TWD: Parisian Apple Tartlet

Jessica of My Baking Heart chose Parisian Apple Tartlets for this week's Tuesdays with Dorie. When I first saw that a tart(let) was on the menu this month, I assumed I'd be hauling out the food processor, examining for clumps and curds, and panicking about over processing tart dough. So I was happily surprised when I read the recipe and realized that this one is by far the simplest TWD recipe yet. It doesn't get "made" so much as assembled.


That's right, from top to bottom we have (1) frozen puff pastry, (2) apple half (mine might actually be an apple quarter; I lost track), (3) brown sugar, and (4) butter. Bake it until it's puffy and browned. Eat it.

Dorie discusses frozen puff pastry in her book, and strongly encourages bakers to forgo the more readily available Pepperidge Farm frozen puff pastry in favor of all-butter frozen puff pastry available at specialty stores. Dorie recommends a version by Dufour Pastry, which she says is so good that she stopped making puff pastry at home.

Let me list a few items that I have not been able to find in my local specialty store (Whole Foods) in the past few months: green lentils, lemon marmalade, fleur de sel, 00 flour, thyme, high gluten flour, amaretto cookies, and fresh yeast. But lo!


I rubbed my eyes to make sure that I wasn't hallucinating, that I wouldn't next wander over to aisle six and see flying pink elephants. Was it even possible that I was looking at not only all-butter frozen puff pastry, but the very brand of all-butter frozen puff pastry that caused Dorie stop making puff pastry at home? The winner of the International Fancy Food Show?


I was on such a high from my unexpected find that I barely flinched at the $11.99 price tag for my one sheet of puff pastry, and whistled and clicked my heels all the way to the checkout line.


Dorie says that peaches, plums, pears and apricots all work well in this, but I just don't think you can beat an apple tart. So I baked one apple tartlet for David and served it with ice cream. I traced my 4" circle for the tartlet (my sifter was the perfect size), and sprinkled sugar and cinnamon on the scraps (for me).

David really enjoyed the tartlet. I swear that he said something really clever when evaluating the tartlet last night (besides "this is really good!"), but I can't for the life of me remember what it was, and neither can he (I just asked him). The scraps were so amazing that I almost cried. That Dufour puff pastry really is as fabulous as Dorie says it is; I totally understand why it won the International Fancy Food Show. It's so good, in fact, that I am going to stop making my own puff pastry at home, just like Dorie. It's a splurge, so I'm sure I'll continue to rely on Pepperidge Farm for my day-to-day puff pastry needs, but for special occasions, I'm breaking out the Dufour.

The Parisian Apple Tartlet simply cannot be beat when you need a simple and delicious dessert quickly. I'll make this one again and again. Thanks for the great pick, Jessica!

[EDITED 6/9 9:15 a.m.]: David must have read my post this morning, because he left me the following message on Facebook: "Had I known the damage one sheet of that magical puff pastry would do, I'm sure I would have had something very clever to say about it. Sorry, did I say "clever?" I meant "profane," something very profane." D'oh!

TWD: Tartest Lemon Tart

Today's TWD recipe was chosen by Babette of Babette Feasts. Last week was crazy around here (thank you for your nice comments on my last post, BTW), and we were lucky enough to have some amazing family and friends who helped us through the craziness by watching our kids, chauffeuring our kids, and completely stocking our fridge with food. Thanks to their kindness and generosity, I have not cooked or baked a thing in over a week, except for anadama bread (which I know sounds weird unless you are a baker, then it sounds perfectly normal.) It will probably be another week before I am back in full cooking/baking/blogging mode (but boy, there is no slowing me down on Twitter!), but I made this lemon tart before things got really nuts, so I figure I might as well post it.


Sometimes I feel like I get good end results with things, but my process is really, really painful to watch. For example, back in law school my friend Cara and I returned to school in late August one year and decided on a whim to sign up for the Richmond Marathon in mid-October. We were both casual, 3 miles-four-or-five times a week kind of runners at the time. But we started adding mileage during the week and doing a long run on weekends. On a typical Friday during training we might run 18 miles, come back, order a meat lover's pizza with a side of cheesy bread, pour some wine, and then clean up to go out and live unhealthily for the next 6 hours. We finished the marathon, which I completely attribute to the power of youth -- if I tried such a thing now I would suffer the same fate as Pheidippides, but well before the 26.2 mile mark. But at the time, my then-boyfriend, now-husband David kind of shook his head and said that after watching our training regimen he could no longer feel the same kind of reverence that he once did for the accomplishment of completing a marathon. I know that I would have done my fellow marathon completers a favor by just surprising David at the finish line without making him watch such an ugly 6-week training process.

