Shepherd's Pie

Link to printable version

This week, we are making a dish I had many times as a child, a Shepherd's Pie! It was a weekly staple in my family which everyone enjoyed. It's a filling, delicious, and hearty dish that is great for a cold winter evening. 

A lot of people confuse this for a Cottage Pie, or use the names interchangeably, and while they are quite similar there is one main difference - Shepherds Pies are made with mince lamb or mutton, and Cottage Pies use mince beef. The rest of the recipe is pretty much the same, so if you like, you can substitute the lamb for beef for an equally tasty dinner ! 

There is some controversy on where the Shepherds/Cottage Pie originated. Since I ate this many times as a child here in Ireland, I always believed it was traditionally Irish. However, there are a lot of people who believe it came from Britain. It's hard to find an exact source of where it came from - the internet seems pretty divided on the issue - but since this was a dinner I ate growing up, I like to think it's an Irish classic ! It's generally accepted, though, that the Cottage Pie was first made around the 18th century as a way to serve leftover meat and vegetables. 

The dish is a hearty meat and vegetable filling, topped with crusted mashed potato. It is very versatile - you can add any of your favourite vegetables, such as leeks, or mushrooms. Today, however, I'm making it like my mother did and using onions, carrots, and peas, as well as some smoked bacon for some extra flavour!

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30 minutes

45-60 minutes

4-6

Strawberries and vanilla cream crêpes cake

Link to printable version

Pancake Tuesday is around the corner, and so we thought that our first dessert of the year should be...a crêpes cake ! It also makes for a perfect valentine's day dessert, and there'll definitely be some left for few days after! 

I always joke about crêpes being in my DNA, not only because I'm French, but mainly because in my family, crêpes was a monthly event ! Even if my mum didn't especially enjoy standing in front of a hot stove for hours, she had two crêpes pans in her kitchen allowing for a much faster process. However, she never made a full cake with them. Personally, I only discovered this cake a few years back at a friends birthday party. They had this cake, which they called a "crêpier", and I remember thinking it was a genius way of enjoying pancakes.

We used our classic crêpes recipe and doubled the proportions to have around 30 crêpes. If, like us, you only own one pancake pan, the most daunting part of this recipe will be cooking the crêpes. It's indeed a long process, but it's all worth it in the end. In this recipe, we'll be skipping the crêpes making process but do check out our crêpes batter recipe and especially our tips for stress-free pancakes at the end.

This is a filling dessert, so we recommend serving thin slices, especially if you're planning on serving it after a large dinner.

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Crêpes : 40 minutes Cake : 40 minutes

Crêpes : 1h30 - 2 hours Cake : None

8 - 12

Tarte Flambée or Flammekueche

Link to printable version

Today we're making a dish that always brings me back. Even though my Mom is born in Paris, she lived part of her childhood in the Alsace region of France, where she grew up enjoying local specialties, such as Choucroute and Pretzels. Because of the particular history of the region, switching between German or French rule, the culinary culture is somewhat based on a mix of Germanic and French traditions. 

One of the specialties from that region that my Mom often made back in south of France is the Tarte Flambée, or, as we usually called it, Flammekueche. Basically, it's a very thin pizza-like dough, often served in a rectangular shape, garnished with thinly sliced onion and lardons over a layer of fresh cream. Unlike what the French name might suggest, the tart is actually not flambéed, but traditionally cooked in a wood-fire oven.

From scratch, it is so easy to do because the dough doesn't need any resting time or kneading. It's even easier if you simply grab a pre-made pizza dough. As for the lardons, they can be hard to find here in Ireland, but you can simply slice some bacon instead - it's pretty much the same thing.  For the onions, if, like us, you own a food processor that can slice, we'd advise you to use it since it's much nicer when the onion is sliced very thinly, but it is not impossible to achieve similar result by slicing it yourself. It just takes a bit more time and tears !

It's also a very versatile dish ! Add a bit of grated cheese and you'll turn it into a Tarte Flambée "Gratinée", or add some mushrooms and it'll become a Tarte Flambée "Forestière". However, we'll be doing the classic version here.

