November 2021: Potato and Cinnamon Frittata; Warming Winter Casserole; Quark Strudel

I'm writing this introduction from a highly improbable location: the seating area of an airside restaurant at London City Airport that hasn't yet reopened post-pandemic. Don't tell anyone, but it's the one place in the LCY departure lounge that actually has plenty of space to stretch out, unpack your stuff, and finalise the latest post on your strange and arcane cookery blog (for example).

The reason I'm here is I'm about to fly for the first time since before the war, my destination being Berlin and my company's office Christmas meal there. I naturally had to think carefully before accepting the kind invitation, what with European infection rates being somewhat in the news recently, but it turns out that the numbers are no worse there (specifically where I'm going) than they are here (specifically where I'm coming from), it's just that we've stopped giving a shit and they haven't. Obviously it's still going to feel a bit odd sitting in a metal tube to travel between two places where life is still decidedly, albeit similarly, weird - but I figure if you're ever going to tentatively engage in international travel again, why not do it when you're freshly triple-jabbed and it's on someone else's dime so it's less of a pisser if it somehow all goes wrong? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, that's beside the point. Right now I'm more concerned about the fact that anyone looking over my shoulder is going to wonder what the hell it is I'm doing and why it involves some mashed potato in a frying pan and something that looks almost, but not entirely, quite unlike a strudel.

Still, at least the latter gives us an appropriately German theme for the occasion. So with that in mind, let's lift off and see what November's Random Menu has in store!

 

◘ THE STARTER ◘

The book: The Silver Spoon

The recipe: p461, "Potato and Cinnamon Frittata"

Interesting start, right? Sure, not necessarily the height of sophistication - but it's not every day you see cinnamon making an appearance in the title of a savoury recipe, for one thing.

Indeed, it piques my interest enough to make me wonder just how cinnamon-y it's going to be.

Ah. Okay then. Apparently a "pinch" of cinnamon is enough to get you a title shout-out these days.

I already have a bad feeling about this one.

That sense of foreboding only intensifies when I realise that what I'm going to be making here isn't something like a Spanish omelette, with chunky slices of potato surrounded by set eggs, but instead... well, read on.

 
I start by boiling "2 potatoes" (no size, no weight, no mention of peeling them first, etc. - you know my favourite cookbook gripes by now) in salted water until they're mashable. 

I then add some milk, butter and salt and beat the potatoes to a purée "with the back of a wooden spoon" - surprisingly fun and successful, actually. Four egg yolks then get stirred through this mixture, which is now extremely gloopy.

Next, I whisk (by hand, no less!) two egg whites until they're fluffy and stiff, which naturally brings back some bad meringue memories.

These get folded into the potato mixture, then a generous pinch of cinnamon is added...

...along with some salt, and the whole thing is mixed "very gently to avoid knocking out the air".

 
The only remaining instruction after this is to heat olive oil and butter in a frying pan, pour in the potato mixture, and "cook over a medium heat until browned on both sides".

Whiiiiich is always going to be easier said than done. I mean, just look at the stuff in the bowl above. It's... really quite wet. Even with eggs inside, which famously enjoy setting when cooked, I'm wildly sceptical about how this next step is going to go. And, well:

Now, granted, at this point the base is starting to set slightly and get a little brown. My main issue lies with the "browned on both sides" part of the instruction, because the top 90% of the so-called frittata is still pretty liquidy, but I'm going to have to try and turn it over at some point or the base is going to burn before any of the rest of it has had the chance to cook at all.

And since there's no fucking way I'm going to be able to casually flip this wobbling jelly of potato and egg like it's an inch-thick pancake - as a tentative attempt involving multiple spatulas makes all too clear - the only thing I can think of is to heat a second pan (see above), clamp the pans together like two halves of a clamshell, and flip it over that way.

Give or take some inevitable splitting at the seams, this doesn't not work (and now it really does look like a great big pancake).