Well, now that I am baking, I can't even tell you how many times I've wished that David did not have to see what went on in the kitchen en route to (mostly) great end results. Sometimes it would be nice to just be able to pull a fine dessert out of thin air for my sweet hubs to enjoy without him having to witness the spills and explosions, the profanity, the injuries, the verbalized self-doubt, and the equipment malfunction that invariably accompany my baking.


This lemon tart is a prime example. The tart calls for Dorie's sweet tart dough with nuts. That came together fine, but then I had to prebake it, which seemed easy enough in theory. But it seemed completely raw on the bottom after the prebake time elapsed. I tried to talk it out: "this looks raw. Is this supposed to look like this? David, does this look VERY underdone to you? Well, I guess the edges are kind of baked. Didn't I do this before? I don't remember it looking this underbaked last time. Or was that the pie crust? Should I just stick it back in the oven?"

I finally decided to just prepare the filling, proceed with the recipe, and hope that the crust would bake up properly in the end. The filling was fun and easy to prepare - it contains whole lemons! I understand that there was a lot of concern on the P&Q about the piths making the tart bitter, but for me the ease of throwing a couple of lemons in the food processor without peeling, zesting, or squeezing was just too irresistible, and I never considered doing anything else.

Once the lemon filling was done, I filled the tart and stuck it in the oven, where it was in grave danger of overflowing. Then it baked, and baked, and baked, but the filling didn't seem like it was setting up properly. More chatter to poor David: "This is so not setting. But it is really getting brown on top. Ugh! Do you think our oven temperature is off? I really don't think this oven has been heating right ever since David Beckham* (*our handyman, not real Becks, unfortch) broke that center glass panel when he came to take it apart after the shrimp incident. We really need to get him over here to get that replacement panel put in. Gosh, that is jiggly. I did call him, but you know it will be hell to get him out here if all we have for him to do is the glass panel. Don't we have something else that is broken around here? Do you think this will set up more in the fridge? I don't want it to get burned on top! Wow, it really smells good. Okay stand back - I'm taking it out."


Well, sure enough, after all that angst, the tart did set up nicely once I took it out of the oven. We had some friends over to watch the Kentucky Derby, and I served the tart then. Everyone really seemed to enjoy it. I did not find it bitter at all, did not get any complaints about bitterness from my guests, and didn't sense that anyone was holding out on me. I thought it was very rich, tart and lemony. Extremely lemony -- in my opinion whipped cream is imperative to neutralize all that lemony goodness; I would not consider whipped cream to be optional here. The next day David's mom came into town; she really loved the tart as well.

David himself was a big fan of this tart. Would he have been an even bigger fan if I did not psychologically exhaust him while making it? Possibly. One of these days I will effortlessly churn out these desserts, I just know it! Until then, we'll consider the turmoil of the process a small price to pay for the ultimate prize of such a fine lemon tart.

Thanks for the great pick, Babette!

TWD: Grand Chocolateapalooza Finale - Chocolate Cream Tart

April has been quite a chocolatastic month for TWD. Sure, we started out the month exploring the coconutty, lime-y and banana-y end of the dessert spectrum, but by mid-month we were solidly into chocolate, and we haven't looked back. As the only reliable chocolate eater in my house (my kids would pick Skittles over chocolate - where did I go wrong?) I sort of found myself on my hands and knees last weekend, clawing and scratching my way to the chocolate finish line. But boy, am I ever glad I made it there, because this Chocolate Cream Tart is certainly the best chocolate dessert I've ever made, possibly one of the best I've ever eaten, and absolutely among the handful of the best desserts I've made since joining TWD.

The tart calls for Dorie's chocolate shortbread tart dough. This is a pretty simple dough -- mix up flour, cocoa powder, sugar and salt in the food processor, and then cut in some butter and an egg yolk and mix until "clumps and curds" form. I might as well just come out and say it: I've got pastry issues. I just can't stop mixing it. I want to stop, I know I should stop, but then there's my finger on the "pulse" button again. Dorie provides the best, clearest directions for pastry dough -- she even tells you that the mixer will start making different sounds when the dough is almost ready, and it really does -- so as long as you don't have pastry dough OCD like I do, you should have no trouble with this.

My slightly overmixed dough after being turned out onto work surface:


The other great thing about Dorie Greenspan recipes, thankfully, is that they are generally pretty forgiving. So you can overmix the crust a little bit, as I did, and it will still taste great. I could tell that mine didn't have that perfect shortbread consistency, but it was very good, and when it came together with the chocolate pastry cream and the whipped cream, it was downright incredible. A tad crumbly, though - I made four 4" mini tart crusts, and two of them kind of fell apart on me. But those pieces worked great in parfaits!

