Apple Rose Tarts

To begin this recipe, have your tarts prepared. Tart dough recipe

Custard Ingredients:

2 Braeburn apples – or apple of your choice. 
100g sugar 
120ml extra thick double cream 
1tbsp lemon juice 
1/2 rind lemon 
1 large egg 
2 large egg yolks 
1-2 tbs cornflour 

Preheat the oven to 400° F. 

Mix the sugar, cream, egg, yolks, lemon rind & juice. Peel, core and grate the apples finely over a sieve to drain off excess juice. (Save this for later) Stir into the egg/cream mixture. Gradually incorporate the cornflour. Spoon into tarts.

 

Decorative Apple Rose Ingredients:

4 red-skinned eating apples – as red as you can find for a rosier-colored rose 1/2 litre apple juice 250g caster sugar I didn't have apple juice but I did have delicious teas from Teavanna (Jasmine Dragon and Rooibos Tropica). Stir the juice and sugar together over medium heat until dissolved. Cut apples in half. Remove the core and slice into semi-circles. Simmer in juice and sugar until tender, but not so much that it falls apart. Pour it into a strainer and let it cool. Line up the slices- I found that 8 is a good amount. However for my tarts today, I had to go with 4-5 because I was low on apples. Roll them up from left to right and carefully place into the custard-filled tart crusts. To avoid burning (which I couldn't figure out until awhile after), cover the pan with aluminum foil for the first 10 minutes or so.

  Bake 10 minutes, turn the pan around and bake for another 10. Or until it looks like the custard has set. Using that excess juice from the first steps, add 250gr of sugar over heat until you get a syrupy substance. Brush over the roses and dust with sugared powder. There was another dozen... that was destroyed by me and my dad :) (I still had some leftover sugar pearls so I tossed those in)

Tips:

1. After you've cooked the apple slices, you can let them soak in their juice overnight so that the red from the skin bleeds more.

2. The skin from the apple can be a bit of a nuisance to eat sometimes. I slice them thinner and that seems to lessen the problem. 

The year is ~2020~. It is 8 years later and I've found an alternative custard recipe I used recently. I can't say I'd throw out the one I posted originally because I haven't tried it in a long time, but here it is anyway:

Ingredients:

1/3 cup granulated sugar

2 egg yolks

1 whole egg

1 1/4 cups whipping cream

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 320° F.

2. Place the sugar in the carafe of a high speed blender. Process on high until the sugar has turned into a white powder.

3. Add the egg yolks, whole egg, whipping cream, and vanilla to the sugar in the blender. Blend until smooth.

4. Bake for 30-35 minutes until the custards are firm. Serve warm.

-My note on the sugar is, I used powdered sugar. I also tend to cut the sugar down in most recipes (unless it will do something structurally detrimental to the food).

Ricotta Pear Tart

I found this recipe online searching for tart recipes using ricotta because my ricotta was days from expiring. And it turned out great!

So you make your tarts...

There's a little trick to this one- the cutter is smaller than I think it should be so you have to use the tamper to press down and up against the sides of the mold to fill it out. Otherwise you're getting the tiniest of tarts.

Poke holes otherwise they're much more likely to puff up (if you pre-bake them before filling) like the following picture:




Making tarts is simple. It's just kind of tedious.

8 oz whole milk ricotta
3 oz cream cheese
2 tbsp honey, divided
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 pears, sliced and pressed between paper towels to remove some moisture

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

The recipe calls to pre-bake the crust for 10 minutes but that was for the large 8-serving tart pan. So I don't think it's necessary to do that here. I modified the rest of the recipe to accommodate that.

Blend together the ricotta, cream cheese, 3 tbsp of the honey, the egg, and the vanilla extract until well combined. Pour the mixture into the tart pan and smooth the top.

Lay the pear slices across the top of the ricotta mixture, and drizzle with the final tbsp of honey.
Bake for 15 minutes or until the tart only jiggles slightly and is starting to brown at the edges.
Let sit for 1 hour before slicing and serving.

I was running out of pears so I changed up how I cut the pears. Not really sure of how to make it look nice on such a small scale hah.

Using the measurements above, I made almost 3 dozen mini tarts.

Pie Crust (Buttery and Flaky!)

For Christmas, Cecilia sent me love and a Williams-Sonoma giftcard from Taiwan. (P.S. She also has a food blog. Clearly, we're sisters.)

After much deliberation between a ravioli mold and a mini-tart baking set, I decided on the latter.


The most basic but also most important step of pastries and pies is knowing how to make the perfect pie crust. It's just a little harder than it sounds, trust me.

1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspon salt
1/2 cup butter, chilled and diced
1/4 cup ice water

The 2 tricks to keep in mind throughout this 1, keep the butter chilled as often as possible and 2, DO NOT overwork it. You should still have bits of butter intact by the time you roll out the dough.

Dice the butter. Like I said, right after I diced them I put them in the freezer just for extra measure.

I sifted the flour (with my Williams-Sonoma flour sifter Cecilia sent me for my 21st birthday). Honestly, I don't know if that really makes a huge difference with pie crusts but I figure it wouldn't hurt anyway.

Then I mixed the butter cubes and flour and pulsed it in the food processor. Only until it looks like the coarse crumbs above. DO NOT over process. Do not over process. Do. Not.

Transfer to a larger bowl.

Then, with a tablespoon at a time, add water in and mix it with a fork. DO NOT OVERWORK IT.
You'll be terribly tempted to use your hands to mash it all together but don't. Put it all on a sheet of cling wrap and condense it into a disc as follows.

It will still look crumbly. But no worries.

Wrap tightly and refrigerate for 2 hours (and up to 2 days). Don't skimp out, it has to be this long.

When you roll. it out, the first roll will be crumbly. Re-condense it and roll it out again. It should be that perfect familiar consistency.