The unfortunate Pizza Rustica

I have to say straight out that I did not enjoy this pie. I don't mean to blame Alpha Baker Marie for this exactly but in her foreword to The Baking Bible she urges bakers not to worry about the sweet pastry for this otherwise savoury pie. I was all ready to leave out the astounding 100g of sugar the recipe calls for when I read that. Marie wouldn't steer me wrong, I said to myself. It was just lucky I partially doubted her and halved the sugar to 50g or I couldn't have stomached it at all. Needless to say I didn't try this out on anyone else. I'm not sure why my tastebuds are so divergent from the other Alpha Bakers because they seemed to like it, on the whole. 

On the plus side the pastry was otherwise easy to make and deal with. The filling was certainly tasty but I would probably reduce the amount of mozzarella if I made it again, plus add more sausage and mix all the filling together rather than layering it.

The ill-fated pastry. 

I love ricotta and this egg and cheese mixture was delicious. It also gave me a chance to use my mouli which turned my ricotta into little worms. The sausage was pretty good too.

I enjoyed the latticing although my non-spatial brain was confused by the 45 degree angle required for the lattice. I managed to approximate something like it.

The pie turned out looking quite nice but that only made it doubly disappointing when I tasted it. I ate quite a bit of it without the pastry for a number of meals in a row then threw out the rest. Ho, hum.

Next week we're making a cake with fondant icing. Now that's going to be an interesting exercise for the decoratingly-challenged.

Summer holidays and the start of Cranberry Christmas Bread...*and finished

So, poor old phylliscaroline has been a bit lonely for a few weeks while I struggled through the traditional pre-Christmas end of year work, social and biscuit-making frenzy. Then I suffered through the traditional holiday earache. Okay that's not a tradition, but it did mean that I spent a lot of time in bed with a hot water bottle on my ear, and missed making two pies (*and a cake as well) with the Alpha Bakers. I've come South for Christmas with family again this year so at least while I was sick I was surrounded by the beauty of my parent's garden and some beautiful summer weather. 

And this is as far as I've got with the Cranberry Christmas bread. Yes I'm only at the beginning biga stage, staring hopefully at the starter, looking for movement. (And now that I'm away from it, I must say one thing about the humidity of Darwin is that you never have to worry about whether the room is warm enough for fermenting yeast.) I'm working with different ingredients in an unfamiliar kitchen so I guess we'll see how it goes. I'll update the post once I've baked the bread, hopefully tomorrow afternoon.

Update* 

It was quite a challenge to get this finished in between watching Star Wars, last minute shopping and Christmas Eve dinner preparations. But I managed to follow the steps...

Et voila! It may be a bit dry (probably better tomorrow) but very nice with blue cheese. It will be a nice addition to the cheese plate for Christmas lunch.

Next week the Alpha Bakers are cooking White Christmas Peppermint cake.