I thought the chocolate filling was the star of this show. Making it, of course, involves that whole custard making process, which for me is inherently stressful. Adding to the usual custard stress was the realization -- after I started boiling the milk and whisking together the yolks, sugar and cornstarch -- that I didn't have enough bittersweet chocolate -- whoops! At that point hubs was not home, and I had three sticky, sandy kids, so I did a quick analysis and decided that losing my pastry cream would suck less than taking my kids to the grocery store at that moment. Fortunately, the pastry cream was as forgiving as the crust, and graciously agreed to come together for me in fits and starts over a two hour period.


The night I made these tarts, David and I went out to dinner at one of the restaurants owned by one of our little town's favorite sons, James Beard Award-nominated (that's why he's a favorite son) Frank Stitt. David ordered dessert, but in an unprecedented move that is likely to never again be repeated, I did not. Because I knew that I had Dorie's chocolate cream tart waiting at home, and I was confident that it would rival anything that Frank could throw my way. When we got home, I prepared the tart for David's parents (our awesome babysitters - thank you!) and myself. And the three of us proceeded to be wowed by the tart as David looked on longingly. Okay, not really, he had just finished off a strawberry cheesecake twenty minutes earlier. But the tart eaters in the house really were wowed!

The three components of this dessert - the crust, the pastry cream, and the whipped cream topping, unite to create a spectacular dessert. Each part is good on its own, but it is not until the pieces come together that this tart becomes really special. What can I say, I'm kind of running out of English words/adjectives to describe the fabulousness of Dorie's desserts. As Jessica and I have discussed, pretty soon we are going to have to move into symbols, a la Prince, or interpretive dance. Suffice it to say that this tart is crazy good.

Kim from Scrumptious Photography chose this week's recipe. Kim has been one of my favorite bloggers from my early days in TWD. I swear I can just stare at her photographs all day long. In fact, come to think of it, some days I do. She is a supremely talented food stylist and photographer. Visit Kim's blog for the recipe, and for more eye candy (and eye cookies . . . eye brownies . . . eye pie . . . you get the idea.) Thank you for this incredible pick, Kim!

Barefoot: Tomato Goat Cheese Tart and Ellie: Chicken with Mango Barbecue Sauce

When you have a library full of cookbooks, as many of us do, it can be really hard to decide what to make. Many recipes look good, but are they really good? Internet recipe sites can be helpful for answering that question; many recipes are online and have been reviewed by numerous cooks. Reading food blogs, of course, is my favorite ways to get the real scoop on recipes -- food that is tested in advance by people I virtually know and really trust? You can't go wrong there. But if ever have to make a really important dinner or dessert, and I need it to be good, I might just ask myself "What would Anne Strawberry pick?" Or better yet, I'll just ask Anne herself! Because since I've been blogging, Anne has chosen at least three recipes that I can think of: Ina's Apple Turnovers, Dorie's Tall & Creamy Cheesecake, and now this week's Barefoot recipe, Tomato and Goat Cheese Tarts, that have made me want to head straight to the highest mountain I can find and give her a loud, echoing shout-out of gratitude.

This tart was simply delicious. Here is a large view of my tart, sideways:


Don't you feel like the sideways orientation really captures the essence of this savory tart? What's that you say? No, it just makes you kind of dizzy? Sorry about that. Last night Blogger started flipping my tart pictures, which had been oriented horizontally, and made them portrait. I tried to outsmart Blogger by going into my pictures and changing them to portrait, hoping that then Blogger would then flip them to landscape when I uploaded, but no, Blogger apparently likes them vertical. Here is the thing about me and technology: it is A MIRACLE that I figured out how to set up a blog by myself, and that I managed to figure out how to upload pictures, underline things, and other basic blogging tasks. My hubs still has to upload music onto my iPod for me. He tries to explain it to me, but I just hear "blah, blah, blah." NOT that he does not explain it in an interesting manner, but I just don't have the gene that makes things like that intuitive to me. So my point is, yes, I have mastered the technical basics of blogging, but it is still very precarious, because if Blogger doesn't want to work correctly for me, I'll never be able to figure out how to fix it. It will just have to fix itself, or I'll be posting sideways pictures forever. Sorry!



