Recipes - Part 2 - Puds

LEMON TART (from one of my mum’s recipe books)
Ingredients
Pastry – either make, or buy sweet shortcrust pastry to fit dish.
Filling
Zest and juice of 2 lemons
150ml double cream
2 eggs
100g sugar

1. Dust cool surface and roll out chilled pastry to more than fit tin (so as not to stretch it… keep dusting!)
2. Chill in fridge for 20 mins (ish)
3. Heat oven to 180C
Put eggs, sugar, double cream and lemon zest and juice into bowl and whisk until creamy
4. Melt butter and whisk into lemon mixture, then pour into chilled pastry case
5. Carefully place the tart in oven and bake for 15 mins, then reduce the heat to 160C and bake for a further 20 mins or until the filling has set (I aim for it to be golden brown)
6. Leave to cool for 1 hour before serving

There is a blueberry version which is slightly different, but equally delicious. Recipe available on request!

CHOCOLATE LEMON CRUNCH
This is dedicated to my friend Teddy, who loves (and makes her own) Lemon curd. It is also from TAB, and I am yet to make it, but it sounds easy. It is supposedly a “low cal” cake, but considering ingredients, I’m not convinced. Perhaps you just need to have a small amount…

Serves: 8
Ready in: 20 mins (plus chilling time)
Total cost: £4.45

Ingredients
175g/6oz Chocolate digestive biscuits
2tbsp golden syrup
25g/1oz unsalted butter
6tbsp lemon curd
225g/8oz fresh raspberries
Mint sprig and sifted icing sugar to decorate (optional)
1. Finely crush the chocolate digestives. Pour the syrup into a heavy-based saucepan and add the butter. Heat gently until blended, then remove from the heat and add the crushed biscuits. Mix well, then press firmly into the base, and sides of a 20.5cm/8in loose-bottom or spring form flan tin. Chill in the fridge until required.
2. When ready to serve, spoon the lemon curd into the biscuit base, then top with the fresh raspberries. Decorate with a mint sprig and sprinkle with icing sugar, if using, and serve.

Finally, for now, is this recipe, which we found when we had too many over ripe bananas left. We'd had limited success with a previous complicated recipe I found, so I used this instead, and considering how easy it is, the resulting cake was delicious!

BANANA CAKE (off the internet… need to find link!)

This is a very basic recipe I found. It works very well and is so easy. And is mostly for Lindy, who had a Banana Cake “disaster” recently! He he

Ingredients
4oz butter of margarine
6oz sugar
2 eggs
8oz Self raising flour

Mash bananas with a sturdy fork
cream the butter and sugar together, and mix in eggs
Mix the two yellow sludges you now have, and mix in the flour
Scrape into loaf tin and bake for about 40 mins at Gas Mark 4/180C
The recipe ends here, but when I made it, the thing was clearly not done in the middle, so I turned the oven down to GM2 and left it for another 30 mins, whereupon it was fine.

(I’ve no idea what GM2 is in real temps (!) but Span did leave it on for a bit longer than 40 mins.