Last Sunday I decided to spend the day making a French pastry from my new recipe book I got for my birthday. I chose a recipe for citrons- a small boat shaped pastry made up of eight different components (you can probably see why I set a whole day aside to make them!).

The base of the pastry consists of a thin layer of short dough which is used to line the barquette moulds. A small amount of strawberry jam is piped into the forms, which is then topped with a frangipan filling. The pastries are baked in the oven until browned, and then left to cool- this was the easy part!

The next step was to make the buttercream topping- this involved making swiss meringue first, then beating in a mixture of butter and margarine to complete the icing. The buttercream was flavoured with lemon curd (which again, I made) and piped onto the pastries to make a triangular ridge.

The filled pastries were then cooled in the fridge until the buttercream had hardened, ready for the next step of applying the chocolate coating!

Working with chocolate can be quite tricky, and I can honestly say I'm not that good at coating things with chocolate, but I don't think my citrons look too bad! The final step was to apply a thin strip of marzipan on top of each pastry, and ice the word 'citron' across the top.

These took me about 5 hours to complete, but I certainly think they are worth the effort. The pastries were not that sweet, but quite rich and fairly substantial despite their small size!