Tarte Tatin! (Say it 3x fast)

So I just found out that 7 Canadians and 4 people from the UK read the blog. For serious? REVEAL YOURSELVES! Just kidding. But if you want to leave me a comment, I'll be your friend. I don't know any Canadians. Also, if you work with me and are a new reader due to the weekly newsletter, WELCOME TO THE BLOG. Just in case you didn't hear me talk about myself enough all day, now you can read me talking about myself on top of that. Heh. Heh. Heh.

Today I was really impressed with myself because I discovered that I can carry 8 rolling pins at once. Six hours later, I am no longer impressed with myself because I can’t lift my arms above my head.

I got to class at 6:30 today to get a jump start on rolling out puff pastry dough. We did a lot of prep work today (making pastry cream, almond cream, more dough, etc) but the big to-do was making tarte tatins.

Funny story about tarte tatin: many years ago, I decided to make a tarte tatin on a whim. Since we serve them in the dining room, the tarts we made are miniature, but traditionally, this dessert is made in a skillet. You make a caramel sauce on said skillet, beautifully arrange apples in the caramel, cover the apples with puff pastry, and then stick the whole shebang in the oven. When the pastry puffs, you invert the tarte onto a serving dish and – voila! Beautiful tarte tatin.

The tricky part is that when my brain sees a skillet, I grab the handle. My brain doesn’t think, “Oh hey, Alice… that skillet is in a 400 degree oven. Maybe you should grab a potholder”. Ok, so maybe it’s not a funny story… it’s a sad, slightly boring story. I burned my whole dang hand off grabbing a baking dish straight out of the oven.

Tarte tatin and I, as you can see, have a troubled past. The miniature ones turned out pretty well, though, and all of my digits remain in tact. I prefer cute little sliced apples as opposed to the big gelatinous apple blob, but I guess that's a casualty of following directions. At least they tasted delicious and looked nice in the dining room.

Also, here’s an extreme close up of one of my palmiers so that you can see the millions of layers of dough. Remember that this started with butter, water, flour, etc – so it’s pretty cool to see how my rolling pin frenzy paid off.

Until next time...