Strawberry goop shortbread cookie-tart aka tapioca flour is magical!

We've been thickening savoury sauces with tapioca starch for a while now. We like it better than cornstarch, because it doesn't muddy the flavour of things the way cornstarch does.

At some point, we decided to thicken a pie filling with tapioca starch. <.< There's no going back. Tapioca starch is magical in fruit filling type goops. It makes everything so wonderfully blobby and clear and pretty, without being sticky and tacky. And it even re-bakes nicely, if you want to stuff it in a puff pastry and bake it.

Strawberry yuzu goop

Makes about 500g of goop. Don't worry about measuring exactly. :P I don't really measure stuff, and this is all conjecture anyway haha. If you use too much tapioca starch, you'll just end up with a more solid and bouncy goop.

Ingredients

  • 500g strawberries, chopped
  • 30g~ of honey citron tea - brand doesn't matter, they're all nice (yuzu is wonderful with strawberries)
  • 30g~ tapioca starch
  • 30ml water
  • white sugar to taste (depends on how sweet your berries are)
  • ground cardamom to taste

Steps to reproduce

  1. Chop the strawberries into fingernail-sized bits. It's okay if your fingernails are giant or midget. All fingernail sizes are welcome.
  2. Dump chopped strawberries, sugar, honey citron tea, and ground cardamom in a small pot of your choice (needs to be big enough to hold all your strawberries, obviously).
  3. In a separate bowl, add water to the tapioca starch and swirl it around till it forms a slurry. Don't skip this step! If you just dump the tapioca flour into the pot with the rest, you'll end up with tapioca lumps.
  4. Add tapioca flour slurry to the rest of the stuff in the pot.
  5. Cook at low to medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring pretty much all the time. Yeah, it sucks. :( I hate stirring.
    The tapioca slurry will look white at first, but once it's done, it'll turn clear.
  6. When the strawberries are squishy enough for your taste, and everything is goopy and clear, it's done.

The goop is great both hot and cold, and it reheats and bakes well. So once you have the goop, go on and GOOP ALL THE THINGS!

Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things

Being the soul of restraint, it's SO unusual for me to go completely mad, and throw in the kitchen sink. Of course it is. Ahem.

1) Hmm wanna make truffles but too lazy to roll balls. Okok let's make truffle bars.
2) Drat, no Nutella, was planning to use that. Ooh but look, hazelnut essence. Ok!
3) Pistachio looks so pretty in choccies, let's throw some in.
4) Hey I have those freeze dried strawberries, and pink is pretty with green. Chop some of those and put them on top!
5) Oo yellow is pretty with pink and I just happen to have dried osmanthus flowers...

And so we have these Hazelnut pistachio strawberry osmanthus truffle bar things.

They are amazing. I don't really like chocolate, I just love how it looks. But in the process of 'squaring' the bars, I've eaten more chocolate than I have in the past 6 months, lol!

Best of all, they're super easy to make (well the base is), and you can throw as many 'pretties' as you like in / on top.

Ingredients
200ml sweetened condensed milk (aka 2 parts)
200g good 70% cocoa dark chocolate (aka 2 parts) (broken into squares it comes in. I'm too lazy to do more than that.)
25g~ honey
25g~ butter (salted, unsalted, doesn't matter. I used salted cause lazy.)
some vanilla essence
some hazelnut essence
some freeze-dried strawberries (chopped)
some osmanthus flowers
some pistachios (whole)

Crafting
1) Dump chocolate, honey, butter in a bowl.
2) Shove bowl in microwave, melt until melted. Until the chocolate and stuff is melted. Not the bowl. If the bowl has melted, you've gone too far. Safest to stop when there are a few lumps of chocolate left, and finish it by stirring it all into a homogenous gloop.
3) Throw in essences, stir stir stir till incorporated.
4) Plop in condensed milk, stir stir stir till incorporated.
5) Mix in pistachios .
6) Pour into some kind of (parchment-paper-lined) pan, make pathetic attempt at forming some sort of 'slab'.
7) Decorate with freeze-dried strawberry pieces and osmanthus flowers in a suitably 'artisanal' fashion.
8) Tos...put gently in fridge (no need to cover unless your fridge has stinky things).
9) Ignore for at least 4 hours.
10) Remoof from fridge, cut into squares.
11) Eat all the leavings that are ~_o 'unfit for presentation'.

Notes
If you want to mess with the ratio of condensed milk to chocolate, more milk will give you softer trufflepieces, more chocolate will give you harder ones (duh right). This ratio gives you pretty much perfect 'fancy truffle' texture. Not too squishy, not too hard, just right.