Tarte Tatin

It’s the second anniversary of the Tuesdays with Dorie group, so the group founder Laurie picked this week’s recipes. Being such a great group leader, Laurie put the question out to the members to vote on what we should make in honor of the anniversary. In the end, two recipes were selected: Cocoa-Buttermilk Birthday Cake and Tarte Tatin. We could make one or the other, or both! I decided to make Tarte Tatin since this is a recipe that I have wanted to try for some time. You can find the recipe on Laurie’s blog.

Tarte Tatin is exceptionally simple: just pastry, apples, sugar and butter. I used regular piecrust pastry, but you could also use puff pastry if you have that available. The recipe called for 8 apples, but apples in Washington state must be huge since I only used 4-1/2 apples in my 10-inch pan. They were all snugly nestled in the pan, so I wasn’t worried that I had used too few apples.

You start by melting lots of butter and then adding sugar, topping with apples, and then cooking until the butter/sugar mixture caramelizes. Dorie says that this will take about 15 minutes, but it took mine a good 30 minutes to turn a “deep caramel color.” I topped it with pastry and then baked it in the oven for 30 minutes.

It looked really great when it came out of the oven. It was really hot though and we didn’t really wait 10 minutes before eating, which is probably a good idea if you don’t want to burn your mouth. I really loved the simplicity of this tart. It is a lot sweeter than I expected, and next time I would serve it with vanilla ice cream. I have no idea if it keeps well since we basically ate it in one sitting. Just trying to maintain that post-Christmas sugar high! Overall, this is a simple dessert that looks very impressive. I’m excited to make this one again.

Recipe from Baking from My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, page 312