Caramel Apple Tarte Tatin and Not Burning Things

Tarte Tatin is a butter-heavy, caramel-coated, sugar-drenched delicacy. Basically I thought my dad would love it and it would challenge me to make better pastry. I'd seen recipes that called for a simple pie crust for the dough and how could that possibly end up layered and flaky? 

So, yeah, it burned a little because I suck at multitasking. The recipe also called for too few apples and they kind of fell apart in the sauce, and I used some agave nectar, which I think burned faster.All in all, though, great success because I made the pastry using a mx of gluten-free flour and spelt (yes, I know spelt is not gluten-free, but I needed more flour and my options were wheat and less wheat - aka spelt).

The tart is traditionally cooked in an oven-safe skillet (cast-iron or stainless-steel) so that the caramel cooks on the stove and coats the apples before being covered in puff pastry and baked to a golden brown in the oven. You can also transfer the contents of the skillet to a 9-inch round baking dish for the final step, and you can use frozen puff pastry if you prefer not to make your own, but the home-made, slightly time-consuming pastry will be so much better.

Tarte Tatin
Oh, and even though I over-cooked my caramel a little, it was still delicious...

Crust
3/4 cup cold butter, divided (or Earth Balance. Add a pinch of salt if you use unsalted butter)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 1/2 cup cake and pastry flour, or all-purpose (you can also use a gluten-free flour blend, but it won't be as light and flaky as the cake flour or even the all-purpose. It will still be delicious, and I haven't found gluten-free puff pastry yet)
5-6 tablespoons ice water

Filling
5 medium apples (Gala, Golden Delicious, or other firm baking apples)
½ cup butter (or earth balance)
1 cup sugar (you can also use agave nectar, or a mix of agave and sugar, but it will cook faster and burn more easily)

Crust:
The trick to puff pastry is to keep everything ice-cold says Irma: your hands, the bowl, and the rolling pin. If using frozen puff pastry, thaw a piece and roll it out to a circle larger than the diameter of your oven-proof skillet or baking dish. Place the dough on a baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until needed.

1. Sift the flour. Wash the cold butter under cold running water (skip this is you use earth balance. It should become soft but stay ice cold. Massage it in your hand until it's creamy and waxy. Knead it briefly with cold hands until no water flies off it. Place a quarter of the butter in a cold bowl and shape the rest into a flat square and place in the refrigerator (with earth balance just measure the butter and add 2 1/2 tablespoons to the bowl and put the rest in the fridge).
2. Add the flour, sugar, and salt to the butter in the bowl. Cut in using two knives or your fingers until the pastry looks like small peas. Add 5 tbsp of the ice water and combine. Add the remaining 1 tbsp water if the pastry is dry or a pinch of flour if it sticks to the bowl.
3. Refrigerate 15 minutes and start chopping the apples (see below). Roll the pastry out to a square shape on a clean, floured counter, rolling out from the centre only, not back and forth. Put the refrigerated butter in the centre of the dough and fold the four corners to the centre to cover. Refrigerate 10 minutes and start making the caramel (see below).
4. Roll out the dough again into a square and fold the corners to the centre as before. Chill again. You can repeat this process up to 4 times if you have the time, but if not, work quickly and fold 3 more times immediately. Roll the pastry out to a circle slightly larger than the diameter of your oven-proof skillet or baking dish. Place on a baking sheet, cover with plastic wrap, and refrigerate until needed.
5. Remind yourself that home-made pastry is better than frozen and this will all be worthwhile.

Caramel Apple Filling:
6. Peel, core, and quarter the apples. Cut the tips off the apples so that they will fit more snuggly against the side of the skillet. The apples will discolour a little but it doesn't matter. You can sprinkle them with lemon juice if you really want to.
7. Melt the butter over low heat in a large skillet. Remove from heat, add the sugar, and stir until blended. Arrange the apples on their sides in the pan so that the front of each piece touches the back of the next. Continue the fan pattern, starting from the outside of the skillet and working your way in. Fill in the gaps with the removed apple tips. If you are transferring the apples later to a baking dish, it's not necessary to do this beautifully.
8. Return your pan to the stovetop on high heat. Boil 10 to 12 minutes, or until the pan juices are lightly golden but not dark or burnt.
9. Preheat oven to 375° F.
10. Remove the skillet from heat. Being careful not to burn yourself, turn the apple slices over with the tip of a sharp knife, keeping them in their original places.
11. Cook 5 more minutes, then remove from heat. If not baking directly in the skillet, transfer the apple slices to the buttered baking dish. (Now you may want to be artistic with the fan shape of the slices.)
12. Place the pastry on top of the apples and brush off excess flour. Fold the edges toward the centre of the skillet or baking dish. The folds don't have to be pretty. Bake in oven until the top of the crust is golden-brown in color, about 25-35 minutes. Remove and let cool 25 minutes.

13. Place a plate or other serving dish on top of the pan and quickly flip tart over onto the plate. Check to make sure the apples aren't sticking to the bottom of the dish before removing it completely. Slice and serve with ice cream, and pat yourself on the back.

