Tarte Tatin

Tarte TatinTarte Tatin is one of those lovely recipes with an attached aetiological myth. Back in the 1890s, the Tatin sisters, who ran a hotel and restaurant in Loir-et-Cher (still open for business in 2010), had a kitchen accident when making an apple pie. Apples were left cooking an a mixture of sugar and butter for a little too long, and burned. Stéphanie Tatin, who was in charge of the kitchen, tried to save the dish by pressing a disc of pastry onto the ruined apples, and served the finished pie as a sort of upside-down tart. The hotel patrons raved about the resulting dish, a buttery, caramel apple classic was born, and the Tatin family ensured themselves fabulous advertising for their hotel forever.

These days, you can actually buy specialised dishes to cook a Tatin in. I have a Le Creuset Tatin dish which gets used for a lot more than tarts – it’s very dense and distributes the heat gently and evenly, making it great for gratins, shallow pies and other baked dishes. If you don’t have one, a frying pan measuring about 25cm in diameter will do the same job, but it needs to have an ovenproof handle – check before you cook that the length of the handle will allow you to shut the oven door.

You’ll need:

Pastry
170g plain flour
80g caster sugar
140g butter
1 large egg, beaten (I used two bantam eggs, but you’re unlikely to be able to find any if you don’t have a friendly neighbour with bantams, so use a large chicken egg instead)

Apple topping

6 sweet apples (I used Cox’s)
110g caster sugar
110g butter
Zest of 1 lemon

Prepare the pastry first, and let it rest in the fridge while you warm up the oven and prepare the apples.

Sieve the flour into a bowl from a height, and rub the butter in until the mixture resembles breadcrumbs. Stir in the sugar, and bind with the egg. Depending on the weather, you may also need a little water to bind the pastry. Put the ball of pastry in a freezer bag and refrigerate.

Preheat the oven to 190°C/375°F.

Core and peel the apples, and cut them into eighths. Melt the butter and sugar together in your Tatin dish or frying pan over a medium heat, and arrange the apple slices neatly over the butter and sugar mixture in the base of the pan. Back on the heat, keep cooking until the butter and sugar begin to caramelise. You’ll see the brown caramel bubbling up through the apple slices. The apple slices must catch and darken, so don’t be shy about taking the pan off the heat – the brown caramel should be visible across the whole dish, which should take 15-20 minutes.

When the apples are ready, roll the pastry out into a disc the same size as your pan. Set it on top of the apples and use your fingers to carefully press the pastry into the dish. Bake for 25-30 minutes until the pastry is golden.

Remove from the oven and allow to cool for a few minutes, then put a plate over the top of the dish and flip it over, using oven gloves to protect your hands. The tart should drop neatly onto the plate. Serve warm, with lashings of cream.

Salt caramels

It’s funny how quickly we assimilate food ideas. Salted caramel was considered suspiciously French, a kind of extreme sweetie sophistication, when we first encountered it about ten years ago. Now it’s all over the place – you can even buy jars of the stuff in the supermarket.

Salt caramels are still, as far as I’m concerned, a grown-up’s sweet. Buttery, creamy and velvety on the tongue, the addition of some salt to the mixture lifts the flavour, bringing out the dairy smoothness in a way you just can’t achieve in an unsalted caramel. A little extra salt sprinkled on top makes for a tongue-shockingly good contrast between sweet and salty. They’re easy to make at home, and make a great gift. Try them as an after-dinner nibble – they’re especially good with coffee. Home-made salt caramels are also a very good application for any interesting salt you might have lurking in the cupboard (the red salt in the picture here is Hawaiian volcanic salt I was given as a present just after I got married in 2004. Embarrassingly, this is the first thing I’ve used it in).

I like my caramel to have a hint of smoky bitterness. The best way to achieve this is to use an unrefined sugar in the recipe. If you prefer a lighter caramel, you can substitute another 150g of caster sugar for the light brown sugar below.

The usual boiling sugar warnings apply. Do not lick the spoon or dip your finger in the mixture until it has cooled completely. Keep an eye on the pan at all times to ensure it doesn’t boil over. And your life will be made much easier if you use a sugar thermometer – if you don’t have one, caramel at the hard ball stage should form a squishy ball that can hold its shape but can be squeezed by the fingers when dropped into a bowl of cold water.