Somewhere in the next ten minutes or so, it coalesces into a finished product that is actually a bit set and not overly burnt, and I wasn't really expecting that to happen.

It even allows itself to be sliced into servable wedges.

Unfortunately, the end product is desperately bland. How could it not be? It's some mashed potato fried up with minimal seasoning and, above all, almost no sodding cinnamon.

Sigh.

I mean, can I say it's actively bad? In all honesty, I cannot. A wedge of it would work as one of several side dishes, say. But given the amount of effort involved in creating something so vastly underwhelming, given how much less good it is than dishes that are far easier to make from the same ingredients, and given the lunatic concept of having to try and manhandle a hot lava flow of potato... it's a no from me.

File under: Not one to repeat.

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

The book: Good Housekeeping Easy To Make Complete Cookbook

The recipe: p95, "Warming Winter Casserole"

Talk about a say-nothing recipe name (although "warming" immediately gives me grounds for concern that it might involve cinnamon again...). 

Spoiler alert, then: It's actually exactly the kind of thing you'd expect, and none the worse for it. I decide to forgive the fact that the recipe gives me a lot of wiggle room, because that can be useful, even if it's a bit silly here. The meat is meant to be pork but could also be lamb, the bulk can be provided by mixed beans or chickpeas (those being really quite different things), and so on. At what point does a recipe become a list of suggestions?

I go with pork fillet, anyway, because I don't cook with pork all that often and it'll make a change. And I go with chickpeas because that's what I've got in the house. I love an easy decision!

And indeed, there's the cinnamon I anticipated - a teaspoon's worth, no less. Why isn't this called "Warming Winter Cinnamon Casserole", then?

Anyway, I digress. There's some quite interesting things in here - apricots, almonds, lots of parsley for some reason - and I'm actually looking forward to making it. Not least since the making is dead simple.

It starts with me browning the pork then setting it aside, softening a chopped onion in the same casserole dish, returning the pork to dish, and adding the "warming" elements - garlic, ginger, coriander, cinnamon and cumin, a predictable but welcome crew.

Appetisingly brown

Once this is all mixed, I add the jar of drained chickpeas, a chopped red pepper, a good handful of roughly chopped dried apricots, and half a pint of chicken stock.

This is then brought to the boil, covered and simmered for 40 minutes. There's an instruction to add extra stock if it starts to look dry, but if anything there's a touch too much liquid even after the time is up.

That's not a problem, since the recipe calls for the casserole to be served with an unspecified quantity of brown basmati rice - so I'm free to interpret that as a liquid-absorbing "lots". Which I do.

First, though, the dish is finished off with a sprinkling-slash-stirring of toasted flaked almonds and chopped parsley.

Still really quite brown

Now, look. A stew like this is never going to win any awards for presentation, not least when several of the ingredients inevitably conspire to make it look rather on the dull side. Serving it with specifically brown rice hardly helps either.

But it turns out to be perfectly timed for those cold nights drawing in, and - frankly - a minor triumph given how simple it is to put together. Nothing earth-shattering in the flavour department, you understand, but reasonably deep and interesting and with plenty of variety in each bite.

As Sam summarises, "It's more exotic than I expected from Good Housekeeping." A little unfair, perhaps, and yet...

File under: Might actually be one to repeat.

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: Backen macht Freude (Dr. Oetker)

The recipe: p338, "Quarkstrudel" (erm, Quark Strudel, but you probably guessed that)

Yes! After a slow start, we're getting two months of German baking in a row. And this time it actually looks like something I might want to eat!

It might not be something I want to make, considering the process looks rather fiddly and extends over two pages. But if that's what the Random gods have decided for me, so be it.

Before that, however, my challenge is to locate the titular quark, that dairy product that's a bit yoghurt-y yet somehow also not. Asda claim to stock it online, but between me placing an order and that order reaching my front door, it gets substituted for Philadelphia cream cheese. Which, OK, not a million miles away, but not quite right for a sweet dessert either. Further local searches prove fruitless - neither M&S nor the Lewisham Food Centre, even with its million different types of Greek yoghurt, can help me here.

