Yet another post driven by frugality, or lack thereof. The Bloke and I have recently returned from the Wildes of Vietnam and Cambodia, and have also recently started shopping at ALDI. You may make the connection between these two occurrences and say "HI, I DO SAY JEEVES, IT APPEARS THAT MRS M'S ESTATE IS IN THE POORHOUSE!" You would, of course, be correct. But being in the poorhouse is no excuse for a lack of afternoon tea in one's life! No, indeed, baking scrumptious things at home and washing them down with a cup of Boh Cameronian tea bought overseas during more prosperous times can be just as fun as an evening spent at the Wine and Cheese Room under the GPO!
OK, I'm full of it. Being confined to the house sucks the big one. And the only reason I baked these was because I cracked open a tin of ALDI apricot halves to serve with pan roasted free range pork cutlets last night and knew full well that they'd just fester in a pile of wastefulness at the back of the fridge if I didn't do *something* with them. And as much as I dislike Kylie Kwong with the fire of a thousand suns, I do agree with her that food wastage is pretty criminal in these hard times (even though I threw out a whole tub of yoghurt and an entire pot of sour cream this morning... yeah, I'm working on it, OK?).
Having an infinite preference for savoury over sweet, I was hard pressed to figure out what to do with the offending leftovers, until I came across a picture of an apple tea cake (yes, just like Agnes Skinner in The Simpsons) and figured that both fruits start with A. Smart, me! A search on The Google came up with a couple of basic recipes which I tweaked to fit the ingredients on hand. The small sizes are more a product of leaving my springform pan in Canberra than deliberate planning. The pistachios were the first thing that came out of a lucky grab into the container labelled "Nuts, Legumes, Mexican" in my pantry.
Forgive my lack of enthusiasm. They taste good, but not as good as a bottle of 1986 hermitage and a lump of ripe blue on a cold city night. Beggars can't be choosers. Enjoy.
Ingredients
2 1/4 cups plain flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking powder
1 cup sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp vanilla extract
170g butter, softened
3 eggs
1 cup tinned apricots, drained and chopped roughly
2 tbsp raw pistachios
2 tbs honey
2 tbsp butter, extra
Method
1. Pre heat oven to 190 degrees celcius.
2. Toast pistachios in oven for fifteen minutes, remove and cool.
3. Meanwhile, dump flour, baking powder, salt and cinnamon in a bowl and stir with a fork to break up any lumps. Set aside.
4. Cream softened butter in a bowl, then gradually add sugar until combined. Continue creaming until light and fluffy, then add eggs one at a time, and then the vanilla extract.
5. Gradually add the flour mixture to the wet ingredients, beating after each addition, until combined. Place batter in freezer for half an hour.
6. Meanwhile, grease 12 pan muffin tin with extra butter. Combine the chopped apricots with the honey.
7. Distribute half the batter into the bottoms of the muffin pans. Top with 2 tsp chopped apricots, then divide the remaining batter across the tops of the pans. Sprinkle with pistachios.
8. Bung it in the oven for half an hour, remove, check doneness with a skewer, shove 'em in your face at afternoon tea like the Queen's corgi scarfing down a leftover Harrod's pork pie. Remember the time you went to London and it rained UP, use this as a focus point for dissuading further overseas travel.
.jpg)
