Month: July 2020

Lemon curd almond friands

Posted on by Tina

Chewy on the outside, tender in the middle. These delicious friands are best served warm straight out of the oven, but will keep for several days…

Ingredients

180g salted butter, plus extra to grease

6 egg whites

240g pure icing sugar, sifted

120g almond meal (finely ground almonds)

75g plain flour

1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest 

80g lemon curd

Method

  1. Preheat oven to 200C (not fan forced). if you only have fan-forced as an option, set it to 180C fan forced)
  2. Melt butter in a small saucepan, you can let it go a little bit brown, it will add a nice nutty flavour. Don’t let it burn though.
  3. In a large bowl add egg whites and stir in sugar. Add melted butter in a thin stream whisking as you mix. Add almond meal, flour and lemon zest.
  4.  Grease a 12 hole friand tin (oval shaped), or muffin tin with extra melted butter and divide mixture evenly between holes. Mixture will be runny. Drop one teaspoon lemon curd into the centre of each friand.
  5.  Bake for 25 minutes, friands will be deeply golden. Use a butter knife of palette knife to run around the edge of each friand and remove gently to a cooling rack. Serve warm.

Tips

  • Icing sugar goes hard over time, buy fresh icing sugar to make sieving easy. Or give yourself extra time to sieve old lumpy icing sugar!
  • Almond meal goes rancid over time so store in the fridge or freezer and use within the best before date

References

I have been making these for years, but think I got the original quantities from the Australian Women’s Weekly website. 

Fantastitch Shawl

Posted on by Tina

The only thing my hands want to work on right now is this gorgeous kid mohair, silk and merino blend by Rosabella Yarn https://rosabellathreads.com.au/. I think it’s the combination of colour-play, texture and fun, inspired by one of my favourite knitwear designers, Stephen West, American born but now based in Amsterdam https://www.westknits.com/. His patterns are written very clearly and are always an enjoyable knit with a few interesting but simple techniques. This one is called Fantastitch and the fun comes from the colour play and the variation of pattern. It never gets boring!

The Rosabella fine kid fibre is grown, scoured and milled near Toowoomba in QLD, Australia. There aren’t many mills left in Australia so I like to support them whenever I can. The hand-dyed colours add a beautiful tonality that is more complex than a large scale commercially dyed wool.

I have only tried the Prima base so far, but am slightly addicted to its soft lustre and luscious hand-feel. The remainder of last years clip has been sent out to just a handful of yarn stores and I got mine from my friend Tash who owns https://handmakecreate.com.au/ and loves to support local producers.

I have spent the last 3 years helping other people pick colours for their projects, so it takes a special person to do the same for me. It’s like someone offering to make you a cup of tea…delightful!