It's a delicious tart, in fact so delicious, that I get often asked to do it at home. We'll be serving it with a mixed salad and my favorite homemade vinaigrette, as a healthy side after the over indulgence during Christmas !

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30 minutes

15-20 minutes

4

2016 - A Gourmet year

Firstly, we're wishing our readers a very Happy New Year. We hope you've enjoyed our Harry Potter themed "Wizarding December" recipes ! 

We'll get back on our usual recipes and scheduling from now on ;-) 

It's the first anniversary of our blog. Exactly 1 year ago, day for day, we posted our very first recipe : the Galette des Rois, which, by the way, is traditionally enjoyed during January, for the Epiphany. So you're right on time to give it a go this year !

To celebrate our very first year of existence, we made a small recap of the top 5 of our most viewed recipes from last year ! We hope it should reflect your five favorite recipes and hopefully inspire you to try some !

Is your favourite not in the list ? Let us know in the comments !

Click on the pictures to access the recipes 

- 5 -

Also called "Pain d'épice", this sweet loaf works with sweet and savory spreads. It's also one of the first recipes we posted on this blog , therefore we're surprised and happy to see it top 5 !

- 4 -

Little sweet shortcrust tartlets, filled with an indulging milk chocolate custard, and topped with fresh raspberries. No wonder why this delicious tea time treat made it to number 4 !

Butterbeer [Wizarding December]

It's so close to Christmas now, and we're at the end of our Wizarding December ! We would like to wish our readers all the best for Christmas, and we hope you've enjoyed the Harry Potter themed posts. 

To finish, we are going to make Butterbeer, the popular beverage served in Hogsmeade village, and enjoyed by thousands of wizards around the world. The main question is : What does Butterbeer really taste like ? J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, described it as being a little bit like less-sickly butterscotch. From the book, it does seems like Butterbeer has a very low alcoholic content, not enough to affect humans, but enough to get house-elves drunk. 

However, for this Butterbeer, we are actually going to adapt an original recipe from "The good Huswifes Handmaide for the Kitchin", an old English cooking book published in 1588, including the first recorded recipe for "Buttered Beer" - a Tudor Era drink. Here is the original recipe as transcribed from the book : 

To make Buttered Beere
Take three pintes of Beere, put fiue yolkes of Egges to it, straine them together, and set it in a pewter pot to the fyre, and put to it halfe a pound of Sugar, one penniworth of Nutmegs beaten, one penniworth of Cloues beaten, and a halfepenniworth of Ginger beaten, and when it is all in, take another pewter pot and brewe them together, and set it to the fire againe, and when it is readie to boyle, take it from the fire, and put a dish of sweet butter into it, and brewe them together out of one pot into an other.

The result of this drink will not taste anything like butterscotch, therefore, probably not anywhere close to the butterbeer that Harry Potter and his friends enjoyed in the books. It actually tastes like a sweet, warm, spiced beer ! We adjusted the spices slightly until it reached our personal liking, and used a bit less cloves and nutmeg than the original recipe asked for ( We used 1/4 teaspoon instead of 1/2 a teaspoon ). About the Ale, we got our hands on a bottle of Old Speckled Hen, and we thought it worked out nicely. You can of course make it work with any other good Ale you can get yours hand on, but the taste may differ slightly.

Find the other Wizarding December recipes here !

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5 minutes

15-20 minutes

3 pints (475 ml/pint)

Sugar Quills [Wizarding December]

Today we're making Sugar Quills ! First mentioned in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, this popular treat is very appreciated by little wizards because it allow them to secretly enjoy a sweet candy in class, while they pretend to think about what to write next.

For this recipe, we are simply going to make lollipops, and if you wish to give them the shape of a quill, you'll need to invest in a mold. We found ours on Etsy (we'll give the links below) and to be fair, we took one that was way too small for what we wanted to do. Regardless, we still made them, they're simply mini-treats rather than large realistic quill. 

