she made some tarts

it almost feels a shame to break up the alternating pattern ed and i have got going on with this, but i am gonna be so busy over the next few days that i figured i'd better post when i could get away with it. it's been busy this week in fact, what with another day of filming, plus my normal shifts at work, plus finding time in the day to repeatedly annoy ed by text and do my homework for wine school.

still, i found time to cook. mostly because things got a little conclusion-of-a-jonathan-franzen novel with my mother, and family arguments, in my experience, are the ones that have the potential to wound the most. what has this got to do with anything, kirsty, and why are you whining about it to us? i hear you say, dear readers. well, it's a simple link; in that when somebody dents my carefully constructed ego, i turn to something i am good at immediately, to restore the damage. hooray for carefully crafted trauma responses developed in childhood!

i wanted to use up the unshelled walnuts we have leftover from christmas, as they are taking up premium space in the kitchen and it would be a shame to let them turn bad, so i turned my fruit-and-nut bible, my personal food hero nigel slater's tender, volume II. there were several recipes that caught my eye, but i have as yet, not touched the stash of green and black's bars i got for christmas (perks of being a food snob) and didn't want them all languishing in a corner waiting for me to be hormonal and eat them all at once, so i found a recipe that satisfies the use of both ingredients, in the form of:

chocolate, honey, and walnut tart

for the crust:

butter, 150g

plain flour, 200g

a large egg, beaten

for the filling:

butter, 150g

set honey, 180g

light muscovado sugar, 180g

double cream, 80ml

a drop or two of vanilla extract

dark chocolate, 140g, roughly chopped

walnuts, 220g, roughly chopped.

to make the pastry, cut the butter into pieces and rub it into the flour with your fingertips, then mix in the egg to give a firm dough. roll out and use to line a 22-24cm shallow tart tin. leave to rest in the fridge for a good 20 minutes. preheat the oven to 220 degrees c/gas 6

cover the pastry case with paper and fill with dried beans or ceramic baking beans. cook in the preheated oven for about ten minutes, till the pastry is lightly biscuit coloured. carefully remove the paper and beans and return the pastry case to the oven for five minutes, until dry to the touch.

for the filling, melt the butter in a small pan, add the honey and sugar and then pour in the cream and a couple of drops of vanilla extract. boil hard for two minutes, then remove from the heat and fold in the chopped chocolate and walnuts. pour the filling into the tart case.

turn the oven down to 190 degrees c/gas 5 and bake for twenty minutes or until golden. remove and leave to cool a good half hour before serving with cream or creme fraiche.

so, here is the piece i ate before work in all it's still slightly warm, oozy glory:

small, huh? i can hear you pondering the apparent self restraint. don't worry, i took about a third of the thing to work for my coworkers and ended up eating loads more with them. this tart was goooood, like seriously. when it was warm it was really sweet and syrupy, but the cooler it got, the more redolent of toblerone it was (albeit texturally much more pleasing, it retained a gooey give even completely cool). apart from me having to cycle to the next village to get some eggs (bitteswell browns because they're leicester-laid, which is as local as it gets unless you count northampton's totally inhumane chicken factory, that turned my entire sixth form fad-vegan after some of its members started working there) in the middle of cooking, the recipe was hitch free, but then i've always done a nice line in cream-based desserts.

it was strange working with pastry after bread. to go from something so big and hands on to fiddly delicate work was a real shift in mindset, but that's one of the reasons i love getting down to making everything from scratch, i guess, it shows you the versatility of ingredients and the cleverness inherent in even the most basic techniques. my family must have liked it too, because this morning there was only this much left:

which should hopefully make them less impossible to live with over the next few days. they don't call it sweetening someone up for nothing.