It being somewhere in the vicinity of
Halloween and bonfire night I was thinking about toffee apples. I'm
not really sure which festival (if you can refer to these dates as
festivals) they are actually associated and I don't really like
toffee apples but the flavour combination is something to work on. We
had visitors due so it was a good excuse for a pudding. I envisaged a
toffee apple tart. Unfortunately none of my recipe books nor cuttings
envisaged a toffee apple tart so I would have to make it up.
I started off with some pastry. I am
not a pastry expert – this can be put down to either:
- not inheriting my granny's excellent pastry making skills
- not enough practice
In the absence of any pastry direction
I decided to just go with plain shortcrust – I thought that the
filling would probably turn out sweet enough and sugared pastry would
be excessive. So I found the most basic shortcrust pastry recipe I
could and made that. I used the food processor for most of it which
sped things up rather than the conventional technique of rubbing the
butter into the flour with your fingers. It seemed to turn out ok and
I rolled it out quite thinly into a sort of circular shape using my
own devised method of placing it between two thin plastic chopping
boards. This prevents the pastry from sticking to the rolling pin and
prevents the rolling pin from getting to messy (or if you haven't
washed the rolling pin up from another project you can still use it).
I could see my first potential problem
being that of insufficient pastry. That would be because I just made
the amount of pastry stated in the recipe rather than an amount
specific to my tart dish. What I should have done was to get a
smaller tart dish out but they are rather precariously arranged in a
cupboard and I had already committed myself to this particular one.
As I transferred the pastry into my selected tart dish my second
potential problem (not unrelated to the first) became apparent:
because I had rolled out the pastry so thinly it broke in a few
places. The brittleness may also be put down to my non-pastry expert
skills (see above). I did a bit of repair job and managed to end up
with something that looked like a raw pastry case.
While the pastry case was chilling in
the fridge I started work on the toffee apple filling. This would be
entirely made up. I peeled and chopped 6 smaller (cox) and 2 larger
(gala) eating apples taking particular care to remove the bits from
around the core that are like finger nails (I never like finding
those in puddings). Maybe cooking apples would have been more
appropriate but I didn't have any. I put these in a frying pan along
with a load of butter and a load of soft brown sugar. This is one of
those creations where you don't really want to think about just how
much sugar and butter goes into it. I didn't weigh but it probably
amounted to about 150g of each. Then I added a little bit of lemon
juice (to stop the apples going brown) and put the whole lot on a
gentle heat on the hob.
It was now time to blind bake the
pastry case. I pricked the bottom, lined it with greaseproof paper
and filled it with baking beans (the first use of a set I acquired
from my mum who was getting rid of them when she had her kitchen
done, she doesn't do a lot of pastry either) and put it in the oven
at 200°C
for 20 minutes, removed the baking beads and then baked for another 5
minutes. The times were a bit of guess work, but it seemed to come
out ok apart from a few cracks. There was nothing I could do about
that now but hopefully I would have avoided a soggy bottom.
The
filling was coming on. The butter and sugar had combined into
a liquid that
was bubbling away and I
just kept moving the apples around in this syrup. I
must admit that I was slightly worried about just how liquidy it was
looking so I put in an emergency call to my mum. She was out so,
since she has yet to fully embrace the benefits of mobile technology,
I would just have to carry on and hope it turned out ok. I might have
added a bit more sugar but I had run out, that
would probably have been futile anyway since sugar is not renowned
for its thickening properties. I could have added some corn flour,
but based on previous corn flour addition disasters that was a risk I
wasn't prepared to take. So I just carried on and hoped for the best.
That
turned out to be the right decision as eventually the liquid turned
more syrupy and then more toffee-y and the apples took on more of a
caramel hue. I took my cue to turn the heat off when it was just
about starting to burn in places. But this was a good sort of burn –
it smelt amazing.
All
the above was done before our visitors arrived so all that was left
to do was to assemble and finish off cooking when it was pudding
time. (Which was a good job as we had all had a rather exciting and
tiring day out at a local “tourist farm”.
http://www.pennywellfarm.co.uk/)
I had actually got a little bit of pastry left over and made a few
bits of lattice and an apple to shape to go on top of the tart. This
is advanced for me but unlikely to win any prizes in the decoration
stakes. It baked at 180°C
for about another 20 minutes (which just about gave enough time for
our toad-in-the-hole and mashed potato to go down).
Matt,
my husband, volunteered to do the honours of serving. I would like to
say that it was this that resulted in the ensuing mess but much more
likely it was the fact that the pastry was so fragile. Still, we
managed to serve decent looking pieces to our visitors and we had the
more mangled looking portions (all served with a little bit of
vanilla ice-cream). But I must say the appearance paled into
insignificance with the first mouthful. It was absolutely
scrumptious. I just need to work on the architectural aspect of my
pastry (it tasted good) and we're going to have a truly special
pudding in our mouths.
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