Home-Made Caramel Frosting

I gave you the cake, now you get the icing. Kind of how at a Christmas party yesterday there was this 17 month old girl who was given half a raspberry square by her mother. The mother placed the child's half on a napkin in front of her and placed the other half on another napkin in front of her other, 3-ish year old daughter. What does the younger girl do? She reaches out and takes a bite from the raspberry square in front of her.

...Then she puts it down.

Okay, so she doesn't want it? Nope, that's not it. She turns to her left and picks up her sisters' square, and takes a bite.

...Then she puts it down. Apparently it wasn't any better than her own square.

So she goes back to her own square and tries another bite. And she puts it down again. She can't seem to make up her mind. So then she picks up a coaster and offers it to my mother. My mother, polite woman that she is, exclaims, "THANK you!". So she gets given another coaster...and another...This child...

So the child wanted both cookies, but she shouldn't really be having both. that's not fair. But YOU! You can have the yellow cake and now you can have the caramel icing too! I would say you can have your cake and eat it too, but that's just not true. Even the kid wouldn't have had any more raspberry squares if she'd eaten both of them. But she's really a kind soul, giving coasters, so her greed isn't going to be her defining personality trait. There's hope.

So, caramel...

I've always been scared of the elusive "soft-ball stage". It's up there with "stiff peaks" in my nightmares of sketchy baking techniques. But it all worked out perfectly. Seriously, perfectly, and I even cheated as follows:

Original recipe:
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup milk or cream
1 1/2 tsp butter
1/2 tsp vanilla

My Recipe:
1/2 cup xylitol (sugar replacer. NOT aspartame, but no crazy blood sugar spikes)
1/2 cup dark agave nectar (it was raw, but I killed it with the cooking)
1/2 cup almond milk
1 1/2 tsp butter
1/2 tsp almond extract (I ran out of vanilla, and I'd already put almond in the cake. You can use 1/4 tsp of both if you like)

Same recipe for both. It worked just fine. You do need a candy thermometre that works, though. "Works" being the key. Ideally one that's either instant read or can latch on to the side of the saucepan.

Instructions:
1. In a saucepan dissolve the sugar and milk
2. Bring the pan to a boil and boil without sitrring until the elusive soft-ball stage. What this means is get it to EXACTLY 238 degrees Fahrenheit on your candy thermometre. It'll take about 15 minutes with agave nectar, I think? I don't quite remember, but it took awhile. It would probably take less with sugar since there's less liquid involved. You probably also need to be careful the pan doesn't boil over, but don't stir it, just lift it from the burner to lower the boiling level.
3. Quickly add the butter and remove the icing from the heat.
4. Stick a hand-mixer right into the icing and beat it until it's thick (about 5 minutes or more!) Patience is a virtue, I hear. Come on, you just whisked an egg white for an age, so this is relatively easy. Maybe grab a book or turn on the radio or something. You know, learn something.
5. If the icing gets TOO thick you can add a little more milk or cream or almond milk to thin it, but that probably won't happen if you used agave nectar.

Spread the icing on the cake right away. The icing should be cool, so it shouldn't drip, and if you actually got it 238 degrees it'll be thick enough. If you didn't get it to that temperature it needs to go back on the heat and all your beating wasn't worth it. If it's not cool yet, though, it may just not have thickened enough, so keep beating it until it's actually cool.

Oh, I suppose you could drizzle like I did, because this icing is pretty intensely sweet. You really don't need a lot to pack a punch. You can also just eat this with a spoon...a quarter teaspoon. Dairy-free caramel.

Thank you, Irma. You're the best.

"Yes B'y, Mudder Cake" With Home-Made Caramel Frosting

I'm very much home. The words running through my head have turned to Newfanese.

I'll be honest, I made this cake in Montreal about a week before leaving, but I can't write about it now like a Montrealer. I'm half a country away and so I'm going to write about it in the words that are running through my head. I don't remember why I thought the words "Yes b'y, mudder," yesterday, but it seems that my mom did something shockin, and as my vowels got smaller in the front and rounder in the back and my skin got sticky from the island's damp air, those are the words I thought.

I made the cake on a whim one night after a decent dinner of leftovers and a disappointing red wine. A bit depressed at the thought of starting my evening in front of my computer, I procrastinated by making cake. If Irma Rombauer had been a Newfoundlander...well, much of her cookbook would be the same, except she'd be a little less self-confident, there would be a lot more recipes for salt fish and beef, more whipped cream pudding cakes with tinned pineapple (there are already a lot, including pineapple snow - a moulded cake with heavy cream, not whipped cream, thank god), and a whole lot fewer recipes for un-Newfoundlander-esque things like oysters, persimmons, peaches (except the tinned kind), and such foreign sounding things as tamale pie and antipasto. Honest to god I laughed a right sad laugh when I saw the persimmons at the grocery store here yesterday. they were hardly orange, more old and brown and sick-looking. If they were a dog, I would have put it down. Who would buy those poor persimmons, I haven't the foggiest.

All I have to say, though, is Jesus, Irma, your caramel sauce is some good.

