Pistachio and Raspberry Teacakes

It's been a long time between drinks for a Tartelette recipe.  It's not because her recipes haven't been appealing, but rather my energies have been focussed elsewhere.

However, after the delicious dark chocolate and pistachio cookies I still had more than half a bag of pistachios!  When I made those biscuits I was able to convince a friend, X, to shell the pistachios while I did some of the other steps in the recipe.  Unfortunately X was not available this time, and I had to shell them myself - boring!

Here they are baked, but undecorated.

They didn't rise much - not sure why.  I used the required amount of baking powder with plain flour. The recipe can be found here, but you should go and look at the beautiful photographs (way better than my picture of these cakes in tupperware).

Of course, I had to 'gild the lily' - and I only had enough white chocolate to do half!

Actually, I burnt the first batch of white chocolate I tried to melt.  I actually think it was to do with the bowl I used in the microwave, rather than too much time, because the chocolate burnt after 30 seconds in the microwave and the second batch needed almost 2 minutes in total to melt.

Recently discovered - Tartelette

I've recently discovered a blog called Tartelette, a blog by a French lady living in the USA. She takes beautiful photographs, and cooks delicious looking meals.  I have spent a fair amount of time trawling through her archives and have been inspired!  There are many dishes I would like to make.  I think most of her dishes would be perfect for a dinner party - they just look so fabulous!

She may or may not be coeliac, but she cooks a fair number of gluten-free dishes, and has done some things that I didn't think were possible to do gluten-free (eg pastry).

I have made the apricot and rosemary shortbread cookies (recipe)

The dough, after it came out of the food processor (which was cheating, because the recipe involves using a pastry blender, which I don't own):

A stack of delicious biscuits - the apricot comes from good quality apricot jam sandwiching 2 of the biscuits together:

And the taste?  Fantastic, a little odd (sweet + savoury) but wonderful.