats and blood plums

First we bought a box of blood plums from the cooking fruit stand at Wilsons.

Then we went to Daylesford, where we ended up in the Aladdin's cave that is Cliffy's, and after tea and cake, bought a cheese from the goats at Holy Goat and tiny olives from Mt Zero and went home and feasted.

Blood plums arrive in high summer. I will put up with the heat for the joy of fresh and, better still, stewed blood plums. (Sorry, but I grew up with stewed blood plums - inelegant term for a delicious dish).

On the right (click) are 4 cakes of locally made soap - sandalwood, mandarin, rose and goat milk, lemongrass. Almost good enough to eat, and so lovely to wash with this is now the only soap I use.

 

Yum!

Plum sauce

Jake pruned the vegetation back, cleared the gutters and cleared away the heaps of twigs and branches and dangerous vegetation ready for summer.

He picked the cherry plums before pruning them  back.

I made tangy, spicy, home-made plum sauce.

Roller Door

Travelling in to the state archives in North Melbourne

is made a pleasure by a trip to Roller Door.

It's just around the corner and down one block from the North Melbourne station.

It's the best coffee in the smallest of spaces - a back yard garage with a roller door and a tiny courtyard.

 Coffe that's worth a trip in just for a for a cup, a few perfect sweets or a delicious organic savoury something.

Boasting and baking

I went to Clunes Booktown last Saturday and made an egg & bacon & herb pie - an old favourite - to take along. Best picnic dish ever. Easy, too.

You layer freshly cooked bacon pieces, then add a thick layer of  chopped fresh herbs - parsley, thyme, chives, sage - then a layer of eggs, each just broken a little and a touch of cream, black pepper and a LITTLE grated nutmeg very lightly stirred in with the tip of a fork so the eggs mostly keep their shape. If you're greedy you repeat the layers, and cook the pie a bit longer.

I bought a few fascinating books and had the best scones from the tea and scones room at the RSL.
As well as books I brought home apples. Clunes streets are planted with apple trees and apples were falling out of the trees.

I wasn't the only one who took a few apples home. 

Some of the Clunes apples became a tart tatin, or upside-down apple tart.

This is so easy! You wash but don't peel the apples and cut them in half across the middle, so that you can see the star of pips in the centre. Just take out the littlest bit of the stem and core. Put a clove in each half then sit them in a baking dish on butter, lots of brown sugar with cinnamon and with the peel side on top.
I usually add honey, or apricot jam to the brown sugar etc. This year I put in a little of my quince jelly.
Bake very slowly until the apples are glazed and super soft, smell delicious but still keep their shape - and the sauce is thick and just a little runny in the pan. Put the pastry on top and bake it. When it's cooked and cooling, you turn it upside down and the pastry soaks up all the sweet sauce. Beautiful hot or  cold.

This is my quince jelly.

I  made it just after Anzac Day. Quince jelly is something I don't always achieve. I never know, each time I cook up a batch of fruit jelly, exactly what I will make. I  have made quince syrup, I have made crabapple paste, and one sad year I made feijoa rubber - yes it bounced and had a burnt rubber tang to it.

This is real jelly, and it stands up for itself!

Now what will I make with the last of the windfalls?

More to show you

My elder son is staying over Christmas, the first time he's been back for a couple of years. Just as I finished the last post he arrived home from a two day fishing trip and with fish! Two beautiful snapper Pagrus Auratus caught this morning. He and Yin are planning how to cook one right  now.

I'm worried about the factory fishing that is destroying the oceans, but can't resist a hand-caught fish. These will be cooked and eaten with respect.

Saturday

There were Williams, Packham and Corella pears. I bought these deep red ones called D'Anjou because they had the heavenly sweet scent that proper pears have. And they were delicious, there are none left.

The hunt for saffron milkcaps

It's been warm and very wet - wetter than for several years so we went on our regular fungi forage with high hopes.

First we tried the edge of Creswick township, a rich source in other years. We were looking for saffron milkcaps which flourish in the pine plantations all around our region.

Lots of broken and crushed fungi, and no saffron milkcaps. Too many careless picknickers have been here.

Next we tried the back of Creswick railway station. It's been unused since Jeff Kennett stopped the Maryborough train, but soon it will open again. Alas, more mashing of mushrooms - a clump of Slippery Jacks had been thoroughly stomped on.

On the way home we stopped at a place just off the road back to Ballarat.

It was full of puddles and marshy spots and little ponds.

Beautiful and very poisonous fungi flourished

We also found the saffron milkcaps.

We took only three baskets of them home, as it seems there has been a bit of a war on mushrooms in Creswick, and we would like to find them again next year.

You could call this bangers and mash

Locally grown, home cooked - delicious! Cotechino made by a friend from a local free-range pig. Lentils grown just to the north of us at Mt Zero. Lentils with flavour! Nicola potatoes grown just down the road by Mt Warrenheip.  

Not a glamorous photo, but we were hungry and couldn't hang around fiddling with a camera. Autumn is a wonderful season for greedy people.

Autumn and gardens

The weather has turned to Autumn, and Hebe, a minor goddess from the Ballarat Gardens seems to be offering some more refreshing rain. Ninety millilitres! (I do know that Hebe is not a water bearer but in Ballarat she can offer nothing better).

This Sunday past Slow Food Ballarat had a Harvest Lunch at the Buninyong Botanical Gardens. All the food was cooked by the Slow Food volunteers. (Yin and I have been with SF Ballarat since it started, since we fancy saving the world through eating.)

I won't go into the menu much, but it was all grown locally from the flour to the yabbies to the blueberries and cobnuts.

This is part of the display of Grinders farm, out at Dunnstown under Mt Warrenheip, just fifteen minutes away. Garlic, gourds, multiple varieties of potatoes and of autumn fruit.
All the mineral water and wine was from our region and the coffee came from a village cooperative in Niugini. It was imported by my neighbour, who is from the coffee-growing village, but who grew up to marry a Ballarat woman - so it's sort of local coffee.

600 people were fed. I was just on gates and free water, but Yin boldly eschewed (love that word!) Chinese cuisine and cooked 600 blueberry, cobnut and cinnamon muffins with Jo. He can no longer claim that he does not cook cakes.

This is the 150th year since these beautiful gardens were planted. The recent heavy rain brought the grass back plush and green, and filled the waterways and pond.

The bowling club was full of happy bowlers who completely ignored the wine, food and acapella singers around them.

And here is one more staue from the Ballarat Botanical Gardens - Summer, about to stride stolidly off, leaving us to enjoy the harvest.

PS. I added a link to the Buninyong website and found a picture of me on the farmers' market page. Fame at last!