Fruit lasagna: episode 3

17/03/2011: We've entered the third phase of our experiment today and thankfully, we finally have some positive results which we can cheer to.

Task implementation
Before the task
Today we've decided to do things differently from the weeks before. We're replacing the apples, bananas and avocadoes with pineapples and mangoes. And for the underliner, we've decided to use sweet dough pastry.

Ingredients:
Filling:
Pineapple slices 1bowl, diced
Mango 2, diced
Brown sugar, to taste

Custard cream:
Custard powder 1/2cup
Milk 1/2cup x 7
Sugar 1/2cup

Sweet dough pastry:
All purpose flour 250g
Icing sugar 75g
Butter 110g
Egg 1
Salt 5g

Other
Popiah skin, as much as needed

During the task

1. First things first, we made the sweet dough pastry by sifting the flour and sugar into a bowl and then mix thoroughly, by hand, with the butter until the mixture becomes fine crumbles. After that, add the egg and salt and mix until the dough does not stick to the bowl

2. Cover the dough with a wet, clean towel and let it rest for 30 minutes

3. The pineapple and mango dices are cooked with brown sugar until golden brown

4. Make the custard using the same ratio and method as the previous two experiments

5. Boil the popiah skins and put them in a container for later use

6. After the dough is done resting, flatten it on a smooth, clean surface and use the baking tins that are supposed to be used for baking to measure how much dough is needed for one tin



7. Cover the surface of the baking tin with a thin layer of butter and then place the dough on the tin

8. Blind-bake the dough in an oven set at 150 degrees celcius top and 170 degrees celcius bottom until brown before we put in the filling

9. Mix some of the pineapple with some of the mango and some custard cream together and then use the mixture for the bottom layer

10. Add the popiah skin on top of the bottom layer as the underliner for the second layer and then add the second layer (the same fruit and custard mixture as the bottom layer)

11. After that, either refridgerate the whole thing until the custard coagulates or cover the top with some more sweet dough pastry and then bake it in the oven to cook it a little more (we did both)

After the task

As it turns out, the sweet dough pastry and the new fruits was the right way to go. The sweetness of the filling and the taste of the crusty dough really complemented each other well.

As for the popiah skin, since popiah skin is naturally flavourless, it was not detriminal at all to the lasagna and quite plausible to be used as an underliner for the second layer

Texturewise, the hot lasagna still couldn't hold much of it's shape on a spoon, but nether can "Secret Recipe's" lasagna. However, the cold lasagna can hold most of it's shape

Recommendation:

1. Popiah skin was great but try to find a way to make the popiah skin hold it's shape for use so that we won't have to paste huge chunks between the layers like this one

Conclusion

Thank God that we finally found a correct combination of ingredients. We've had drawbacks before but this time, we've finally got it. We just hope that in the future, we'll find another ingredient combo that is as tasty as this one.