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Tag Archives: dessert

A story about guavas…or maybe peaches

I’m back.  Even if I’m a week late.  We’ll see how long I can make it this time.

The other day I was peering at one of the guava trees, the one that produces the pink fruit.  It’s early in the season for it, but I wanted to see how the tree was doing after I had the tree pruned.  Guava fruits on new growth and pruning often encourages new shoots, so I was wondering if I was going to have a lot of fruit this year (much like any other year when the tree isn’t pruned but the tree was getting out of control).

As it turns out, yes, I think I will be getting plenty of pink guavas this year.  As I was looking at all the branches, I saw numerous unripe guavas developing.  I will have to dig out the fruit picker.  Maybe I’ll make guava ice cream again this year.  Or maybe guava jam or something.  There’s no way I’m going to eat all those guavas.  Especially since I’m not a huge fan of the pink ones.  I like the Thai varietals better.

ANYWAY!  I was looking at all the new fruit on the guava tree when suddenly I see a flash of red pretty high up on the tree.  I thought that was really weird.  Guava trees don’t produce red fruit.   There are a lot of leaves in the way, so I had to move around to try and get a better look.  And…it was a peach!  There’s a ripe peach growing on my guava tree!

Probably not.  A peach tree was never grafted onto the guava tree and more than likely, it’s a peach tree that’s just entangled its branches with the guava tree.  But it’s weird because I don’t think I have any peach trees on that side of the yard.  I just have another guava varietal.

I was going to trace the peach branch back to its tree, but I got called away to do something else and didn’t get the chance.  But soon.  Soon I will follow that branch back to the tree…just to verify that my guava tree did not produce a peach.  Also, that peach looked really nice and ripe.  But unfortunately by the time I got back out there, the peach was gone.  Like it never existed.  But honest, there was a peach on my guava tree!

 

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I make! Dark chocolate éclairs edition

It’s another bakealong!  This one is from February and I actually did try it out in February.  I never posted because I didn’t get a good picture while I was making the éclairs back then.  I figured I’d make them again and just get a good shot then buuuut…I haven’t made éclairs since then.  Just haven’t felt like making éclairs.  So you get a terrible picture.

Anyway, this is maybe my fourth time working with choux pastry?  I think?  I’ve made éclairs and cream puffs before in the past.  And I think I’ve used a different recipe for choux pastry each time.  Some have been easier to work with, some have been more difficult.  One of them was just plain strange.  I would tell you to avoid that one but I don’t remember which one it is anymore.  The KAF recipe seems just fine and easy to work with.

This time I piped them with a star tip.  I forgot which size, but it wasn’t a huge one.  I think the first time I made éclairs I was doing it with the jr high girls and we just used ziploc bags with a corner cut off to make the éclair shape.  And then we piped pudding in, as I had no intention of making pastry cream and éclairs with jr highers in one night, using a ziploc with a bit of a straw taped to the corner of the bag.

Anyway, I piped the éclairs and filled them with chocolate pastry cream.  I didn’t slice and fill fill but instead used a smaller tip to poke a hole into the tops (one at each end in case there was a partition that didn’t clear in the middle) of the éclairs and fill that way.  Then I tipped the top into the glaze and tada! It’s like I never made a hole in the éclair at all!

Um, I didn’t really bother making the éclairs look that nice.  You’ll see that a lot of them are all wonky.  I baked them kind of late at night.  But they tasted good.  Of course, I am a huge fan of chocolate, so I might think anything heavy on the chocolate tastes good.  I made them for my last couple of weeks at clic (and they went really fast, so I think they really did taste good).  So yes…I’m free from clic!  On to client D (henceforth known as clid)!

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This really is a bad picture.

Obtw, one of the guys at clic came up to me afterward and asked me how I managed to bake the éclairs with the filling inside and also, how I even got the filling inside.  It…was a weird conversation.