Two Tarts
Saturday, 15 July 2006
K.’s creativity was unbounded yesterday. Even with a poorly equipped kitchen and a difficult-to-adjust apartment-size oven, she undertook to make not one but two apple tarts as our contribution to dinner with the Hunter-Gatherer and R. Two, K. felt, was necessary because the guest list was long enough that with only a 9.5 inch tart pan, the size of the pieces would have been too meager. We all moaned happily and involuntarily as we forked morsels into our no-longer-hungry maws.
This particular recipe (sorry, I don’t have it) has a shortbread crust, a cream cheese custard with small apple bits, and spiced sliced apple top layer, and I think K. got it from a B&B somewhere (not Helmer).
She’s willing to go to considerable trouble for not only desserts, but also any other dish. Me, I’ll fuss with main dishes, but I generally do fairly simple sides, etc., and, okay, get “fancier�? desserts from the bakery—not an option up here!
Consider: to use a single tart pan to make two tarts, you have to convince the first one to part company from the pan so you can reuse it. Consider: a shortbread crust is very fragile for such an operation!
And, yet, with considerable application of ingenuity, we did it!!!
Postscript: as the second tart was in the oven and the heat both in the kitchen and outdoors was becoming oppressive, we finally!! got a rainstorm, which cooled everything down, although even on sandy soil, the moisture only penetrated an inch.