You’ll need:

150g caster sugar
150g soft light brown sugar
80g butter (choose something with a good flavour – I used an unsalted Beurre d’Échiré)
200g double cream
75ml golden syrup
1tsp salt, plus more to sprinkle at the end

Line a square cake tin (mine measures 20cm on each side) with buttered greaseproof paper.

Combine the caster sugar with 30ml water in a saucepan, and bring to the boil over a medium flame. Swirl the pan every now and then, and keep watching it until the sugar starts to change colour. It will quickly work its way from clear to pale gold through to a reddish brown. As soon as it hits the reddish brown point, remove it from the heat and wait for the bubbles to subside.

While the sugar is cooking, melt the brown sugar, butter, cream, syrup and a teaspoon of salt together in a separate pan and stir well. Pour the mixture into the reddish brown caramel and return to the heat with a sugar thermometer. Stir gently to combine the ingredients.

Bring the mixture to a boil and continue to simmer, swirling occasionally, for between 5 and 10 minutes, until the mixture reaches hard ball stage on your sugar thermometer (125°C, 260°F). Remove from the heat and wait for a few minutes until the bubbles in the pan subside. Pour the mixture into the prepared cake tin and cool for an hour or so until the caramel is solid. Cut into pieces and decorate each piece with a pinch of salt. Flaky Maldon salt is fantastic here – and if there’s any Hawaiian volcanic salt in your cupboard, now’s the time to use it.

Pineapple upside-down cake

Pineapple upside-down cakeTwo cake recipes in a week! This is blog democracy in action – many of you have asked for more dessert recipes, so in response, I have been baking like a demon.

This is a handsome cake. The caramel and fruit layer on a pineapple upside-down cake looks positively jewel-like, and tastes glorious, soaking into the cake to add a rich moistness to an already toothsome sponge. If, like me, you significantly lack cake-decorating skills, you’ll like this recipe, which produces a foolproof but rather beautiful piece of baking. If you can get pineapple tinned in syrup rather than juice, use that for an extra kick of gloss and sweetness; however, if all that’s available near you is the kind in juice, that will work perfectly well. (It’s what I used here.)

To make one pineapple upside-down cake, you’ll need:

50g salted butter
50g soft brown sugar
1 can pineapple rings (in syrup if possible)
Glacé cherries
3 tablespoons milk
175 g softened unsalted butter
175 g caster (superfine) sugar
3 large eggs
175 g self-raising flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
Vanilla essence

Pineapple upside down cakePreheat the oven to 180° C (350° F).

Begin by greasing and lining a 25cm round cake tin with greaseproof paper. Don’t use a springform tin – there is caramel in the pineapple layer which will dribble out of a tin with a loose bottom when heated.

Prepare the caramel by melting the salted butter, a couple of drops of vanilla essence and the soft brown sugar together in a small pan and boiling hard for five minutes. (Watch out here – the caramel will be very hot.) Pour the caramel into the bottom of the lined tin, and tip the tin carefully to make sure that it covers the base well.

Arrange the pineapple rings in a tight pattern on the bottom of the tin (see pictures), and put a glacé cherry in the middle of each one. Set the tin aside while you prepare the cake batter.

Put the milk, unsalted butter, sugar, flour, eggs and baking powder in a large bowl and beat with an electric mixer for two minutes, until the batter is pale and stiff. Spread the batter out over the pineapple pieces with a spatula and bake the cake for 50 minutes, until a skewer pushed into the centre of the cake comes out clean.

Allow the cake to cool for about ten minutes in its tin, until it is cool enough to handle (this sponge can be quite fragile when very hot), then place a plate over the top of the cake tin, hold it there firmly and turn the whole assembly upside down, so the cake slips out, upside-down, onto the plate. Slide the cake off the plate onto a cooling rack until it is completely cold.

Praline

Almonds in a dark, crisp caramel aren’t just used in European cuisine. They’re a popular Chinese nibble (although the Chinese do not pulverise them as we do in Europe), and gosh, they’re good. Praline is what the European call the powder made from pounding the toasted almonds and caramel. try making the powder, and mix it into ice-cream, a creamy cheesecake topping, chocolate sauces or meringues. Alternatively, do what I did on Saturday, and gobble the crisp little almonds whole.