Well, back to the tart. It is fabulous. It is made on frozen puff pastry, and the pastry puffs up beautifully around the tomatoes, basil and goat cheese filling. This is super easy to make - saute onions, garlic, add white wine, thyme, salt and pepper. Roll out the puff pastry and trace two 6 inch circles on each sheet (I cut the recipe in half and just made one sheet). I just scrounged around until I found a plate that was about the right size -- no need to go out and buy a compass or anything. Score a half inch border, and fill inside of the border with the onion mixture, herbed goat cheese, and a slice of tomato. Brush the tomato lightly with olive oil and top with fresh basil, salt and pepper, and a few shards of fresh parmesan. Bake 20 to 25 minutes until the pastry is puffy and browned. I used a few plum tomato slices rather than one larger tomato slice because that's what I had, but the good thing about a recipe like this is that the tomato will get roasted, which brings out the flavor in even a sub par grocery store tomato. Of course, I can't wait for the farmer's market to open so that I can make this with really delicious tomatoes -- even better!

David and I really enjoyed this. I think I loved it more than he did, but his nature is more reserved in general than mine is, and he tends not to gush over things as effusively as I do when I love something. So maybe he did love it as much as I did, but just showed his love differently (i.e. D - "This is really good!" as opposed to C - "OH. MY. HOLY. LORD. (puts fork down dramatically) Can you even believe this tart? I can't even believe this tart. *sigh* I love Ina Garten. I love Anne Strawberry. This is the most amazing thing I've ever eaten. Ever! Do you hear me? Ever!"). In any event, this would be perfect for a special luncheon, or, in our case, a regular ol' dinner. Oh, and with the leftover pastry (there was a lot of it!) I sprinkled sugar and cinnamon, rolled up, sliced it into pinwheels, and baked. Great treat!

My great bloggy friend Aggie of Aggie's Kitchen chose the Ellie recipe this week, Chicken with Mango Barbecue Sauce. Blogger apparently thought that these worked just fine horizontally and kept them that way, even though I uploaded them at the same time as the tart pictures.


This is another really easy, gushworthy recipe. This barbecue sauce is FABULOUS!!! The roster of ingredients is long, but it comes together quickly: onion, garlic, red bell pepper, molasses, Worcestershire sauce, allspice, salt, pepper, red wine vinegar, lime juice, tomato sauce, jalapenos, and, of course, mango. Look at how colorful and pretty this is, pre-blending:



I just used my immersion blender (how did I ever live so long without one?) to mix it all up in the saucepan -- so much easier than transferring it to a separate blender! Mine had more of a salsa-like consistency, which I loved, but I could have pureed it longer to get more of a barbecue sauce consistency. What a combination of flavors!! It is sweet, tart, fruity and spicy all at the same time, and it totally WORKS. If I closed my eyes while eating this, I could almost imagine myself sitting on a balcony overlooking the beach -- it just tastes summery and delicious. I served the chicken with roasted vegetables and brown rice, and the next day turned the chicken, vegetables and a little mozzarella into quesadillas, with the sauce on the side. Equally delicious. This one will be a regular in our house. My whole family enjoyed this.

Thank you, Aggie and Anne. We thoroughly enjoyed both of these recipes, and I'll be making them again and again!

TWD: French Pear Tart

This is a very special week for Tuesdays with Dorie, as the great Dorie Greenspan herself has chosen this week's recipe for a French Pear Tart from her amazing cookbook, Baking: From My Home To Yours:


I've gotten endless pleasure baking from this fabulous book, but even with baking from it weekly over the past five months, I haven't even begun to make a dent in it. There are seemingly endless decadent desserts in here, so to have the chance to make THE ONE picked by Dorie is truly exciting.

I had some important preliminary decisions to make. The crust calls for a 9" tart pan with a removable bottom. I did not have, and could not get in time, a 9" tart pan with a removable bottom, so I had to choose from the following: (1) an 11" tart pan with a removable bottom; (2) a 4 inch mini tart pan with a removable bottom; or (3) a 9" pie dish with straight sides but no removable bottom. I knew that I wanted to make a mini for sure. But I felt that for my first go-round I should go with the pan that was closest in size to the one called for in the recipe, and decided to go with the 9 inch pie dish and serve it from the dish. This way, I'd have an idea about what this thing was supposed to look like before I started winging it with a mini. And seeing as only my hubs and I would be eating it, there wasn't really anyone to impress with my tart de-panning prowess (not that I don't care about impressing you, David). But if all worked out according to plan, I'd still get the full out-of-pan tart experience with my mini.

Next, I had to pick pears -- fresh or canned? Dorie's narrative introducing the recipe suggests that canned pears are not only acceptable for this tart, but the most common choice among Parisian pastry chefs. When one of the world's most renowned bakers tells me it's okay to use canned fruit, I'm going to use canned fruit. That, plus the fresh pears at Publix weren't looking so hot.

