Custard Cream Puffs

We’ve already had a recipe for the cream puff choux pastry (where I wrote about my grandmother’s long-standing fondness for them) and another one for chocolate eclairs. Here’s a more detailed cream puff recipe, which also includes instructions for the custard filling.
The custard filling relies on the use of custard powder (or ‘custard flour’ as [...]

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Baked Chocolate Pudding

Another recipe of grandmother’s that used Spry vegetable shortening (which I’ve commented on here, in addition to comments on Spry’s equivalent, Crisco, here), which was very much the method of cooking at the time. You can substitute with butter.
See grandma’s list of oven temperatures to find out the correct setting for a moderately hot oven.
This [...]

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Chocolate Eclairs

Eclairs are made from choux pastry, as are cream puffs. Grandma’s other recipe for choux pastry is here. [30/12/07 update: another cream puffs recipe here.]
You might also want to refer to grandmother’s list of oven temperatures to determine what temperature ‘moderate oven’ refers to.

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Lemon Curd Tart

For the crust, try out one of the shortcrust pastry recipes I posted earlier:
Crisco Pastry
Shortcrust Pastry
In those pastry recipes, I’d commented on Crisco and Spry, which are hydrogenated vegetable fats, and Spry is also one of the ingredients for the lemon curd here. Spry can be substituted here with butter, which probably also gives a [...]

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Christmas Pudding

With 25th December just round the corner, I thought I’d post this newspaper clipping (probably from The Straits Times) which grandma stuck inside her notebook, right on the first page. The facing page has some notes dated 22 December 1957, as you can see here.
Merry Christmas, everyone!

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Shortcrust Pastry

I posted grandma’s Crisco shortcrust pastry recipe earlier. This one uses another vegetable shortening, Spry, which was Crisco’s main competitor. Read more of my earlier comments on these vegetable shortenings also here.
The recipe’s list of ingredients states ‘butter’ next to ‘Spry’, though the ingredients refer only to Spry. As I noted in the Crisco pastry [...]

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Chocolate Fudge

Fudge is very much an American confection, and continues the collection of American dessert recipes that grandma collected. In some cases, grandma would note down that the recipe came from the American women’s magazine, McCalls, such as in some of these recipes.
Fudge is believed to date from the 1880s, becoming popular at women’s colleges such [...]

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Fried Cookies

Christmas is just round the corner, and spiced, fried cookies are a traditional Christmas food in some European cultures, such as Scandinavian rosettes, Norwegian fattigmann, Polish krusczyki, and Italian cannoli and strufoli. Spanish churros are also a type of fried cookie, but made from choux pastry. According to the Cookies-in-Motion website, cookies were made by [...]

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