Here is the link to the mold we used in this recipe : our mold, but you may want to consider this one and this one too. We simply did not came across them before we ordered our first one :( 

Unless you order several molds, you will have to do the quills one by one. The ingredients below allowed us to make approximately 8 of our little quills, but we divided the measures by 4 to do it in 4 times. Let us explain : with sugar work, temperature is key, if you don't heat it up enough, you'll end up with some stretchy caramel, too much, and the sugar will crystallize and be unusable. If you do them all at once, your sugar mix will begin to set while waiting for each quill to harden. Which means that you'll have to re-heat the sugar and risk crystallization of the whole thing. We noticed that, with the sugar mix, it was only possible to do 2 quills before the sugar mix begins to crystallize. So we advise you guys to divide the measures by 4, for 2 quills per batch. This method also allows you to get creative with flavouring and colouring by changing it each time.

In this recipe we use powdered glucose, which helps to prevent the crystallization of the sugar syrup ( it still does when overheated but allows us to make 2 quills at a time ). It's not the easiest thing to find in store, so if you're in Ireland, we found ours in Dunnes Stores.  

This is a very generic recipe for lollipops and any other hard candies, so if you don't have a feather mold, don't worry, you can use any mold safe for sugar work you have at home! 

Disclaimer:

The Arrogant Pug is not affiliated, endorsed or sponsored by The Harry Potter franchise. Product names, logos, brands and other trademarks are the property of their respective trademark holders. All the files offered for download is for private use only and cannot be sold.

Find the other Wizarding December recipes here !

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10 minutes

15-20 minutes + until set

8 lollipops approximately

Bolandi's Exquisite Crystallized Pineapple [Wizarding December]

Continuing our magical Wizarding December series, today we're presenting the most time consuming treat on our list : the Crystallized Pineapple. It first appeared in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince when Tom Riddle offered his teacher, Professor Slughorn, a box of "Bolandi's Exquisite Crystallized Pineapple" in an attempt to get more information about Horcruxes.

Since it sounded absolutely delicious, we decided to make them ! You might be, rightly so, scared by the amount of sugar used, but it is exactly the same method used to confit fruits. Born out of necessity (to conserve over extra long period of time), this way of enjoying fruits is now used for sweet treats. 

This recipe is a very time consuming one because it is done over a minimum of 5 days. Basically, you'll boil pieces of fruit in a highly concentrated syrup, let it soak over night, and repeat this steps 5 times. Unless you possess a dehydrator, you'll need to let them dry in the oven on a very low heat over several hours. 

We would advise you not to re-use the syrup to make a second batch. That's what we did, and while the first ones (that we ate) kept their vibrant, yellow color, the second batch turned out much much darker. They tasted just as sweet, so if you're not bothered by the colour, go ahead =) A candy thermometer is also essential when it comes to creating the hard candied texture. Again, we didn't have any so our pineapples ended up being more of a confit fruit than properly candied fruit bits. 

To present it we simply placed the pineapple bits in an A6 sized clear plastic bag and taped the Bolandi's logo on the top. The logo available for download below is not scaled ! You will have to print it the size you wish.

Disclaimer:

The Arrogant Pug is not affiliated, endorsed or sponsored by The Harry Potter franchise. Product names, logos, brands and other trademarks are the property of their respective trademark holders. All the files offered for download is for private use only and cannot be sold.

Find the other Wizarding December recipes here !

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20 minutes

20 minutes per day over 5 days

3 to 4 bags

Chocolate Frog & Peppermint Toad [Wizarding December]

With the recent release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we reemerged ourselves into everything Harry Potter, and while binge watching all the movies decided to showcase a handful of recipes inspired by the delicious treats from that magical universe. We are very excited to post our first recipe of Wizarding December, as mentioned on our Facebook page, exceptionally we'll be posting one recipe every week during December ! 

Today, we'll be doing 2 of probably the most popular delicacies from the Harry Potter universe : the Chocolate Frogs and Peppermint Toads. Unfortunately, because we're muggles, ours will be missing the magic to make them jump ! 

The chocolate frogs will be made with milk chocolate and filled with an indulgent salted caramel. While the peppermint toads will be made with white chocolate and filled with a fresh peppermint cream. 

Chocolate is a tricky thing to work with, because depending on the type of chocolate you'll decide to use, you will need to temper the chocolate. I am not going to write a long description of how to temper, or tell you what type of chocolate to use, but I will recommend you to watch this very handy video from Ann Reardon about the difference between real chocolate and compound chocolate, and the different methods to temper your chocolate. It will also show what happens when you work with tempered chocolate and when you don't. 