And so I resort to internet research. There are all kinds of opinions on what can be used instead of quark in a sweet baking context, but eventually I settle on skyr, that thick Icelandic dairy product that is readily available... at my local Asda. Full circle.

 
Fortunately, the rest of the ingredients are quite straightforward. I'm even able to find a (vegan, apparently) vanilla custard powder to replace the Dr. Oetker branded version that the recipe wants me to use, which is a nice touch. It's pretty much the one Dr. Oetker product I didn't think to order from the German Deli last time round...

Unlike last time, I don't have to look up any of the words in a dictionary to make sure I'm doing the right thing. However, I do have to check out a YouTube video to be sure that my interpretation of one of the instructions is in the right ballpark. Never let it be said that I'm not thorough.

First, though, some groundwork. A small tight ball of simple smooth dough is made from flour, egg, lukewarm water and oil. This is left in a warm place for 30 minutes. The recipe describes a convoluted method for achieving this - involving boiling water in a pan, then draining and drying the hot pan, lining it with baking paper, popping the dough in there and putting the lid on - but since I've got the heated clothes airer running anyway, I figure proximity to the radiating heat from that will have a similar effect.

Since the dough doesn't really rise at all during the 30 minutes, however - not that the recipe specifically says it's meant to, but I suppose there must be some reason for setting it aside - I now retrospectively wonder if that was the source of some of the problems I later encounter.

But again, if you're not going to actively tell me what should be happening during that time, it's not for me to guess whether I've gone wrong or not. This is a cookbook that comes with a "success guaranteed!" label on the front, after all. I have expectations.

Anyway, while that 30 minutes of nothing much is elapsing, I prepare the filling for the strudel. Contrary to the name, it's more than just quark. Indeed, I'd have called this "Apricot, Raisin and Quark Strudel", since that's what it mainly is. (Pity there's no cinnamon involved really.)

I start by softening some butter then slowly add sugar, a egg, some lemon juice, the quark yoghurt skyr, the vanilla custard powder and some whipping cream. I expect this to end up lumpy or in some way unappealing, but the result is essentially a slightly tarted-up yoghurt, really, and it's smooth enough without needing too much whisking. It's perhaps a little thicker than I anticipated (in a good way), but that's mainly because I didn't take the time to think about what the custard powder was likely to do to it. Duh.

Having also taken the time to drain and dice some tinned apricots, it's now time for me to work with the dough. What I hadn't fully realised before starting - and this is where YouTube comes in - is that this involves splitting it in two (yes, this recipe makes not one but two strudels), rolling each half out into a rectangle, then stretching it out to 30x40cm. As the video shows me, this is a bit like what pizza chefs do with pizza dough, only the result is super super thin - almost reminiscent of filo.

Now, you've read enough Random Kitchen to know that I'm definitely not going to be able to execute this with any degree of competence, and I'm fully aware of this too. But the fun is in the failure, so let's see how it goes, eh?

The recipe calls for a floured tea towel to be used here, because obviously that's a thing. That's not going to happen, not least since all we have is terry tea towels that would leave bits of fluff all over the dough. Instead, I do what I've learned to do when working with pepparkakor dough and use a sheet of baking paper (over a tea towel, still, as that part is going to come in handy later on).

This is what it looks like when I try to roll the first bit of dough into a rectangle:

And this is the result of the pizza stretch:

So yeah, that's gone as well as expected.

Still, I figure it's going to get rolled up and that might hide some of the worse failures of my stretching technique, so I plough on.

Of course, 30x40cm rectangles are a pipe dream at this stage. I now assume that's because the dough was supposed to rise somewhat in the proving, which it didn't, hence there being less volume to tease out in the first place.

