At last, something edible has come out of the kitchen for my bake along blog post. After almost a solid month of churning out bad, bad bakes (see: shudderingly awful attempt at trifle, pissed up attempt at pie, crimes against pizza), I was about ready to give up. Thankfully, having a crack at a Bedfordshire clanger has taken me back up into the more comfortable “passable” territory.

Thanks to it being a forgotten bake, it wasn’t particularly easy to get hold of a recipe for the Bedfordshire clanger. I had a little skim of this one from GoodtoKnow, took a screenshot of the exact measurements of the pastry and then winged the rest – I hate constantly looking at my phone while I’m baking and my laptop is currently out of action, so I was on my own out there.

The pastry is easy enough: flour, suet, cold grated butter, water and one egg. For the filling I boiled thin slices of potato and parsnip and mixed them with creme fraiche, salt and pepper. The sweet end (1/3 to the savoury ends 2/3, as per the recipe) was a little dollop of custard plus heavily cinnamon-sugared bramley apple.

Thanks to my not having paid attention to the show at the right time and not having read the recipe properly, I hadn’t realised that the dividing line of pastry between sweet and savoury was supposed to be wafer thin, and just chucked a massive wodge of in between them..

Obviously, the great big wodges of pastry did not bake well. The rest, however, was satisfactory. I think they probably could have benefited from an extra five minutes or so in the oven but overall they were all I wanted them to be: edible. A nice flake on them, no soggy bottom, a satisfying golden colour.

The dessert filling was wonderful. The savoury filling, however, was lacking in flavour. I ended up dipping it in yellow mustard and that sorted it right out. Should have spread a layer of mustard down. Then I could have called them mustard and custard clangers. Bollocks, that would have been brilliant. I’ll remember it for next year.

There, see, that’s much better isn’t it. I knew I wasn’t completely and utterly hopeless. Though I was starting to worry that I’d reeeeeeeeeeally lost my touch.

Sorry I haven’t mentioned the show once in this post, I actually can’t bear to acknowledge the fact that we’ve lost Liam. It’s still too raw. Maybe we can talk about it next week. Probably not though.

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