A weekend where the kitchen kept opening up. Saturday morning was a batch of rough puff and a pan of poached pears; Sunday was the bakes themselves, plus a tray of cookie dough scooped and shoved into the freezer for whenever the urge hits. Three recipe cards worth of work for two days of cooking, and a fridge and freezer that’ll feed us back across the week.
Cheese twists, with sliced apple
Rolled-out rough puff, grated parmesan pressed into it, folded once and rolled again, sliced into strips and twisted. Into a hot oven until gold and shattery. We had them warm with thin slices of crisp apple – the saltiness of the cheese and the sweetness of the apple play off each other, and an afternoon snack turns into a small ceremony.
The full method, with the rough-puff base it leans on, is in the cheese twists card.
Poached pears in vanilla-lemon syrup
Four whole Beurre Bosc peeled and cored, simmered gently in a syrup of water, sugar, vanilla, and lemon peel, then left to cool overnight in the same pot. The overnight rest is half the recipe – it’s what gets the vanilla all the way to the core. They come out scented through, pale gold, holding their shape. Two went warm with cream; the other two live in their syrup in the fridge for the week, headed for ice cream or porridge or eaten cold over the sink.
The full method, with variants and a list of things to do with the leftover syrup, is in poires pochées.
Sourdough discard cookie balls, in the freezer for later
A batch of brown-butter chocolate chunk cookies with cold sourdough discard worked through the dough – chewy edges, soft centres, a faint sour note under the chocolate. The whole batch goes raw into the freezer as 75g balls and bakes from frozen, four at a time, in fourteen to sixteen minutes. A tray of these in the freezer is the kind of small luxury that costs nothing in the moment a cookie is wanted on a Tuesday evening.
The full method is in the sourdough discard choc chip cookies card.