Instead, these are the kind of dimensions I'm working with:

This is the other dough half; no, it's not much better, is it?

...and if you're thinking that's likely to result in a flat and stodgy bake, (a) you've watched enough Bake Off to understand foreshadowing and (b) you're absolutely correct.

I mentioned filo earlier, and the next stage is indeed to brush my "dough" "rectangles" with melted butter:

Next, I spread the quark mixture over the surface then sprinkle it with apricots and raisins, leaving enough room to fold in the edges afterwards.

And then it's time for the part where the tea towels come in. Excitingly, I get to do that technique - also familiar from Bake Off - where you use the towel to roll up your bake, one turn at a time. Even more excitingly, this part of proceedings at least goes pretty well!

Midway through

Satisfying and fun. What's not to like?

Now, with less dough to work with than I ought to have, my strudels are unlikely to look the part just yet (if ever). But at least there isn't quark filling seeping out of them like I'd feared when I saw those gaps in my rolled pastry.

I make sure they're well pinched together at the edges then lay them on a lined baking tray, seam down, and brush them with more of that melted butter before popping them in the oven to bake.

(Incidentally, the recipe wanted me to pre-heat the oven before starting to do any of this work with the dough. Good thing I ignored it - that's a lot of power to waste during an energy price crisis.)

Halfway through the bake, the strudels come out for some more buttering - and nope, they still don't look great...

...at all

The lack of consistency in strudel size is quite striking now. Even more striking is the fact that they're not rising at all. What with the dough issues, I suppose this shouldn't come as a huge surprise, but I might have expected at least some kind of lift between the pastry layers. Not necessarily to quite the extent shown in the recipe...

...but at least to more of an extent than, well, this:

Christ.

Oh well. I appear to have invented the strudel flatbread! That's fine too. At least a bit of icing sugar should hide some of my sins...

...or, as it transpires, massively accentuate them.

Man, this isn't going to be the world's best eat, is it? I already know what it's going to be like in the mouthfeel department - stodgy, basically - but I'm hoping the filling might be moist and tasty enough to rescue things a little.

And you know what? It actually does. A little. The fruit and dairy combination tastes good, with a bit of a tang to punch through the stodge, and substituting skyr for quark hasn't had any real adverse impact as far as I can tell. Even the barely risen dough is flavourful enough in itself - though the butter and icing sugar are doing some heavy lifting here, let's be honest. It's better with a little cream or even ice cream (come to think of it, why didn't I make up the rest of the packet of vanilla custard?!), but it stands fairly well on its own.

So, you know what, despite looking fairly fucking catastrophic, this isn't actually a total disaster. And hey - I've never made strudel before, the dough-stretching is more complex than I realised and you can't expect to get everything right on your first try. Plus I've learned how to do that cool rolling trick with a tea towel. Life skills!

Just, you know, a shame about the actual baked product.

File under: Surely too much effort to repeat.

October 2021: Salmon, Tomato & Basil Soup; Courgette, Tomato and Basil Pie with Goat's Cheese; Dattelmakronen (Date Macaroons)

Blimey, that's a lot of basil. At least the macaroons won't have any in (I assume).

Yes, as the German title suggests, this month we celebrate the Random Kitchen debut of Backen macht Freude, the most recent addition to my collection! Alongside that, it's a basil-tastic journey through two older books that have tended to deliver mostly decent results in the past. Sounds promising, right...? Join me for the antepenultimate edition of the Random Menu and find out! 

Wait a minute, "antepenultimate"? Well, I did restart this blog to help me ride out a lockdown or three, and so I don't specifically intend to carry on after Christmas unless the winter prompts the government to admit that Covid still exists after all.

So OK, not necessarily the antepenultimate edition...

◘ THE STARTER ◘

The book: A Soup For Every Day (The New Covent Garden Food Co.)

The recipe: p144, "Salmon, Tomato & Basil Soup"

Let's be honest, "salmon soup" sounds like a weird concept right from the get-go, but I'm definitely here for it.

