Tarte Tatin

Inspired by the Great British Bake Off I decided to do some baking. I attempted to make tarte tatin, which I have never made before, but which I have enjoyed eating on numerous occasions. I started off by looking up recipes on the internet and came across a very recent one by Claire Ptak, of Violet Bakery in Hackney.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/28/apple-tarte-tatin-recipe-puff-pastry-claire-ptak-baking-the-seasons

The Violet Bakery is beautiful and irritating in equal measure. It's the kind of place that serves its cakes on the same 1970s china your parents got as a wedding present (which your parents will love to loudly comment on if you ever take them there, which you shouldn't). The service is glacial and the staff are dressed in that inimitable Hackney style Ugly-on-Purpose. They mix their cakes with a 1950s Hobart they probably found in a skip. I adore their cakes, but I don't honestly feel cool enough to be in there in the first place.

I love Claire Ptak's recipes, not only do they generally work, but her books are beautiful (she is a food stylist - although if ever there was a #firstworldproblem it is that) and she explains how to be a good baker outside of just following a recipe. In one of her recipe books she relates a moment during her time as a stagiaire at Chez Panisse in California (one day I will totally do a stage there too...) when the great Alice Waters told her off for her poor mise en place. In other words, if you don't get your shit weighed out and organised before starting to bake, and tidy as you go, you're going to get into trouble. I generally cook in a hurricane of confusion, so it's a piece of advice I have tried to take on board.

Sooo, tarte tatin. As explained in the overly pedantic Guardian comments section below the recipe, tarte tatin it does not need prefacing with 'apple'. A tarte tatin is always made with apple and only if made with other fruits do they need specifying in the title of the dish. Especially if you're making a banana one, like Sarah Jane did on the Bake Off. I will want to know it's a Banana Tarte Tatin so I can avoid eating it and then arrange to have you killed. 

First let's deal with the pastry. Claire's (we're on first name terms now right?) recipe kindly only specifies '500g puff pastry'. Which I think implies I can either make it or buy it. So I sent Eddie to the shop. Sadly he came back empty handed, apparently it's still a capital offence in France to buy ready-made pastry. (OK, I'm only joking, you can buy it, but I bet you believed me for a second there. Mind you, you still can't buy fresh chicken stock). 

So I made some rough puff BY HAND. I froze some cubes of butter and instead of using a standing mixer (which I don't have here) I used the washed hands of a small boy. Then I rolled out the whole buttery mess, folded it and turned it, resting in the freezer for 20 minutes in between. Five times. 

No rolling pin. So I turned to the next obvious cylindrical object

Mise en place still rubbish

I made a caramel with butter and sugar, which immediately hardened into rock hard toffee once it had cooled, but I hoped it would liquefy once in the oven. I peeled and cored my apples and popped them on top, but the wrong way up as I forgot the whole thing would would eventually be turned out upside down. 

The finished product can't be said to have been an unmitigated success, as my dutifully made puff pastry did not laminate (i.e. get layers) and instead turned into a sort of buttery crisp. That said, it was pretty tasty so not a total disaster. 

Buttery

Fruit the wrong way up

I learn from various online forums that a failure to laminate is either down to the butter being too warm when it goes in the oven so it just immediately melts (but my pastry had been in the fridge), or it's down to the oven not being hot enough. I don't know the oven in the house in France so I think this is likely. Pastry has never been my strong suit, I'm also totally crap at making shortcrust, so maybe it's something I should practice....

We ate the tarte while watching 'Mr. Right', a hit-man-rom-com in the vein of Grosse Point Blank - one of Eddie's favorite films. It was a pleasant surprise to find a new and watchable film on netflix and it proved to be the perfect antidote to our jaded state of overfed exhaustion. With the amiable screen presences of the consistently excellent Sam Rockwell and Anna Kendrick on fine form, the humour was amusing, the romance touching and the action well choreographed. The script had a touch of Shane Black but with a female co-lead instead of his more typical bromances. 

And for all of you who have found this post criminally boring, here's a photo of Charlie with a stewed carrot stuffed into each cheek.

'I want to make you an offer you can't refuse'