Who knew?



I then made a double recipe of the sweet tart dough(without nuts), with the intention of using half of the dough for my 9" tart/pie/thing, and the rest of it for the mini tarts. This is the second Dorie pastry dough I've made -- the first was the Good For Anything Pie Dough. Dorie has the most wonderful and foolproof pastry crust recipes around, hands down. Her instructions explain not only what the dough should look like at various stages, but also note things like how the food processor will start to make funny sounds when the dough is almost ready. As usual, I talked out loud to myself the entire time I was making this. I always assumed that David learned to tune me out years ago. Well, I got to the part where you process until the dough "forms clumps and curds," assessed my dough, and said "hmmmm. I guess I think those look like cumps and clurds." At which point David looked up from whatever game he was watching and said "Whoa, careful now! If you have cumps and clurds, you might end up with a torte instead of a tart." Yup, no doubt about it -- you're definitely the one for me, honey.

Sweet Tart Dough, full of cumps and clurds:




And pressed into the mini-tart pans:



I had lunch with Amanda on Monday, and she said that you know that someone really loves you if they make you a tart, because pressing the dough all the way up the sides and into all those nooks and crannies in the pan is no joke. We agreed that we might have devoted more time than we usually would to these particular tarts, however, trying to make them look pretty for Dorie. Just in case.

I made the almond cream two ways. For my 9" tart, I used Meyer's dark rum instead of vanilla, and unblanched almonds instead of blanched almonds, because blanching them was way more tedious than ehow led me to believe it would be. For my mini tart, I cut the recipe in half and used vanilla and blanched almonds (I found them already blanched at the store -- score one for the lazy chick!)

I made my 9" tart first. Assembling this thing kind of stumped me. There is not a picture of this tart accompanying the recipe in the cookbook, and the P&Q wasn't up yet, so I had a hard time understanding what I was supposed to do with the pears. The instruction reads: "Thinly slice each pear half crosswise. Lift each half on a spatula, press down on the pear to fan it slightly and place it over the almond cream, wide end towards the end of the crust. The 6 halves will form spokes." Now that I know what the tart is supposed to look like, those instructions are as clear as day, but at the time, I just couldn't quite visualize it. It was the same experience I have when I read about the current financial crisis being rooted in "credit default swaps on mortgage backed securities." Even though I read the words over and over again, I just don't quite get it.

And therefore, I did this with my pears:



I suspected that wasn't right because I only used up 3 pear halves rather than the 6 the recipe called for. When I checked the P&Q later, I followed a link to a picture of what the pears were supposed to look like, and I was able to do it the proper way the next day with my mini tart:



I've mentioned before that I've been warned by standardized testers that I should never, ever trust my own instincts regarding spatial relations. Here's why:



I initially eyeballed my mini tart and thought I could fit two pear halves side by side next to each other. No. Not by a long shot. I had to dig out that off-centered pear (which had been intended to be part of a pair of pears) and move it over a couple of inches to become the lone, centered pear.

When I waited tables after college, André, the head chef at the restaurant where I worked, would often stop me in the kitchen on a busy Saturday night and say: "I should have been a pastry chef, Cat. That's where all the glory is." I didn't understand what he meant at the time, because the blackened chicken sandwiches we were churning out seemed plenty glorious to me compared to what I had been getting in the school cafeteria. But now I get it. Glory will come to those who can make a French Pear Tart (I'm still waiting, but any day now, I just know it!) Needless to say, I was completely blown away by these tarts. I've made some amazing desserts with Tuesdays With Dorie, but this tart has now set the new standard against which all other TWD recipes will be measured.



I preferred my mini tart (with the vanilla in the almond cream) to the larger tart (with the rum in the almond cream), but that could have been because there was a much higher pear-per-bite ratio in my mini-tart because I assembled that one the right way, whereas I accidentally skimped on the pears in the big one. Therefore, I thought the dominant flavor in the 9" tart was rum, and if I've learned anything through TWD, it's that I don't like a strong liquor taste in my desserts. David loved them both. Oh, and I thought the sweet tart crust was absolutely phenomenal. If I couldn't have the pear tart, I'd be happy with a dessert of crust crusted crust. I'm thrilled that I still have three mini crusts in my freezer. Now that I have my first tart under my belt, I can't wait to fill the rest of them up! Thank you, Dorie, for your amazing cookbook, for your support of this group, and for choosing this fabulous French Pear Tart for us this week!