a pick-me-up

Caramel. A bit of sugar + heat. And it turns into this ooey-gooey goodness.

Add a little bit of red wine and it becomes this fantastic, complex but sweet mixture. Then add some chocolate and it's like heaven.

I have this recipe for a toffee apple tart that I'd previously improved by adding red wine to the toffee topping. Tonight I made it that much better by stirring some chocolate into the hot caramel sauce. And it was heaven on a plate.

I have about 1/2 cup of the caramel sauce left over. I could have poured it all over the tart, but then I wouldn't have any left to do things like dip the stickies made with the leftover pie crust and pour it over ice cream (another night). Or just spoon the stuff into my mouth.

My November issue of Food & Wine has a recipe for a caramel croissant bread pudding. Nigella Lawson, you are a genius. Stay tuned. I have frozen croissants waiting in the freezer for such a time as this (thank you, Trader Joe's). And I haven't even gotten to all the Thanksgiving recipes yet. I love the November issue.

Baking makes the world a better place. And it makes the apartment smell good. :)

bakewell tarts

The June Daring Bakers' challenge was hosted by Jasmine of Confessions of a Cardamom Addict and Annemarie of Ambrosia and Nectar. They chose a Traditional (UK) Bakewell Tart... er... pudding that was inspired by a rich baking history dating back to the 1800's in England. Recipes are on the host blogs.

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Alrighty. I think I mentioned that I joined The Daring Kitchen, which has monthly baking challenges and monthly cooking challenges. This was this past month's Daring Baker's Challenge (which I think I was supposed to post yesterday, which was the reveal date, but I totally forgot).

I made mini bakewell tarts. Mostly because things in miniature are awesome (in my opinion). These appear to be pretty similar to the baked tarts they sell at Sarah's, where I was working (my last day was last Thursday, how sad), in terms of pastry crust + fruit (jam here) + almond cream (frangipane). I made these for Bible study snacks for GCF, they disappeared pretty quickly.

I stood in the jam aisle at Wegman's to figure out what to use. I wasn't quite in the mood to make my own jam (though I did do that this past weekend with the roomies, we made strawberry freezer jam but that's another story). I decided for blackberry, plus some canned pears, and some chocolate (not all together, as you'll see in the pictures below). Emily has rubbed off on me, I couldn't just use pear jam (though pear + almond is a pretty delicious combination), because then the whole thing would've been beige.

So, pre-filling:

blackberry jam

blackberry jam + canned pear slices

chocolate chips

Coming out of the oven:

I put an almond slice on the plain blackberry ones- I think this caused some confusion at bible study, cause these were the most that were left.

And a little pear slice on top of the blackberry-pear:

And a little chocolate chip on top of the chocolate ones:

They were, suffice to say, delicious. I will have to make these again sometime. Perhaps a larger tart next time, but I love bite-sized things. They're just that much cuter.

And so pretty inside!

I had a lot of dough but only a little bit of frangipane (the almond cream filling) left, so I made this free-form "large" tart- by large I mean it was probably about 5 inches in diameter. A layer of jam, some pear, and almond filling. Mmm.

I made 1 batch of frangipane but 2 batches of the shortcrust pastry dough, to make 48 mini-tarts. (This makes sense, since when you reduce size, for the same volume [frangipane filling] you'll increase the surface area [pastry crust]. See, some of my education is occasionally useful. Only occasionally.)