friederike's Reviews
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Appeltaart
By Janneke Philippi
Karakter Uitgevers - 2011
Similar to the crumble cake recipes I reviewed a while ago (I wrote this review, the rest were family recipes). What was different about this cake is that all the recipes back then used a one batter for the base and a another one for the crumble. This recipe tries to use a single batter for both... and fails. The base is very wet, and I can't tell if that is liquid from the blueberries or if the cake hasn't cooked through properly, while the crumble isn't crisp at all.
I had a look at the ratio of ingredients. Compared to other base batters (it's neither a pound nor a sponge nor a butter cake - in German you'd call all of these batters rather generically 'Rührteig', batter that is stirred), it contains very few eggs - other recipes contain up to 6 eggs for roughly the same amounts of flour, butter and sugar while this one uses only one. For the crumble, it just the other way around, none of my crumble recipes uses an egg, while this one does.
My guess is that the author tried to make this recipe easy, but sometimes, it's just worth it to walk the extra mile.
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Amazing! The crust (made with 30g ground almonds and 30g ground hazelnuts because our almond supply was up) and the almond crust were extremely delicious, though the apples were pretty much uncooked. For really perfect results, perhaps you'd have to pre-cook them for 10 min or so?
As usual, I had my difficulties with the dough, this time because it was quite crumbly due to the addition of the ground nuts, but that was solved with the use of a springform pan.
It all looked very pretty, though shortly after cutting the pie, it all fell into pieces. We served it with David Lebovitz' Vanilla Ice Cream, and the combination was great.
Edited 29 September 2013:
I had a different problem this time: the dough was too wet! I made it in the food processor this time, and didn't do that last year, so that might be one difference; I also thought that perhaps I didn't use the 2 tbsp milk last time, though now that I read that I complained that the dough was crumbly, I cannot imagine that I didn't add them. In any case, the dough was difficult to handle because it was too wet and kept tearing and sticking, so I added more flour and ground hazelnuts and almonds, and made sure it was really cold.
Unfortunately the almond crust (on top) wouldn't turn gold, so I had to bake it about 10-15 min. longer. That didn't really result in a very crunchy cake though. I served it the next morning (within 12 hours of baking), and it completely fell apart or stuck to the pan. DH liked that it was moist, but actually both the almond topping and the dough/crust should have been crunchy. I guess I'll have something to practice...
Edited 17 September 2015:
Yes, it's nearly that time of the year again. No, not autumn - hubby's birthday!
This year I decided to test the cake before making it for another birthday party; I wanted to know why the pastry had gone so wrong last time - was it because I used a kitchen machine? Or did I maybe omit the milk the first time, but not the second? I decided to make two smaller cakes to find out.
I didn't have any ground almonds (or at least I couldn't find them), so I used ground hazelnuts exclusively, and I made both pastries with a handheld kitchen machine, adding the flour at the very end and using my hands to mix it. The recipe, by the way, makes no mention of the fact that you should add the flour at the very end and handle it gently, without kneading too much.
I made one pastry without milk, the other with 1 tbsp milk; I let both of them rest in the fridge and made the milk-less one the next morning, the other one only three days later (yikes) - but that actually turned out well, because while felt was too wet the first day, but it was less so on day three.
With these pastries, I was able to bake two beautiful pie crusts. It were the following few steps were everything went wrong. You're instructed to blind-bake the pastry for 15 min, then bake another 10 min without the weights - this means that the edges, if they are not covered by the weights, will get much darker than the bottom of the crust - I'm mentioning this because I would probably need at least 1 kg of beans to achieve this for only half a recipe of pastry!. Also, it means that the bottom will be considerably less crunchy than the edges.
Unfortunately, though, my biggest problem was linked to this, as the apples (Granny Smith in both cases - not sure what I used in previous years, quite likely Granny Smith) emitted lots of juices and drenched the bottom of the pie - there was a very narrow time window, if at all, where the pie was cooled down and the bottom of the crust was still crunchy.
