Apricot Kernals

My fascination with apricot kernals started last summer -- The Other had brought me back a copy of Regan Daley's cookbook In the Sweet Kitchen: the Definitive Guide to the Baker's Pantry on a business trip back to Canada.

Now, I'll confess that since living in France, I do much less baking. For one thing, I have fewer people to bake for. As well, there are such an amazing array of delectible treats at local patisseries, which haunt virtually every corner (much in the way a doughnut shop haunts corners back in Canada....ahem...)

And even at the supermarket, you can get high-quality baked goods made with real ingredients (butter, eggs), so there really is little incentive to bake.

Though, the availability of already prepared pastry in the supermarket has pushed me into making tartes both sweet and savoury. I will miss these terribly when we move back to Canada...

Neverthless, every once in a while one has a craving for culturally instilled baked goods. Cookies, brownies, muffins, and suchlike.

Now, combine this with a respect for seasonal and locally-produced materials (something I'd lost living in North America, something I found difficult to cope with when I first moved here, but something I now have great respect for). I can't help wanting to take advantage of things. I eat them fresh, I love to cook with them.

One of the great things about Daley's book is that slightly more than half of the book (tome, really, it weighs in at almost 700 pages) is devoted to the ingredients used in baking. There are descriptions of everything -- creams, flours, sugars, fats, eggs, leavenings, flavourings -- not to mention the pages devoted to baker's tools themselves.

Add to that the recipes themselves -- Daley is a prominent Canadian pastry chef, who worked most notably at Avalon, and the book was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Book Award, and won the International Culinary Professionals Best Cookbook of the Year award. The range from the simple to the sublime, and when I learned I would be moving back to Canada, I was at least comforted by the fact that although I wouldn't have ready access to crème fraîche, I'd be able to make it myself, thanks to Daley's book.

So there I was, one day last year during apricot season, reading Daley's chapter on Stone Fruit, in which she wrote:

Apricot pits are the small, almond-like centres of apricot stones. Rarely if ever called for in North American recipes, they are a wonderful source of flavour. In fact, Amaretto, the famous almond liqueur, is made from a combination of bitter almonds and apricot pits. Save the stones during apricot season and experiment a little. Finely grated, the pits add a delicious accent to desserts such as cakes, frangipane fillings for tarts and other pastries and muffins. They have a delicate, slightly floral Amaretto-like flavour, which complements apricot, peach, almond and citrus flavours beautifully, and they can be used anywhere ground almonds are combined with fruit. Use a hammer or cleaver to carefully crack open the stones. Grate the pits on the finest side of a box grater and use one or two for a standard frangipane or cake recipe.

Thus, the seed was planted. Though I have to say, don't try the hammer or cleaver idea, I did that, and didn't find it all that efficient. I'll explain later the alternative I found.

To read more:

Daley, Regan. In the Sweet Kitchen: the Definitive Guide to the Baker's Pantry. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2000.