Beautiful and tasty nectarine and frangipane flan

Masterchef Australia by itself is responsible for me producing a whole lot of recipes that I watched on the show. This delicious nectarine frangipane flan is one of those. Original recipe is from Maggie Beer.

While Tom and I watch episode after episode of season 1 of masterchef Australia, dish after dish is whipped up and even the ones that get bad reviews are probably all dishes I would not be able to make myself. So I’m always pretty impressed with what they make. Granted there are always people that tell me that the people on masterchef cannot cook. That it’s all child’s play. Child’s play?? Are you serious? Sure there is an element of show in there that’s just part of the tv series and that’s fine, but I refuse to believe that the top 24 of masterchef cannot cook. That’s just a ridiculous assumption.

I think they’re all brilliant. Some more then others (we all have our favorites) but I totally love watching the show and I do get inspired by it a great deal. I would not have made a chocolate mousse with olive oil if it wasn’t for George Calombaris and now this dessert. I think it was actually from season 3 that they showed this dish… I’m starting to wonder about the season now… (the reason being that they started season 3, while season 1 was still running. Very nice if the first episode shows you the winner of season 1. That was a total bummer…)

Delicious small flan with nectarine and verjus glaze

It was part of a 3 item dessert that Maggie Beer (what a lovely lady!!) presented to the contestants and they had to reproduce. This flan caught my eye and I just had to make it. Luckily the recipe was on the website of Maggie so that was easily fixed. However; one of the ingredients that was needed for this was verjuice glaze… What?? I never heard of verjuice (or verjus as we call it here) before so it took some tweeting around before I had the answer. It’s essentially the juice of unripe grapes and ofcourse, not something you can buy in a supermarket.

With a little taste of summer; nectarine flan

Luckily Hans Klomp, who is the (head?)chef at Vineyard Catering where I did a few foodshoots a couple of months back, tweeted to me that it was sold at Vanilla Venture. They responded via twitter quite quickly and while they normally don’t deliver to consumers they kindly agreed that I could buy a bottle. It was delivered to a restaurant here in Almere where I could pick it up. So fantastic service by Vanilla Venture! I was really happy with that.

So I had a bottle of verjuice but now I still needed to make the dessert. And that is what I did today. I loved the taste of the dessert; the sweetness of the frangipane and the slightly sour taste of the verjuice went brilliantly together. I did make a few mistakes when baking so it could have looked better, but this was my first time with this dough (never my strongest point) so all things considering; I’m pretty happy with how it turned out!

If you’re also curious to find out how the former contestants and winner of the first season of Masterchef Australia are doing? I know I was, so I  looked up the websites of my favorites. So have a look if you want!

Julie Goodwin – Julie is on her second cookbook now which is about to be released soon.

Justine Schofield – Justine has started her own catering company

Poh Ling Yeow (with her artwork) – and via ABC tv where she has her own tv series called Poh’s Kitchen I would love to watch that but it’s in Australia only apparently…

Chris Badenoch – He wrote a cookbook too but there is also some controversial stuff going on around him. I’m not interested enough to find out but if you’re into juice gossip… I would google some more.

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I stare upwards at the blue sky… The sounds in the gardens around us seem muffled and quiet. The heat has slowed everyone down. It’s simply too warm to run around like a headless chicken and even the kids next door seem to make less noise then usual. While I lay in the cool grass under the overgrown tree in our garden I ponder about the next Plate to Page assignment; taking photographs of apricots. One in raw state and one in a baked dish. A large bumblebee buzzes around my head and I am just quick enough when I turn my head to prevent it falling flat on my face… They should call them stumble bees, rather then bumble bees.. Especially the larger ones seem to fall quite often. Apparently humans are not the only ones that can be overweight. We have a bumblebee nest in our garden every year, but this year they seem to be more active then previous years. Maybe the nest is slowly getting too full. It’s build inside a birds house, one of those wooden structures you can hang on a tree or shed which is supposed to house a bird. Not bumblebees… They’re suffering from the heat too. Every time I walk to the shed I can hear one or two of them in the opening fanning their wings like mad. It’s their own ventilation-system but it must be – literally – killing them to sit there and fan air into the nest. Maybe the bumblebee that fell beside me in the grass was one of the “ventilators”. He’s still alive but too tired to fly it seems. I turn on my stomach and watch the bumblebee as it tries to climb a blade of grass but keeps falling down.

The writing assignment to go with the photography assignment is summer memories.. Ah… summers when life was good and nothing was wanted of you but to play in the sun, build sandcastles and run to mom and dad for your new sunscreen.. As kids we would always go on vacation to the beach; when we were little we went to Noordwijk, Katwijk en Egmond aan Zee. When we were in our teens, we moved those beaches to France and on occasion we would go to Austria.

Yes that would be me tucking into that bag of fries... My mum is smiling in the camera

I loved going to the ocean; no matter what the weather was. We would take long walks when it was windy and cold (and remember this was still Holland!) and huddle up in our little cabin and play silly card games. Or read.. I could read forever, ask my parents! And o, by the way; can you see how blond I used to be??

From left to right, my sister Yvonne, my younger sister Monique, mum and me on the right. O and notice the fancy shoes... with socks...

But then came the time when I turned 15 (or 16, can’t remember) and did no longer want to go on family holidays… Family holidays were for children and I was no longer that (I am sure I was still a kid in the eyes of my parents but in my mind I was very mature…)

So I went on my own with friends, but with no money that ended up being a trip around Holland by train..lol.. I honestly can’t remember when the last family holiday together was; I should probably look at my photoalbums to know how old I was when that happened.

Building sandcastles used to be my favorite passtime

In my memories too the summers always used to be warmer. These days it’s either too hot with temperatures going above 30 or it is raining. I suspect that it is really my memory playing tricks on me as I do have a lot of photos where we are huddled in raincoats on our summerholidays! But over to the present day and our assignment for apricots or other stonefruit. I have to confess that I usually am not too fond of the apricots we can find here. They are just not the best in flavor, but nectarines and peaches can be really nice. I did have the most amazing apricots when we were in France a few weeks ago and that just proofed the point that not all fruit is created equal…

For this challenge I initially set out to make apricot cupcakes. I had found some apricots that looked fairly ok so I figured making them into cupcakes would be a good idea. But my first batch of cupcakes failed miserably.. I mean seriously seriously big failure. I made a mistake by adding bakingsoda instead of baking powder but I noticed the mistake while adding it into the batter. I scooped out most of the salt and proceeded in adding the required amount of baking powder. Can you guess what went wrong there?

I thought I'd show the failed batch! lol...

It was just one of those things where I already knew it would go wrong as soon as I popped them into the oven and needless to say… I was correct. So *deep sigh* I started again with the second batch. Those were much much better (couldn’t have really been any worse!) and quite tasty too. The only thing I struggled with was finding a good angle to take a photograph of them and while I was initially not unhappy with the photos; the longer I looked at them the less appealing they became.

Apricot cupcakes

So I decided I needed to go with another stonefruit and make myself a clafoutis. As faith would have it; I made the first clafoutis and used a different recipe from my usual one. Can’t remember where I found it but it just was not the best in terms of consistency and flavor. So… again on to the second batch and this time it came out tasting and looking delicious as a clafoutis should!

Nectarine clafoutis