Everyday Epicurean

You’ve had an excellent dinner with roast sweet potato the previous night but found you have about 1/2 a large sweet potato left over, what to do with it ?
Whack it in the fridge and make pie in the morning of course!

Ingredients.

(measurements are approx. since I didn’t actually measure anything)

• 1.5 sheets of puff pasty (or make your own pastry)

Filling 1:

• approx. half a large sweet potato, peeled, sliced and baked.
• 1 egg
• 1/4 can of Sweetened condensed milk
• 1 Tablespoon King Island Cream (well ok, any thick cream will do)
• 1/2 teaspoon of Dutch Cinnamon
• 1/4 teaspoon of Allspice (Pimento)
• Dash of Port
• 1/8th Cup of Plain Flour
• 1/8th Cup of Brown Sugar

Filling 2:

• 7/8th cup of plain flour
• 125g of sour cream
• 1/8th Cup of Brown Sugar
• Two Eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon of Vanilla Essence

Method:

Grease a deep pie dish with butter and line with one sheet of puff pastry. Set aside the half sheet for later.
Pre-heat the oven at 200C (fan forced, top and bottom element, shelves on bottom and middle positions, place a pizza stone on the middle shelf).

In a mixing bowl, mash the sweet potato, add the other ingredients of Filling 1 and mix until you form a smooth paste. Transfer this to the pie dish and smooth out.

Not in the same mixing bowl, add the ingredients of Filling 2 and whisk into a batter. Pour over the top of Filling 1.

Slice the half sheet of pastry into strips and lay as a lattice on top of the pie.

Bake for 30 minutes on the bottom shelf of the oven. Test with a skewer, serve warm with ice cream.

So for breakfast this morning the request was for something with cinnamon in it.
Obviously with such a wide scope, I had to think hard about what to make. As it happens I spied a tin of pear halves in the pantry and an idea was born.

Note, the amounts here are very very rough as I didn’t actually measure anything when making it.

Ingredients.

• 1 can of Pear Halves (in juice) – well drained
• 75g of butter (softened)
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup of castor sugar (roughly 8ish soup spoons worth)
• 2 eggs
• 100g (1 cup) of Almond Meal
• approx. 1 cup of plain flour
• 1 teaspoon of Dutch Cinnamon
• two sheets of puff pastry
• a dash of milk
• a dozen pieces of white cooking chocolate.

Method.

Drain the pear halves. Put the juice in a tall glass, drink it, it’s good for you.

In a mixing bowl, creme the butter and sugar.
Add the eggs one at a time and whisk in well.
Add the cinnamon and dash of milk, whisk well.
Add the almond meal and flour and whisk to a smooth cake mixture batter.

Grease a deep pie dish with butter, and line with one of the sheets of pastry.
Place the pear halves on the pastry, arranged neatly.
Pour the batter over the top and smooth out with a spatula.
Insert the white chocolate pieces evenly around the tart.

Now slice the other sheet of pastry in to strips about 1 – 1.5 cm wide.
Weave the strips together, leaving gaps about the width of a strip of pastry between them to form a cross-hatch pattern roughly the same size as the original sheet of pastry. Lay this on top of the tart and trim the edges with a sharp knife.

Bake at 175ºC for approx 50min to 1hr. The centre should be ever so slightly gooey while the edges cake like. (The gooey centre will set after about 5 mins out of the oven).

Serve with custard or ice-cream.

Tonight we had a light dinner so I decided to make dessert. Given I had some puff pastry sheets in the freezer, I opted for a pear strudel.
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