If you are a Harry Potter fan, you'll remember the lovely box in which the chocolate frogs are presented in. The amazing blog of Bryton Taylor, Food in Literature - is offering the box template to print. We added some tweaks to it, such as a gold effect on the lettering and some designs on the back of the box. We also created a similar box for the Peppermint toads ! 

Disclaimer:

The Arrogant Pug is not affiliated, endorsed or sponsored by The Harry Potter franchise. Product names, logos, brands and other trademarks are the property of their respective trademark holders. All the files offered for download is for private use only and cannot be sold.

Find the other Wizarding December recipes !

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1 hour + resting time

20 minutes

12 pieces

Classic Madeleines

Link to printable version

Today we baked another French classic : the Madeleine. This famous delicacy is usually enjoyed for afternoon tea. Madeleines are very small sponge cakes, traditionally flavoured with lemon, and have a distinctive shell-like shape, much easier to do than commonly thought. 

The legend of this cake is traced back to the 18th century. Stanisław Leszczyński, Duke of Lorraine, was having a large dinner party in his Château de Commercy, in 1755. In the kitchen, an argument occurred between the steward and the cook, leading to the latter quitting and taking all the freshly baked deserts with him. The dinner seemed compromised until a young maid, Madeleine Paulmier, offered to cook a cake recipe she inherited from her grandmother. The warm welcome that this uniquely shaped cake received, baked in scallops shells back then, inspired Stanislaw to name the cake after the young heroine who saved his dinner. To this day, Commercy is still regarded as the home of the madeleines. 

Madeleines were also made famous by the French author, Marcel Proust, in his novel "In Search of Lost Time". He uses madeleines to demonstrate the contrast of involuntary memory and voluntary memory (retrieved by putting conscious effort into remembering events, and therefore inevitably partial). Now known as the "episode of the madeleine", the cake, when dipped in a cup of tea, suddenly evokes not only a mere memory, but the full essence and feeling of a childhood event. The "madeleine de Proust" became a popular metaphor commonly used in French to describe something that triggers an involuntary memory. 

But enough with history, to make this delicacy, you will need a madeleine cake mold, now widely found in specialized kitchen equipment stores and online. The cooking time will vary depending on your oven, and since it only needs between 8 and 10 minutes of cooking I would advise you to stay around to check on it regularly. A perfectly baked madeleine should be light golden-brown, with a little bump on the top side, and the distinctive shell-shape on the other side. The recipe is very versatile and you can replace the lemon by vanilla, or add some chocolate chips. We'll be presenting some other variations, including savory ones in the future ;-)

If you have kids around, make this recipe with them ! It doesn't need anything sharp, it's easy as pie, and you will create some true "madeleine de Proust" moments for them.

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20 minutes + 1h resting time

8-10 minutes + until cold

20 madeleines

Wine poached Pears

Link to printable version

For Halloween, we decided to do wine poached pears ! Ok, we know it isn't a Halloween classic but we thought the deep red colour of the pears looks almost blood-like (and with some whipped cream, we even achieved this brain-like look in our serving glasses). Spooky !

Wine poached pears are a traditional dessert from the Burgundy vineyards in eastern France, more specifically, the Beaujolais province. In French, we would call this dessert "Poires à la Beaujolaise", and we would poach them specifically with Beaujolais wine, however, you may use any wine of your personal preference for this recipe. 

This dessert can come in handy because it has the advantage of being prepared the day before, on top of being super easy. The trick is to get pears that are not ripe. This is important because if your pears are already very ripe, they will get soft and mushy, while you want them to hold their shape and stand up themselves.

We will only do 4 pears here, however, you can probably get up to 6 pears depending on the size of your saucepan. You can also keep the spiced wine, reheat it slowly for poaching a second batch of pears the day after, or simply strain the wine and drink it (heat it up a little bit for extra mulled wine goodness) !

The whipped cream is totally optional here, and for more convenience, you can substitute the handmade cream for canned whipped cream. We would advise you not to choose sweetened whipped cream because the wine sauce is already sweet. 

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30 minutes

30 - 40 minutes + 24h resting time

4