Chinese caramelised almonds usually keep their little skins, as in the picture. If you’re making European praline, you’ll need to blanch your almonds before you begin. Don’t buy ready-blanched almonds (white almonds with no papery skin). It’s very easy to slip the skins off yourself – just pour boiling water over the almonds, and when everything has cooled down, pop them out of their brown skins. Blanched this way, your almonds will taste sweeter and fresher.

For every cup of almonds, you’ll need:

1 tablespoon butter
4 tablespoons caster sugar
½ teaspoon lemon juice

Put all the ingredients in a non-stick pan. Keeping everything on the move, cook over a medium heat until the almonds are brown and toasted, and the sugar is melted and golden. Keep a careful eye on everything; the almonds can burn very easily. Add the lemon juice at the end to prevent crystals forming.

Turn the contents of the pan out onto a buttered surface. I use a cold, non-stick baking pan, but in Italy and France a marble slab is traditional. Allow the praline to cool at room temperature until it is hard and brittle, then break the almonds up.

If you’re planning to use praline as a powder, put the cooled almonds and caramel into a plastic food bag. Wrap this in a tea towel, and wallop the hell out of it with the end of a rolling pin. Praline powder will keep in an airtight container for a few days, but you’re unlikely to be able to resist eating it for that long.

Reach Fair 2006 – toffee apples

First of all, an apology for not having posted for a week and a bit. A visit from family, a series of busy evenings of unbloggable dinners (at the houses of friends who weren’t seeking Internet fame, at the University where the lights are dim and the meals a bit swillish) and finally a really, really nasty brush with salmonella all conspired to stop me posting. I’m better (and thinner – positively svelte, now I mention it) again now, and I and the seven colleagues who ate the coleslaw at the pub on Perne Road have called Environmental Health in.

Cast your minds back a week and a half.

Astute readers familiar with Cambridgeshire will have worked out by now that I live in Reach, a tiny village about fifteen miles from Cambridge, set around a large green. The village is complete with a Roman canal, a ruined Norman church (I’m looking at it out of the living room window as I type – see above for a picture taken at the end of March – the roundabout on the left is the view out of the front garden from the last week of April) and marks the start of the seven-mile Devil’s Dyke, a perfectly straight chalk earthwork which was put in as defence by Hereward the Wake’s lot. It is, you might gather, a village with a fair old bit of history.

In 1201, King John granted a charter to the village allowing it to host an annual fair on May 1. Historically, the fair had huge significance in the region, and was a big event for those wishing to trade in livestock and the goods which had come down the Roman canal (which, in 2006, is still navigable, although it’s not been used commercially for about a century). Back then, the fair was a three-day affair, drawing visitors from all over the east of England.

Eight hundred and five years later, the fair is still running every year, although now it’s an old-fashioned funfair which only opens for a day, with a merry-go-round, swingboats, hoopla, a coconut shy and a helter-skelter. The local schoolkids dance around a maypole, the village is infested with morris dancers and squeezebox players, mock battles are held on the playing fields, and there’s a hogroast.

There’s food everywhere you look; excellent local ice-cream, vans full of sweets, the coconuts nobody is winning because they appear to be weighted with lead. Our very splendid local pub also has a beer tent most years. These toffee apples are particularly magnificent, and they’re a staple of the fair. To make your own, you’ll need:

450 g soft brown sugar
50 g butter
10 ml malt vinegar
150 ml water
1 tablespoon golden syrup
6-8 medium-sized apples and the same number of good wooden sticks. (I’ve used pencils in emergencies – and no sticks for your toffee apple is, as far as I’m concerned, an emergency par excellence.)

Put the sugar, butter, vinegar, water, and syrup into a large pan with a heavy base. Stir over a low heat until the sugar has dissolved, then raise the temperature and then boil until the temperature reaches 143°C (soft crack on your jam thermometer). At this temperature a drop of the mixture in cold water will separate into hard threads which are not brittle.

Push the sticks into the clean apples. Dip the apples into the toffee and swirl them around for a few seconds until they are covered in the toffee. Leave to cool on a sheet of greaseproof paper.

I’ll leave you with a photo of the fair in the 1930s. See those people sitting on the verge on the left? These days, that’s my front garden.