Adventure with Tarts
Posted by Arwen Mosher in Food on Thursday, October 23, 2008 8:00 PM
My husband is in the middle of a big project at work, and on Monday he warned me that he’d have to bring some stuff home to work on after Camilla was in bed, I planned an evening project of my own.
I love to cook, but I normally like to keep it easy. My favorite recipes are the ones that are simple enough that I have them memorized. I like to bake and I can pull off a pretty good from-scratch cake or pie, but I generally stick to Betty Crocker or Joy of Cooking and the recipes my mom handed down to me.
Only every once in a great while do I try something more complex, like Monday’s project: a cranberry, caramel, and almond tart recipe that caught my eye on one of my favorite cooking websites almost a year ago.
The dough has a long chilling time so I had to start it before dinner and roll it out before Camilla went to bed, which meant I had her help while I was doing it. Oddly enough, in spite of the pastry expertise that is so well-known among toddlers, her help didn’t result in perfect little tart shells. In fact, quite the opposite. The shells sort of… fell apart in the oven.
But I was not to be deterred from my project! The pieces of the shells still tasted good, so I forged ahead, loading them into my silicone muffin baking cups. I figured I’d just put the tart filling on top of the pieces of crust and bake them up like that, and hopefully they’d still taste okay.
Then my caramelized sugar seized up while I was whisking in the cream and butter to make caramel sauce. This has happened to me once before, and my solution was to start over with a different, easier caramel sauce recipe. Not this time! I bravely stuck the sauce back on the stove and whisked like crazy, crossing my fingers the whole time. (You try whisking while crossing your fingers - it’s not easy.) A few minutes later I was sure I heard a heavenly chorus as the lumps disappeared and my sauce turned into the lovely golden syrup I’d been seeking.
The rest of the project - mixing the caramel sauce with cranberries and almonds, scooping into over the tart shells, and baking it - was hassle-free. My tarts looked a little bedraggled but since it was only their form and not their substance that had been compromised, I held out hope that they’d still taste good.
They did! If you’re feeling ambitious and want a slightly complicated dessert project, I would highly recommend trying this recipe. The mixture of caramel, cranberries, and almonds is incredible. And even if your tart shells, like mine, refuse to cooperate, the whole deal is still like a little taste of heaven. After all, it’s not appearances that count!
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