Peach and white chocolate failure

[igenlode]

I tried Jack Monroe's Peach and White Chocolate Traybake (as I happened to have a tin of peaches sitting in the cupboard), but it was a failure -- and while I know that prices have shifted around quite a bit in the last ten years, and chocolate in particular has gone up a lot, I really can't see how a recipe specifying three eggs and *eight ounces* of butter (not even margarine; she specifically says butter) can ever have been considered a 'budget recipe', let alone priced at 28p per portion if it only makes eight portions. (I made mine in two trays and cut it far smaller; it was still ridiculously extravagant, and if the quantities had been given in ounces upfront I wouldn't have considered it; but I have no very clear concept of how large "250 grams" is...)

Probably I shot myself in the foot by trying to economise and using only half butter and half margarine, and substituting two of the eggs for the last of the frozen chickpea water from the last time I boiled chickpeas... but although the mixture actually seemed rather stiffer than described --there could be no question of 'pouring' it into the tins-- and although I had split it between two small tinfoil containers rather than one large square tin, it was obviously not cooked after an hour (estimated baking time 45 mins to an hour). After a further half-hour, although it had shrunk away from the sides of the tin and was much darker than the photo it was evidently not properly cooked on the bottom layer once cooled down. The top crust simply lifted off, leaving goo behind.
I subsequently put it back into a low oven for another 45 minutes or so, which made it just about solid enough to cut into fingers and lift out, but the texture was obviously nothing like that illustrated. Instead of having chunks of fruit and white chocolate visible among cake crumb, the whole lot had simply melted together, while the peach made it even soggier.

It wouldn't have been so disappointing if it hadn't used so many expensive ingredients; I managed to boil dry an Apple Hat (*inside* the pressure cooker while under pressure, which I had always regarded as impossible) and had to struggle to get the melted plastic bowl loose from the trivet and scrape it off the inside of the cooker. But while I spilt a lot of the delicious buttery juices in the process, that very rich-tasting and filling recipe only used two ounces of butter, being padded out with suet pastry (itself padded out with grated potato :-p)

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"The Four of Us" has now shot up to 118 hits and 19 kudos on AO3, which is more in six days then any of the other five fics I posted in that fandom have achieved in up to nine months.
Chapter 3 of "Little Gentlemen" has received three page views... which is better than the nothing it got on the first day of upload, but probably about as many as it is likely to get in total!

Comments

[watervole]

I tried aquafaba once and concluded it was pretty useless as an egg substitute.

[igenlode]

It works decently well in cakes as a whole-egg substitute, in my experience; I use it where a scaled-down recipe would otherwise call for 'half an egg', since two ice-cubes more or less equate to one egg in volume, or if a recipe wants two eggs and I only have one left.
Where it really doesn't work is as a substitute for whipped egg white....

I was, however, amused to see that Jack Monroe's chickpea curry recipe tells the reader to rinse off and throw away the nasty sticky liquid from the tin, rather than advocating the use of it as a vegan wonder ingredient :-D
(Mind you, she also tells you to boil the tinned chickpeas for ten minutes to 'remove the toxins', which shouldn't be an issue with beans that have already been cooked!)

[watervole]

HUh? The whole point of tinned beans is that they're already cooked!

[igenlode]

To be fair, what the start of the recipe actually says is "Drain your chickpeas and rinse them vigorously to get rid of the stagnant water that they'll have been sitting in. Pop them in some fresh water in a saucepan and boil rapidly for a good 10 minutes to remove any toxins."

Since the ingredients list says "250g tinned chickpeas (drained weight)" I naturally assumed that this meant that you drained, rinsed and carefully boiled the contents of the tin. But since it does also say later "By this time the chickpeas should have finished vigorously boiling, so reduce them down to a simmer (or take off the heat if using tinned chickpeas)", presumably at some stage in the editing process she had the possibility of soaking and cooking dried chickpeas from scratch in mind, even though it isn't mentioned anywhere else.

I wouldn't have thought that simmering for another 30 minutes, as suggested, would be long enough to cook dried chickpeas, but maybe it would. (It still doesn't explain, in that case, why the tinned chickpeas as a putative alternative would have been 'on the heat' in the first place....)

Aha: the online version, as supplied as a 'guest recipe' to Nigella Lawson's web pages, starts off "Drain your *soaked* chickpeas" and lists 100 grams of dried chickpeas soaked for at least 8 hours in the ingredients.
That is presumably the gourmet version as opposed to the 'eating out of own-brand supermarket tins' version!
https://www.nigella.com/recipes/guests/jack-monroes-peach-and-chickpea-curry


Evidently an editing error in the book; this *is* a first edition (assuming that it went into multiple editions!)

[watervole]

Ah, yes does sound like an editing error.

I HATE poor proof reading.

[igenlode]

I can imagine that proof-reading cookery books is quite tricky....

And I can still remember the teacher in (I think) my Russian mock A-level standing up at the start and dictating a manual correction to the exam paper, which had come back from the printers with a typo in it. Of course it was all Greek to them :-D