Tuesdays with Dorie ~ Tarte Tatin

*apples soaking in pinapple juice while waiting to be cooked

Laurie from Slush hosted Jan. 5th's Tuesdays with Dorie. (Yes, I'm painfully late. But better late than never right?)

It was a choice between two recipes and I chose to do the Tarte Tatin. It's sort of Dorie's take on a rustic farmhouse apple tart. It was so easy and sooo good. She says that if you make it once you will never need a recipe to make it again and I can see that that is true.

The only changes I made were using my own puff pastry for the crust and sprinkling the apples with a bit of cinnamon while cooking on the stovetop.

It did get a bit messy on me when I flipped it upside down after baking per the recipe. So I probably should have let the apples cook longer before baking. But it turned out soooooo delicious. I didn't expect to love this recipe as much as I did. This will definitely get made again. My husband loved it too. But maybe next time, I'll forgo the whole flip-it-upside-down part. I think it's pretty as can be straight out of the oven.

Homemade Bladerdeeg * better known as Puff Pastry

I've always wanted to try a puff pastry from scratch but, quite honestly, have been too intimidated to do so. So for my first attempt, I searched for a recipe that looked fairly easy and straight forward. This particular one got very good reviews so I chose it as my starting point.

Bladerdeeg

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1 1/2 C. flour

1 C. butter (*I know the pic only shows 1/2 C. but the whole cup's worth made it into the recipe.)

1/2 C. sour cream

Cut butter into flour until it resembles crumbs.

Stir in sour cream. Turn onto a floured board and knead until it just holds together.

Form it into a ball, flatten it just a bit and then wrap and refrigerate at least 2 hours to overnight.

Cut dough in half, working with one half at a time while keeping the other half in the refrigerator.

Pound the dough with a heavy rolling pin to make it pliable.

Yield: 2 puff pastry

I know this isn't a 100% traditional puff pastry, but it was easy, it did puff up prettily, and the flavor was sooo good! It didn't puff up in quite the same way a store bought one does but it still puffed none the less. I'm quite happy with it and this will be a keeper recipe. It is now my go-to-guy for puff pastry.