A Bright and Colourful Christmas by Rice

Is it too much pickled herrings and schnapps, or do the designers at Rice get more mad with each passing year? Rice are such a great company to work with - their staff are fun, friendly and full of well meant advice - not your run of the mill sales people. I guess it comes from being such a fun, creative company with a strong ethical base, and so I now think of the people we deal with there as friends. Together, we have been putting together a competition to run on Lucy at Attic24's blog and below are some of the photos which have come out of today's shoot.

I say Rice are always full of good advice, the one thing which turns out to be not quiet true is that the little paper stars used to decorate the plates below are "easy to make". Thanks for that one, Helene - it turns out they require the paper mastery of an origami expert. Once they are made up, they look beautiful so, all in all, I am glad I persevered. I think we might turn them into a drinking game ... break out the schnapps.

Photos contain the following Stock:

Rice Christmas Melamine Bowls, Cups and Plates. 

Christmas Paper Star

Gnome Toy Basket

Happy Home Colourful Interiors Book

Gnome Candle

Set of 3 Cake Tins

Gift Wrapping Decorative Bird

Glass Candle Votive

Paper Chain Decoration

Strips for Making Complicated but Beautiful Decorations ... Best Used to Challenge Your Friends

A Recipe for Hot Air and Puff

We know the French think their food is the best. We know they think it because they are forever telling the world it is so. How they stay so thin eating cream, butter and cheese and drinking wine all the time none of the rest of us know, although I suspect the secret is strong black coffee, Gauloise and plenty of gesticulation and philosophical argument whilst not actually eating the beautiful pastry set on the plate before them. In the spirit of cross cultural understanding, I have decided, this week, to try making my own puff pastry. After all, how difficult can it be?

It turns out to be quite difficult indeed. Hours of rolling, folding and refrigerating. Perhaps this is the work out that burns off the calories of the 50% butter pastry. Is this the real secret of how the French stay thin? The effort which goes into their food makes you appreciate even a small mouthful of it? Message us on Facebook if you want details on how to make puff - I'm no expert so will point you in the direction of someone who is. Or just buy some good quality butter puff pastry in order to make this Tarte Tatin. But maybe run to the shops to work off the calories instead.

Tarte Tatin

Ingredients

6 medium desert apples e.g. Cox's

Juice 1/2 lemon

120g butter

200g caster sugar

250g puff pastry

Flour for rolling

Method

Preheat the oven to 220 degrees centigrade. Peel, core and halve the apples. Squeeze over the lemon juice and toss quickly and put them in the fridge whilst you prepare the rest. 

Use a pan approximately 10 inches in diameter which can go on the stove top and in the oven. Evenly cover the bottom of the pan in the butter, then sprinkle the sugar over the top. Add the half apples, round side down. Roll out the pastry so it is slightly large than your pan, so that when you lay the pastry over the top of the apples, it comes and in or so up the side of the pan. You want to trim this rim so it is fairly even all round - once the tarte is cooked and inverted this becomes a crunchy, caramel soaked rim of loveliness. Put a couple of slits in the pastry at the centre of the pan to release the air.

Now, this is the magic bit - on the stove top you turn the butter, sugar and some of the apple juice into caramel. I used a medium heat - the recipe I worked from said a "fierce heat" but I think you could easily burn the apples. I put it on the stove top for about 15 minutes. The pastry puffed up with the expanding air and I kept sniffing the steam coming through the slits to make sure I couldn't smell burning. Once the pan was up to a good heat I lowered the temperature a little too to keep the apples frying and caramelising without burning. I think you'd have to be careful not to use a thin pan too, but instead one with a heavy base so that the heat disperses fairly evenly to the apples.

After this, it is a case of baking in the oven for 20 minutes (keeping an eye still on the pastry, and then turning out onto a serving platter straight away whilst the caramel is still hot and soft. The buttery pastry soaks up all the caramel apple juice. It was slightly nerve-racking to make because of the unseen caramel making, but other than that, with shop bought puff pastry, would be relatively simple. And, it turns out, absolutely delicious. Vive la France!

Photo Credits:
Geronimo serving platter by BlissHome
Indus mango wood bowl by Nkuku

Some Autumn Colour

Autumn is one of my favourite times, especially on a cool crisp day. Here are a few photographs to get you in the mood from sunny Bristol. The first features the shadow of Brunel's Suspension Bridge.

All images copyright Mark Fletcher - director, fig1.co.uk

Mary Berry and a Dangerous Game of Russian Roulade

Challenging Mary Berry could be a dangerous thing. If you managed to rile her so much she decided to be

rid of you once and for all, surely her method of choice would be with poison. Well, she would hardly batter you with a Battenberg would she? No, in the ultimate bake-off, she would serve you a delicate array of treats in a macabre game of Russian Roulade.  Would the profiterole she proffered be perfect or poisonous? Would her luscious ladyfingers actually be laced with lethal ingredients. Would her angel cake have you visiting the heavenly host?  Surely her poison of choice would be arsenic - the almond flavour would go so well with a drop of finest rose water. You would consider resisting those sweet treats, but her dainty perfections would be too much temptation in this most macabre of bake-offs.

I know it sounds like I fell asleep during the bake-off and woke up to Midsomer Murders. This morbid obsession with an entirely fictional version of Mary Berry is born from a near sacrilegious task I have set myself - I have decided to alter one of her recipes. The thing is, it is bonfire night and I wanted to make something with a toffee apple theme to take for the various people I'm meeting at our local fire in the park. Mum has been going on about a molassesy ginger cake Mary Berry makes, and so I have decided to alter her recipe, and now the idea is in my head, I just can't stop.

The original recipe is here, but instead of the crystalised ginger in syrup, I added some caremelised apple cubes instead. To make these I took 800g of desert apples cut into 1 cm cubes, heated 60g of butter in a frying pan and fried the apples. The trick is to have the pan reasonably warm when you put them in, and then only to turn them after a couple of minutes of frying, so the apples go golden without burning. Don't stir them too much or apple purée will ensue. After turning a couple of times I added 80g of soft brown sugar and stirred one final time, then added these little half the squares of sweet toffee apple to Mary's cake mix. The rest I saved for decorating.

Instead of Mary's icing I made a quick toffee icing - 25g of butter and 100g of soft brown sugar heated gently in a pan until the are combined, then add 80ml of cream. Simmer gently whilst stiring for 2 minutes and then allow to cool until it is just starting to form a crust before spreading evenly over the cake and quickly levelling off with a palette knife - a good tip is to keep the palette knife in a jug full of boiling water, that way it forms a nice glaze on the icing without sticking too much to the blade. Finally I decorated with the remaining cubes of toffee apple.

Now it's time to taste it. Oddly there seems to be a hint of almonds...

Picture Credits:
Ceramic two-tone tableware by Rice DK
All images copyright Mark Fletcher