Delicious Tarte Tatin

Butter, sugar, puff pastry and apples. That’s all that’s needed for this delicious recipe. Oh and some amazing vanilla ice cream to top it off.

I would seriously encourage anyone to give this tarte tatin recipe a try. It’s categorized as ‘a challenge’ but it’s really not. Well, so long as you watch the sugar to make sure it doesn’t burn, it cooks really fast and I of course thought I could do a couple of other things whilst it was on the stove top. Short cut to smoke filling our tiny kitchen, me panicking and turning cold water onto it, which instantly hardened it (half of which was already down the drain). I had to run a lot of hot water to disintegrate it. I apologised to the sink drain. What else can you do. Scott just looked pained, he’d suggested I keep an eye on it and I rebuffed his concern with an insouciant shrug of the shoulders. Humble pie anyone?

I know my tarte tatin doesn’t look at all like the perfect rendition that is Raymond Blanc’s, but that’s okay, it tasted fantastic. Even my long-suffering friends, on whom I tend to inflict my baking adventures on a regular basis, were supportive – there were some appreciative lip smacking and plate scraping sounds. You have to flip the skillet when the tarte is finished to get the apple right side up. Here’s where I diverge from the recipe, DO NOT wait until the tarte has cooled (at least with a cast iron skillet). Flip it if you can whilst it’s still warm, it’ll come out of the pan way easier that way.

Bon appetit!

Before the flip…..

Successfully flipped tarte tatin. Add ice cream and enjoy.

 

Gâteau Breton

Gâteau Breton

I had fun baking a fabulously simple gâteau the other day. I should confess that it was  emphatically not vegan (we’re trying to eat vegan more often than not). Yes, we fell spectacularly off the vegan wagon and landed with a buttery splash onto a vegetarian one. I feel a bit bad about that. But I do have to say this is one delicious gâteau and, well, if you’re going to use butter, then really use butter.

It felt like baking would be a good idea on a rainy, grey day – those warm, comforting aromas that emanate from an oven are like substitute sunshine – and chose a recipe from Mimi Thorisson’s French Country Cooking, her second cookbook. I love her books, they’re full of lovely recipes (no surprise there) and fabulous photographs but also great vignettes of how she and her family bought and renovated a big old house in a small French village and their adventures with their pop-up restaurant. I love how their lifestyle and work has positively affected the local businesses and economy, it’s an inspiring story that she also recounts in her wildly successful blog Manger, which needs no introduction from me.

The amount of butter? 16 tablespoons, or 225g, or approximately 1 cup depending on where you are. And lots of eggs and some dark rum. I can’t repeat the whole recipe I’m sure without permission, but you get the idea. It was delicious. And rich. And a very little goes a long long way. Gratifyingly my gâteau ended up looking very like the photo of the one in the cookbook. This doesn’t always happen, to me at least, so it’s nice when it does.

So after a long day of amazing snowshoeing a little over a week ago (the weather is far from spring here still)…..

It’s really nice to still have a little of the gâteau left to munch on….

Sometimes cooking is a chore, but sometimes, ummm, not so much.