I suppose it's not that odd really; fish soup itself is no rarity, conjuring up visions of everything from bouillabaisse to lobster bisque. "Salmon, tomato and basil" sounds more like an Ainsley main meal, though - inevitably served with a side of oven-baked potatoes, a green vegetable and a stupid recipe name - so I'm curious as to how it'll translate into soup.

(The short answer, for those who are too impatient to read on, is "lumpy".)

The ingredient list for this one is threateningly long, but the preparation isn't especially difficult. Notable ingredients include both fresh salmon and smoked salmon trimmings, and fish stock - or "shellfish stock" as M&S insists on calling theirs, because M&S. Still, it's not something that's stocked (no pun intended) by any of the other Lewisham supermarkets, so M&S it is.

There are two phases to the making: let's call them Before The Blend and After The Blend. On the "Before" side, it's all fairly standard for a soup. Butter is heated, onion and garlic are sweated, flour is stirred in, then the remainder of the soup base ingredients are added: the stock, a decent slosh of white wine, some milk, tomato purée, a pinch of cayenne pepper, and a bay leaf. This combo is simmered until the onions are soft, then the bay leaf is removed, and the soup base is cooled until it can be blended without me scorching my forearms.

So this has started appetisingly

As it turns out, "blend until smooth" isn't the easiest instruction to follow when what you're blending is almost all liquid, give or take a medium onion. My hand blender does its best, but what I'm left with at the end mainly resembles a fizzy latte.

Croissant, anyone...?

Anyway, during the aforementioned cooling phase, I was preparing the remainder of the dish. That meant chopping a salmon steak into 2cm cubes, chopping some fresh basil (the recipe calls for one tablespoon, but that seems incredibly measly for six bowls' worth of soup, so I do at least three times as much - it's in the title, for heaven's sake, it ought to be actively present), and... ah. Apparently the 700g of ripe firm tomatoes needed to be not only deseeded and diced, but skinned first.

Well, ain't no one got time for that, as the cool kids say. The skins will soften in the soup, and it's not like I'm serving this to the Queen at one of the dinner engagements that have left her knackered of late. We'll cope.

So, the fizzy latte is reheated to boiling and the salmon cubes, salmon trimmings, diced tomatoes and chopped basil are introduced and cooked for a couple of minutes "until the salmon is just firm".

And that's it, pretty much! A "garnish" is also called for - this involves some whole basil leaves, a dusting of paprika, and a swirl of single cream that immediately merges into the ocean of liquid in each bowl.

Elegant

 
Which, I think, goes some way to summing up the problem with this soup. Even by Random standards, it is very much just some stuff floating in (or sinking to the bottom of) an awful lot of wetness. Erm, so to speak. It's definitely not one for fans of consistency and texture, that's for sure. In hindsight, I think it would have made a lot more sense to include the salmon trimmings at the pre-blend stage and get a bit more substance into the soup base.

But, I have to admit that's the only real problem with it. The flavours are nice - how could they not be, they're a decent main course in a bowl - and there's some quite interesting stuff going on in there. It's just a bit of an odd eat and not one I feel especially compelled to repeat.

File under: Nice but conceptually flawed.

◘ THE MAIN COURSE ◘

The book: Masterclass (James Martin)

The recipe: p22, "Courgette, Tomato and Basil Pie with Goat's Cheese"

Now here's a thing.

I went through the whole process of making this dish. I found a local, far less pretentious equivalent to the "Dorstone cheese" that features in the actual recipe title. I let out a quiet cheer to myself at the return of that old Random Kitchen staple, the "thing calling itself a pie that's actually just some ingredients with a bit of puff pastry rested on top".

I sliced courgettes lengthways, cursed the recipe when they took more than twice as long to brown in the oven as they should have done, and wondered why I wasn't told to cut them into smaller pieces before adding them to the pie mixture.

