…and it?s in the form of pastry goodness. Seriously, somebody needs to do an intervention or something, because I am stress bunny armed with a whisk and a silpat, and I CAN?T STOP…baking. This time, it was a red wine caramel apple tartan with thyme from sexy man Tyler Florence?s book, Real Kitchen. How fun is this?basically an upside down apple tart tatin Now I will admit, I have been cooking a lot from Tyler Florence. But I?m am living Australia with pretty much three cookbooks, two of which are Tyler?s. Plus, he rocks. Oh and I sort of forgot to use the thyme, which was a shame, because I was really looking forward to it. But at the rate I?m baking, I?ll get back to it soon enough. So, the recipe was pretty straight forward, although I ended up changing the ratios of the red wine caramel sauce. I forgot to write down the name of the wine I used, but I know it was a red blend. Basically, you make a caramel by heating up sugar until it turns brown and add cream and red wine to it, and then let it reduce a bit. The recipe actually calls for a great deal of wine, so much that I was worried the caramel would be too runny for the dish, so I only used half and was pretty satisfied with the final result. It was rich and yet strangely seducing with the red wine, like an ingredient you can?t quite put your fingers on. Even the scalding hot burned sugar wasn’t enough to keep me from eating spoonfuls of it from the pan. About half of the caramel was poured into the bottom of a round baking dish, then I peeled, halved and cored the apples (Golden Delicious) and placed them cut side down on top of the caramel. Then I topped it off with two sheets of puff pastry, trimmed the excess, and baked it.
When it was done and cooled slightly, I turned it upside down on a plate and got this:
Its not terribly impressive looking, but it wasn?t half bad either. There were definitely a few steps that needed to be altered?the crust, for example, was too thin, and got soaked shortly after I flipped it all. Next time, I will use several more layers of puff pastry to give the tart more structure, or perhaps investigate another kind of dough. The apples tasted good, but the caramel didn?t seem to penetrate them enough, and they were actually a bit on the tart side. The recipe has you save half of the caramel to serve with the tart, but I would put more in tart next time, because I had way too much left over. I topped it off with homemade buttermilk ice cream, which sadly, did not go as well as planned. Had the apples soaked up the sticky sweet caramel, their richness would have rocked with the tangy buttermilk ice cream. But alas, in all my haste to bake as much as possible, my caramel to apple ratio messed things up.
You live and learn. And then you ignore the tart and eat the leftover buttermilk ice cream with the leftover red wine caramel and some crushed shortbread cookies and life is pretty good. ~LTG
