jam tarts (another type of pie)

18th century Pie

Among the other delicacies served at the eight year old Henry's feast in Westminster Hall were "Partryche and Pecock enhackyll". The latter was a cooked peacock mounted in its skin. Other birds like partridges, swans, bitterns and herons were frequently placed on top of pies for ornament and as a means of identifying the contents. This medieval practice of creating a 'subteltie' or eye-catching centrepiece, remained current until the eighteenth century and even later. For instance, a game pie with a stuffed pheasant placed on top, is illustrated in an 1890s edition of Mrs Beeton as a breakfast dish. Pies were also made in the shape of the animal they contained.

Text and image from www.historicfood.com

pie testing

It sort of looks like writing with blobby felt tip pens, I kind of like it. Before and after baking pictures. And no I can't spell consideration.

old school pie

From Mrs Beeton's 'All about cookery', very nice.

Head sketches

Strangely I keep drawing bald men with long necks, not sure what that's about.

Short Crust Portraits/tests

Same dyes, different pastry.

Edible food colours

I burnt this first lot of colour samples that I made, oops. Every thing just looked a bit charred. Fingers crossed I'll have time to make a rainbow pie later.

(left-right: turmeric, beetroot, parsley, carrot, red cabbage, cranberry tea)

Value Meal where are you?

I'm trying to find more information about the "Value Meal" exhibition that was held as part of the Saint-Etienne International Design Biennale in 2004.

I managed to find this article on metropolismag.
"To give the theme weight, the curators selected designers who were comfortable with conceptual thinking—from emerging talents such as Tobias Wong, Dan Harper of Elseware, and the “idea foundry” Superhappybunny to established names including David Rockwell, John Maeda of MIT, and the IDEO team. With their brief—develop an intervention to make people aware of what, how, or how much they eat—Wolff and Chen encouraged speculative thinking and boundary pushing."

It sounds like it was a good un.

Crave Aid

"Much like nicotine patches that allow wearers to wean themselves of cravings without enduring withdrawal symptoms, Crave Aid food patches are intended to be worn on the skin to allow us to experience the fantasy ingestion of unhealthy foods.

Our palettes are trained to desire foods that are high in sugar and fat content. We endure cravings for these foods that are so powerful they alter our moods and interfere with our body chemistry. Studies show that women can overcome sugar cravings if a drop of vanilla is worn on the wrist and sniffed when the craving starts.

Created as part of the "Value Meal" exhibition at the Design Bienale in St. Etienne, France, the Crave Aid food patches were an ironic take on a way to overcome cravings for unhealthy foods. The curators asked us to create a conceptual, engaging, and light-hearted piece that commented on the dangerous habit of consuming unhealthy food.

Our idea was to ironically present food cravings as a medical emergency and to engage visitors and foster dialogue by offering a take-away, which led to the emergency kit reference and the food patches dispensed from the modified emergency box. Reportedly, food patches were spotted on visitors to the Bienale all over town for a few days."

Excerpt and image from Ideo's website.

Pancake day!

Don't forget :)

Hot water pastry

This stuff is great, really pliable and you can model it a bit like clay, it would be great to make some moulds to try it in. I've been trying it with tin mugs, tiny jam jars, and free-forming, but haven't even scratched the surface. This is the pastry that is used for scotch pies and those epicvictorian raised pies.....

Portrait Pie

Here's a hot water crust pastry cameo, it's modelled on a postage stamp, but doesn't look much like it, I think i need a shaper knife, time to get the scalpel set out, this is great fun.

Nursery Rhymes

Georgie Porgie, Puddin' and Pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry,

When the boys came out to play

Georgie Porgie ran away.

Rowley Powley, pudding and pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry;

When the girls began to cry,

Rowley Powley runs away

idea for pie

the queen of hearts

The Queen of Hearts she made some tarts all on a summer's day;
The Knave of Hearts he stole the tarts and took them clean away.
The King of Hearts called for the tarts and beat the Knave full sore
The Knave of Hearts brought back the tarts and
vowed he'd steal no more.

here are some magpies I saw today

It makes sense.....

From Michael Pollan's new book Food Rules.

Edible knits2- Puff

Not as easily as I was hoping, it never is with knitting, the pastry kept drying out and is really stretchy, I had to put in the freezer for a while to moisten it up again. Not sure what flavour pie should have a knitted pie crust....any ideas?

tested puff

As promised here's the bake off between home-made and shop-bought, can you spot the difference? I could taste it. Hearts are mine, stars are courtsey of Jus-Rol, definitely more salt. From one of my team of professional tasters the hearts were "lighter, with out being brittle", ha ha I think I'm on to a winner.

Liquorice Pipe

Edible treats from an old school sweetie shop in Dumfries&Galloway.

Shop bought vs Home-made

So the challenge is on, today I made my own puff pastry (the one on the left is mine). Tomorrow I'm going to be having some sort of bake off. I'll be updating as I go.

pie pie pie

Mahala's back and we had a quick chat about pies tonight! I started a quick google of pies and this amazing recipe came up, it's amazing!

This would be a really fun thing to make at the workshops, could have a mystery tasting of different types veg/fruit pies and try out different combinations. Mahala was also talking about buying a mini oven to cook them in, sounds totally cool. This sounds like a winner.

Not feeling so great as I'm bunged up with a cold so going to go to bed now. X

Project H Design: Empowerment through food.

Project H Design is a group of designers and builders whose aim is to enrich and enhance the lives of those in overlooked communities and social groups. One of their projects, Empowerment Through Food is a project run through schools that show children how to grow their own food, where it comes from and how they can have a healthy life from community-grown foods. They also teach children how to sell their food, imparting business skills and a chance to earn money within their local community.

They also have a Flikr group.

ideas for sharing

..maybe people make one pattern across 2 plates and they have to put them near to each other (whilst share their food) to complete the pattern....rings that are like little pots to contain dipping oil so you dip your bread into the oil of the person next to you...

I tried a few ceramic transfers tonight. It's really fun, and you're supposed to be able to bake them in a domestic oven, so hope it works out.

experiments with natural dyes

So yesterday Mahala came to Dundee for a bit of food chat. We're still a bit stuck on where this is actually going but with a week of solid research and thinking we should be on track. We did some experiments printing with beetroot, spices and boiled-down purple cabbage. It was pretty difficult to get a good result though, so we decided to scratch this one off the list as even if we had managed to get some good results, the effect would have been able to be replicated very easily. Also check out the squash-vase Mahala made.

edible knits

Etymology of PIE

I was reading last night about pastry- the word developed from the greek word for embroidered veil. And Pie comes from Magpie, the bird, due to the it being a collection of odds,ends and left overs put together in a crust, in reference to the bird gathering a mish-mash of objects to form it's nest.