I took lovingly framed photographs of the pie filling, even though courgettes, sunblush tomatoes, shallots, basil, garlic and crumbled goat's cheese were never going to be the most photogenic thing in the world.

See?

I noted that the photo accompanying the recipe had some nice pastry patterns on top of the pie, so even though the recipe itself doesn't mention using the trimmed pastry for this purpose, I did what I could within the constraints of my personal lack of artistry.

Self-praise is no praise

I took the pie out of the oven - again, about ten minutes after the recipe wanted me to, because it clearly wasn't browned enough yet. My "K" disintegrated a bit along the way, but these things can happen.

Slop

We cut into the pie. As expected, it had precisely zero internal cohesion.

We ate it anyway. Despite being sloppy, it was quite nice. I made some notes and filed them away for later.

And then, while writing up those notes today, purely out of curiosity, I Googled the phrase "even a French crottin" to see if anyone else had picked up on James Martin's endless pretension when it comes to goat's cheese, and I realised that...

...oh.

The single solitary hit for that phrase on Google is the Random Kitchen post from October 2016 in which I made exactly the same pie.

It probably says all you need to know about the bang-averageness of this dish that Sam and I had both completely forgotten about having literally made and eaten it before.

On re-reading that post, I'm reassured to note that our verdict is largely the same as it was five years ago; broadly speaking, thumbs down for the lack of "pie-ness" but thumbs up for some of the flavours.

That's embarrassing though. My recipe books are packed full of similarly "perfectly OK" recipes that I could have been making instead. Sorry everyone...

File under: Eminently forgettable, apparently.

 

◘ THE DESSERT ◘

The book: Backen macht Freude (Dr. Oetker)

The recipe: p370, "Dattelmakronen" (Date Macaroons)

At least I can be sure I haven't made these before, since the book is new to my collection. But I'm shedding an anguished tear for a different reason, and that reason is the sheer cruelty of the random number generator. A big chunky cookbook packed full of hearty German bakes that would have been the perfect kitchen fit as the autumn closes in around us, and I have to make some lightweight meringue puffs?

Not only that, but the adjacent pages are full of macaroons with far more appealing flavour combinations - there's one that's basically just Nutella - and I'm stuck with poxy date and almond. Ah well. I suppose it's... kind of festive? So let's crack on.

This classic German book from the Dr. Oetker stable, updated for the modern age but still cheerfully traditional, comes with "SUCCESS GUARANTEED" emblazoned on the front cover. The ingredient list for this recipe gives a first indication as to why they feel confident in making this boast - including, as it does, a "sachet" of vanilla sugar and a "vial" (!) of rum flavouring. See, what they mean by those vague descriptions is "the packaging sizes you get when you buy the Dr. Oetker-branded products". Clever.

And so, via an order from the German Deli (and a parcel that goes missing thanks to DHL - no hyperlink for you), I find myself pre-emptively stocking my kitchen with various things that I'm likely to need as I work my way through this book, both randomly and out of choice.

Yes, I even buy the Speisestärke called for in this recipe - that's basically just cornflour, but I figure there might be something different about the German version, so better safe than sorry.

Anyway. This recipe begins with fairly standard meringue procedure - egg whites, sugar (including the sachet of vanilla sugar), and lots of beating until some nice firm peaks form. (Or "until a knife cut remains visible", as the recipe insists.) Even as an experienced German translator, I have to double-check the meanings of a lot of the baking terminology to make sure I'm not going wrong here - I wouldn't want to get my unterschlagen, unterheben and unterrühren confused, after all.

The vial of rum flavouring also gets added at this stage. It definitely doesn't look at all suspicious.

Now I turn my attention to the ingredients that will be stirred through the macaroon mix, and this is where things get a bit silly. Finely chopped almonds, no problem; I can get those pre-chopped from the supermarket anyway (and I do). However, the pre-chopped dates you can buy are still too big for the "fine" pieces this recipe calls for - and I have whole dates in the cupboard anyway following last month's weird dessert, so naturally, I do the job myself.

