Shelley-belly’s Underground is very excited to be catering the wedding rehearsal of a couple that attended one of our very first underground dinners and we’ve spent the past few weeks playing with old recipes and inventing new ones to make their night extra special.

So this post is not going to be about their dinner, that menu has to stay secret for a another week or so, this post is about the dish that got the chop. It was my favorite of our discarded ideas – it was too gluteny for a dinner that [unexpectedly] has to be gluten-free.

A pithivier, really just a fancy word for “pie” (and also a town in France), is, traditionally, a sweet pastry filled with frangipane and fruit. I filled mine with braised duck and the last of the summer’s cherries and served them with charred carrots and a duck and cherry jus.

I won’t bore you with the recipe, let’s face it, we’re all mostly interested in pictures anyway, but if you’d like the recipe please email me and I’ll be happy to give it to you.

Once again, I got so involved in the making-of that I forgot to take photos so you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that making the Pithiviers was time consuming and lots of fun.. if, like me, playing with pastry and filling is your idea of fun.