Narn bit of corn syrup involved. And the cake was about the best cake I'd eaten in ages. I couldn't stop. There were no spices in it, and besides using a gluten-free flour blend instead of all-purpose, using half sugar and half agave nectar (which I thought would dry it out but it didn't) I didn't change a darn thing in the recipe.

All her sifting! I sifted until I was all sifted out: 1/4 cup sugar and 1/4 cup agave nectar

Cream: 2 tbsp butter (that's it! Just 2. You could almost eat the whole cake it's so light...until you get to the next 2 ingredients) then add the sugar/agave mixture and mix for ages (about 2 minutes. You can't even drink caffeine in Newfoundland that quickly. The city doesn't believe in espresso). Beat in 1 egg yolk (at room temperature, of course).

Sift!!! Tree times (not a typo) 3/4 cup plus 2 tbsp bread flour (my gluten-free blend) or 2 cups cake flour. Don't add it to the egg mixture.

Sift!!! Just once more with1 1/2 tsp baking powder and 1/4 tsp salt. That's a ton of salt. Not to a Newfoundlander who may have grown up on saltfish and saltbeef and saltpork, and Jesus, anything else you can salt, but in this cake it's a lot of salt. A delicious, perfect lot of salt. Do it.

Measure out 1/2 plus 2 tbsp milk. Add 1/3 of the flour mixture to the butter mixture, beat, then add 1/3 of the milk, beat, then half the remaining flour, beat, then half the milk, beat, then the remaining flour, beat, then the last of the milk. Only beat a fe seconds after each addition, says Irma. I agree, of course.

Then beat in 1/2 tsp almond extract or amaretto. The amaretto is my idea because a lot of people don't have almond extract (It's not as if there's tons of amaretto kicking around the average kitchen either, though, especially in Newfoundland, but there is a LOT of rum, and that's fine too. At the liquor store yesterday there were more rums than Canadian wines. A Newfoundlander wouldn't know a Canadian wine if it came out and sang the National Anthem. I had to laugh when I saw a shelf called "Local Wine" and there was Newfoundland blueberry wine sitting next to Pinnacle iced wine. "Local"...).

Now the fun part. I was NOT about to wash my beaters to whip up one little egg white. You've got to make sure you dry the beaters really well, because water and inhibit the riding of the white. So I decided to whisk it. People had been doing it forever, surely I could too. So I started and it was slow going. I switched hands and ways of holding the whisk about 10 times in the 5 or so minutes it actually took me to whisk the white. That's ridiculous. I tried to go quickly but I apparently am as bad at whisking as at kneading, but I can't blame my cold hands on this one.

I decided that the directions to whip until "stiff but not dry" were going to have to deal with me being exhausted of whipping. So I quit and hoped it was enough. It stayed in place when I removed the whisk, so that was a good sign, I figured. the nice thing about not using a handheld beater was the air stayed in the white better. It didn't collapse. My energy had made it stronger than electricity, I told myself. Maybe Irma's hubris is rubbing off on me? Nope, I'm still a right useless whisker.

Fold the white gently into the rest of the batter. This is where hand-whisking is great because I wasn't so worried about wrecking my cake through collapsing egg whites.

I greased the 8" cake pan liked I'd never greased before (I had to use aluminum because the bottom of my cake pan is trashed). I think I used a good 1 1/2 tbsp of butter because the rest of the cake had so little. Poured in the batter. 350 Fahrenheit for 25 minutes. Done. Beautiful. Some good, wha?


Caramel while that was going on...

Caramel Rum Oranges

I love a dessert with 3 ingredients. I also love a fruit dessert that doesn't taste like a sacrifice. This is a good example of the things that make me happy.

Oranges (As many people as you need to serve. 3 for four people, 8 for a potluck )
2 tbsp rum
1/2 cup sugar

Zest an orange and slice the long pieces into thin, thin slivers.

Remove the peel and white membrane from the oranges and segment the fruit. This takes some time but is necessary so the rum can soak into the fruit itself and not get stopped by the skin of each segment like an alcohol barrier. All the rum should soak into the (blood) orange stream. Place the orange segments in a bowl and drizzle with the rum (more or less, to taste).

Heat the sugar with 1/4 cup of water in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Wipe down the sides of the pan with a wet pastry brush, but don't stir. Let it cook for 5-8 minutes, to the point where you can take a little of the liquid on a spoon and drop it onto a plate and it should seem thick and syrupy. It should also be changing colour around the edge of the pan. At this point you want to swirl the pan, not stir it, and let the colour spread throughout the liquid. Less cooking time here is better than more, because if the caramel over-darkens it will become bitter. I actually used xylitol, a sugar substitute, which didn't darken to a caramel colour because it's not sugar...but it did thicken a little, thank goodness and it didn't get bitter. The dish still tasted amazing even if it wasn't really caramel.

Pour it immediately over the oranges and rum. Serve hot, or refrigerate to let the alcohol and syrup infiltrate the fruit...mmm...macerated fruit.

Serve in a prettier glass than I did...like champagne flutes, martini glasses or small wine glasses.