The ultimate comfort food

Baked custard might be an old-fashioned dessert but it is a dish that deserves to be made more often. It is the ultimate comfort food: its silky-smooth texture makes it deceptively easy to eat half of the dish before you realise how much you've eaten, but it also has an easy elegance to it that is more than the sum of its simple parts of cream, milk, eggs and sugar.

Thankfully, Donna Hay has resurrected this lovely dessert in the latest issue of her magazine. There's a step-by-step guide to making basic baked custard, plus twists to the base recipe using spices, chocolate, rice and brioche for a modern take.

I had forgotten how much I loved this dessert until I made it recently. Surprisingly, my toddler was not overly enthused by the custard, but Adam and I quickly polished off the dish before we realised how quickly we'd eaten it! Not to worry - this is a dish that doesn't keep and tastes best warm from the oven. Its comforting texture will enfold you like a cosy doona and it is a dessert to enjoy on cold nights.


Baked custard
From Donna Hay Magazine, issue 50

500ml single (pouring) cream
250ml milk
1 vanilla bean, split and seeds scraped, or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs and 3 egg yolks, extra
110g caster (superfine) sugar

Preheat oven to 150 degrees Celsius (300 degrees Fahrenheit). Place the cream, milk, vanilla bean and seeds in a saucepan over high heat until the mixture just comes to the boil. Remove from heat and set aside.

Place the eggs, extra yolks and sugar in a bowl and whisk until well combined. Gradually add the hot cream mixture to the egg mixture, whisking well to combine.

Strain custard into a 1.5 litre capacity (6 cups) ovenproof dish.

Place dish in a water bath* and bake for 1 hour 25 minutes or until just set.

Remove from the water bath and allow to stand for 15 minutes before serving. Serves 4-6.


* To make a water bath, place the custard dish into a deep-sided baking dish and pour in enough boiling water to come halfway up the sides of the custard dish.

Hot pies

Subscribing to food magazines makes me realise how quickly the months slip away. I feel like I've just opened an issue and a new one is already on the doorstep. Donna Hay Magazine's 50th birthday issue has just arrived, and it has a magnificent chocolate layer cake on the front cover that is begging to be made.

I haven't missed an issue of Donna Hay Magazine since I first subscribed to it and I find inspiration in every issue. To make sure I get the most out of my food magazines, I file them according to season (so I put all the autumn issues together). Each year, when the season changes, I take out that season's past issues and flick through them to see what I've made in the past that I enjoyed, or to get some new recipes to try.

Tonight's dinner came from my random flickings. I rediscovered this easy but tasty pie dish that I had first made in 2008 and marked as "definitely make again". It is such an easy dish to make but it is very impressive, whether you serve it as a weeknight dish for the family or dress it up for dinner with friends. The Dijon mustard is the hidden secret here, adding piquancy to the pie filling. I made two large pies, as specified by the recipe, some smaller pies for the children, and had some filling left over that I piled into ramekins and topped with leftover pastry scraps to make a lid. The pies are easy to reheat as leftovers.

Easy chicken, leek and mushroom pie

From Donna Hay Magazine, issue 38 (April/May 2008)

1 Tb olive oil

50g butter

1 leek, sliced

200g button mushrooms, chopped

2 x 200g chicken breast fillets, trimmed and chopped

sea salt and cracked black pepper

2 tsp Dijon mustard

6 sheets store-bought butter puff pastry

1 egg, lightly beaten

Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Heat the oil in a non-stick frying pan over high heat, add the butter, leek and mushrooms and cook for 5 minutes. Add the chicken and cook for 2-3 minutes until sealed and lightly browned. Add salt, pepper and mustard and mix to combine.

Cut 4 x 14cm rounds from 2 sheets of pastry and 4 x 16cm rounds from remaining sheets. Place 14cm rounds on baking trays lined with baking paper, top with chicken mixture and brush edges with egg. Top with remaining pastry, press edges to seal and brush with egg. Bake for 20 minutes or until golden. Serve with steamed green beans or a simple salad.

Review: Donna Hay chocolate cookies

Packet mixes of cakes and biscuits are not often a feature in my trolley. I prefer home-made treats where possible, mostly for taste reasons but also because I know exactly what's going into the final product and there's no hidden preservatives or chemicals.

But I admit to a twinge of curiosity when Donna Hay recently launched her own brand of cupcake and cookie mixes. I'm a huge Donna fan and have all her cookbooks. I couldn't imagine her putting her name and brand to any product that wasn't of the highest quality.

Last week, when visiting Andrew's Choice in Yarraville, which is so much more than a butcher's shop and stocks a great range of deli items, my son Daniel found a box of Donna Hay chocolate chunk cookie mix, conveniently placed at exactly his eye level. He was entranced by the enticing picture on the front of the box and no doubt thought he could open the box and find the biscuits inside, waiting to be devoured by a hungry toddler.

So, in the interests of research, the cookie mix came home with us and we baked the biscuits. Making biscuits is not a hugely time-consuming exercise at the best of times, but mixing up the biscuits was so fast that the 12-minute cooking time felt like an eternity. We provided 80g of soft butter and a melted egg, and the box provided the cookie mix and a generous bag of dark chocolate buttons.

The raw dough tasted as good as anything else I've made and the final product was delicious - one of the best chocolate chip cookies I've eaten. In fact, it tasted exactly like the Donna Hay chocolate cookies that I make from her cookbooks. Checking the ingredients list, I discovered that the mix contains wheat flour, brown sugar, natural vanilla flavour and raising agents 450 and 500. There are no added artificial colours or preservatives.

The verdict? This product gets a huge thumbs-up. Most people would not be able to pick that the biscuits originate from a box and it certainly does save time in the kitchen. The only slight downside is the price: on the Donna Hay website, they are listed at $14.95 (although currently on special at a more reasonable $8.95). I know choc bits and other baking goods have recently increased in price but $15 seems quite steep for a box of biscuits - I don't think it would cost that much to make a batch from scratch.


But that is a minor quibble - chocolate chip cookies are a treat, rather than an everyday indulgence anyway. As Donna says on the box, these biscuits is "as good as baking from scratch, only foolproof." I'll definitely use this product again.