You see, the thing about chopped dates - their main distinguishing feature - is they're all sugary and sticky. So when the recipe asks me to mix them with the chopped almonds, all that's ever going to happen is some unfortunate clumping and clagging.

Thus rendering it pointless having chopped them up into tiny pieces in the first place. Sigh.

And when the recipe asks me to combine this with the meringue mixture, all that's ever going to happen is that the whole thing is going to end up looking like this.

Exactly: The almonds are nicely distributed throughout the mixture, but the dates most definitely are not, and there's no way of recovering the situation now.

I'm not sure how you'd avoid this really. Freeze the dates first, then chop them with a really sharp knife, then freeze them again before using them in the recipe? Or just surrender on the "fine pieces" requirement and use the shop-bought bigger chunks in the first place, in the hope that their coating might stop them from having the adhesive qualities that are inherent to the inside of a date?

Anyway, the next step is the slightly loose instruction to "use two teaspoons" to make "small heaps" of meringue on a baking tray.

This lack of clarity is problematic insofar as I realise I've used well over a third of the mix already and the recipe is meant to produce "around 50" macaroons. Whoopsie. Still, can't be helped - and besides, the photo in the book gives a sense that these things are meant to turn out fairly big and pillowy...

...albeit with the almonds clearly a lot more visible. (Should I have toasted them? Perhaps I should have, even though the recipe didn't tell me to. Never mind.)

Next, my baking tray goes into the oven for 20 minutes at - get this - 120 degrees. Yep, you're right, that is a subtle bake and no mistake. The idea is clearly to make the macaroons set so lightly that they're fluffy and airy. That's fine, but it also makes them very hard to handle. They break at the slightest touch, and about a quarter of them don't even make it off the baking sheet and are now being frozen for use as ice cream topping. (Waste not, want not!)

Those that do survive, however, look... well, they look much as they did before going into the oven.

See? Already crumbling

They also don't look a huge amount like the photo in the book, but I've already accepted the fact that the almond and date distribution is going to be all off here. That might also be why they're so breakable, I don't know.

In case the size is the problem, I do a final mini-batch that are a lot smaller...

(and somehow even less attractive)

...but no, they turn out to be just as brittle on the outside. It's clearly part of the design. To be fair, the recipe does talk about "carefully" removing them from the baking paper. I am inevitably reminded of certain other meringue-related experiences I have had in the past.

But enough about that, Faulkner - how do the things taste? Well, the flavour side of things is perfectly acceptable really. They're basically just little clouds of baked sugar, and that can never be too wrong. What's definitely a bit odd is the texture - the almond fragments are distributed fairly consistently, meaning you're always chewing on some nuts (steady, woman, steady!), but the clumping of the dates means you don't have the fruity chewiness to offset that. Instead, you get the occasional bite that's all date, whereas some of the macaroons don't have any in them at all.

Or, as Sam puts it, "It's got something not very nice in it, but everything else is good". (He got a bite that was all date.)

What is nice and chewy is the meringue interior, I have to say, despite my suspicions over the baking process. (Turns out 20 minutes at 120 degrees would have made my swans a lot more palatable too.) While going harder on the baking front would have made the macaroons firmer to the touch and less likely to immediately collapse, I suppose the gentle treatment is what gives them that chewiness that would otherwise be lost.

Good enough to be given to friends
Good enough for us to eat
Good for nothing

Anyway, while I cannot claim that this was a wholly successful bake, it wasn't terrible either. It just wasn't really what it was supposed to be... whatever that even was (I'm still not entirely sure).

Can we have a Stollen or a Kirschtorte next time please?

Until then, allow me to finish by bestowing upon you an Ohrwurm courtesy of the only thing that should ever spring to mind where dates and the German language are concerned. You're welcome!

File under: SUCCESS NOT GUARANTEED.