Cranberry Crackle Tart

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe is for the Cranberry Crackle Tart. I wasn’t sure quite what to expect from this pie and the picture looked interesting. This pie is basically pie pastry filled with cranberry-studded meringue. My friends kept asking me if the pie was cranberry, topped with meringue. No the meringue is the filling for the pie. Interesting! was the verdict. I loved that the recipe was fairly straight-forward and required few ingredients. Make sure you check out what the other TWD bakers thought of this week’s recipes at the Tuesdays with Dorie website.

I used some pie dough that I already had on hand, basically galette dough. I love Dorie’s press in the pan pastry, but I figured I should just use what I already had. You top the pastry with a thin layer of jam; I used some raspberry preserves that a friend at work had made. I’m glad I had read what the other TWD bakers had experienced in making the meringue. They suggested using a hand mixer to make the meringue, since it was a fairly small volume and sometimes the big mixer doesn’t do the best job with small projects.

I mixed my meringue but I’m not sure that I whipped it enough. It seemed a little soft, but I folded in the cranberries and put it in the oven to bake. Mine puffed and cracked a bit, and it’s a very pretty pie. It seems like it shrank a little as it cooled. I think that my pastry got over baked throughout this process, but I had rolled it fairly thin, so maybe that was it. My husband and I tried this and it’s…interesting. Some bites I really liked it, other bites I thought that there were too many cranberries. I liked the meringue combined with the jam, so maybe there is some recipe idea there. This isn’t going to be my favorite pie, but I’m really glad I tried it.

Recipe from Baking Chez Moi by Dorie Greenspan, pages 135-137