Cupcakes & Catastrophes: The mother of muffins

I had a good haul of pressies this Christmas. I suspect by the time you hit thirty you should perhaps have outgrown that smug feeling of receiving a large stash of excellent gifts, but just as Dan’s eyes lit up when he opened his remote control car, Emily squealed with glee at her new doll’s house and Neil pronounced himself “stoked” with his new chilly bin (what? that was what he wanted!), so too did I feel a rush of giddy delight upon receiving some great new recipe books (including Thomas Keller’s ‘Bouchon Bakery’ and Paul Hollywood’s ‘How to Bake’ – thank you Steve and Heather respectively!)

Among them was Peter Gordon’s ‘Everyday’ (thank you, Tristan and Jen!) – a book I’ve been lusting after ever since I spent ten minutes ogling it in Paper Plus, while Dan and Emily ran around the shop and I pretended they weren’t my kids.

I’m somewhat in awe of Peter Gordon, the so-called ‘father of fusion cuisine’, with his Kiwi-British restaurant empire, his column in the Herald and now his amazing new cook book, from which I tried my first recipe last night: blueberry custard tarts. Partly through burning creativity, although more accurately through lack of correct ingredients, I adapted the recipe somewhat to more of a blueberry peach cheesecake tart.

His sweet pastry is a Spanish version, made with sherry. I was somewhat surprised to find we had sherry in our rather sparse liquor cabinet; even more surprised when I realised post-tart that I’d used brandy instead of sherry (which we actually didn’t have as it turned out), however the texture and taste were great.

The pastry was cooked beautifully, or so I thought, until Neil says, in the manner of an airport security guard who has just spotted something dodgy in your hand luggage, “Waaait. Mine is slightly undercooked on the bottom.”

Sure enough, there was a very fine transparent line of raw pastry in the centre of the tart.

“That’s the sort of thing they’ll have a go at you for on the show,” says he, who claims to have never watched it.

The ‘show’ he refers to is, of course, 'Chelsea New Zealand’s Hottest Home Baker'. Applications close about now so I should hear soon...

I’ll be honest, the tarts were the first thing I’ve made in a while. The Kiwi summer has morphed into a series of endless, hot, beachy, loll-about-on-a-sun-lounger-with-an-iceblock days, which don't lend themselves to time in front of the oven. However, summer also means summer fruits – stone fruits, berries, pineapples, melons: I love them all. Neil, on a particularly inspired Daddy daycare morning, took the kids to boysenberry-picking. They returned with full juicy punnets, so boysenberry muffins with lemon curd centres and cream cheese icing were the order of the day.