Oops!! Where Did That Week Go?

Well, so much for posting in the week eh! School holiday stuff at this end of the week and recovering from the weekend at the beginning of the week put paid to that idea....sorry.

So what did we do then? Well for a start it was a scorcher of a weekend weather wise, and boy did we suffer in the wool in the kitchen.....apparently we were the coolest place in the palace but it certainly didn't feel that way to us. Hot weather or not, we did pretty well when it came to 'end results' again, especially Robert who was a demon with the measuring - funny, I'd have expected him to have posted something about it by now!

Slight problems with the bread making, trouble with the ovens it appeared, so Pick and Carters Bread emporium was not to be! The loaves the did manage to produce would be long lasting though, as you'd have a better chance of cutting granite than their early attempts at manchet loaves!! Still their 50% pea flour 50% wheat flour loaf came out brilliantly, and quite surprisingly tasted ok; only tasting of peas for the first mouthful, then just tasting of an 'odd' flavour, but in no way unpalatable. I've posted some pictures of the loaf, along with most of the images I took over the weekend over at Flikr. Strangely enough I didn't take many picture over the weekend and I'm pretty sure that Robert didn't either.....let's hope we do better on the holiday weekend.

Dave and Jorge spent the weekend working on marchpane. The idea was to keep plugging away at it rather like Jorge and I did with the boiled sugar until they were happy with being able to get consistent results...no need to worry about making thinks. Dave though just can't help himself and as you can see, he had to do something with the marchpane that they made.



As it happens, subtle differences in how the two of them made their marchpanes led to 2 different 'types'- a hard/firm marchpane ideal for moulding as you can see in the pictures and a softer variant better suited to draping, more like you might use for cake decorating today. This means that the guys have extra 'tools' in their arsenal now for creating decorative subtelties - an idea for which Jorge and I have knocked together (he came up with an idea and I've provided a little historical info' to push it a bit further) I'm going to resist telling you more about it at the moment until we've got a few more bits sorted out........you should be used to that now shouldn't you!

The sardeyne turned out quite well but did provoke some interesting comments

¶Sardeyne.
¶Take Almaundys, & make a gode Mylke of Flowre of Rys, Safroun, Gyngere; Canelle, Maces, Quybibe; grynd hem smal on a morter, & temper hem vppe with þe Mylke; þan take a fayre vesselle, & a fayre parte of Sugre, & boyle hem wyl, & rynsche þin dysshe alle a-bowte with-ynne with Sugre or oyle, an þan serue forth.

The overwhelming taste was of fruit....strange as it contains none!! Some of the guys said it tasted like mince pies or Christmas pudding, the rest of us said it tasted of apples......very much like a McDonalds apple pie as it happens! The best guess we had was that the texture and the cinnamon and ginger were what triggered the 'fruit pie' thoughts in our heads.....strange stuff this food malarkey.