Also, I baked both pies for an additional 10 min to let the almond crust turn golden - it hardly did, though, and it never really got very crunchy. I probably should have placed it under the grill, or maybe a slightly higher temperature would have helped.
In a way, I was lucky that this cake turned out so well the first time, or else I never would have made it again. It does need a lot of tweaking, though. For this year's party I might resort to this cake, and continue my experiments at another time.
useful (1)
So-so, for 3 reasons:
1. Even after being in the fridge for more than 30 minutes, the dough was far too soft to roll it out properly. I had the idea that the consistency just wasn't right. I would guess that this dough is a crumble type of dough. Coincidentally, I just made Ottolenghi's one half an hour before to make Fennel, Cherry Tomato and Crumble Gratin (yes, I know, bad prep - if I had thought about it in time, I just have made a double portion of one of them), and it's nearly exactly the same recipe, only that this one uses an egg on top of all the other ingredients. That's probably the reason it was too soft.
2. It was just boring. Slightly too sour, but other than that, absolutely nothing happened. As this is a dish for 8 servings, I used only a quarter of the dough for the two of us tonight, and I will probably experiment with adding spices in the next few days.
3. Proportion (didn't we already have that? See point 1.). Theoretically, I should have used 250g apples for the two of us. That would have been just little more than half an apple per person - far too little, in my opinion! So I used two apples (400g) instead, with the consequence that it could have used a bit more dough. Positive aspect: because we had so much apple, we had both cooked, jellied apple and crisp, fresh apple, which we liked. I'll see if we think half an apple is enough next time.
Served with Fennel, Cherry Tomato and Crumble Gratin, but of course you already knew that.
Edited 2 days later:
We had an apple pie party today, as we figured we'd have to throw away the dough if we didn't. I made 3 versions: one with sugar, lemon juice and ground cardamom, one with preserved ginger and syrup, and one with sugar, tarragon and Marsala. Thyme or rosemary also would have worked well.
Generally speaking, the flavours all went well, but weren't as strong in the baked pie as I had expected, with the possible exception of the ginger one. Also, I used one apple each, which meant I had more or less the propotions aimed for in the recipe - as expected, it was too much dough. I was more or less forced to make a crumble topping, as the dough was either far too hard or far too sticky to roll out. And definitely use enough sugar with the apples, they will be sour otherwise.
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Tarte Tatin : page 22
Why is caramel always so difficult?
Let me start with saying that this tarte tatin was really, really delicious. Not as brilliant as the this tarte tatin the first time around, not as bad as the second time, and quite a bit better than this one. It could have used a bit more caramel (= more sugar!), but that was about it.
That said, I'm not entirely happy with the recipe instructions, but maybe that's just because it's just so hard.
The biggest problem was the caramel. At first I melted the butter and then only added the sugar, fearing the sugar would burn otherwise. Well, no, the butter browned before the sugar even made a move. I continued until the mass had caramelised, but I thought it was too dark, and decided to start again, starting out with butter and sugar at the same time. The same thing threatened to happen. It really reminded me of this Caramelised Chicory and Onion Tarte Tatin. In the end, I decided thar caramel would have enough chance to caramelise in the oven, and decided to proceed with the mixture of molten butter and not yet melted sugar. This was probably a good idea, as it made it fairly easy to spread the caramel evenly.
Also, in the beginning, I was wary of the dough, it reminded me a lot of the failed Individual Apple Pies, but after I checked and compared with my favourite tarte tatin recipe (see above), I was less worried.
It was fairly sticky, though, but then I had a brilliant idea: when I wasn't able to get it off the baking parchment, I stuck it in the freezer for five minutes - so much better! The only problem was that I then tried to slide it on top of the baking tin that I had placed on low heat to keep the caramel soft, and the butter in the dough instantly melted... Aaah!
Last, small stuff: remember to keep more than three apples at hand, just in case. I needed five, and I'm glad I used them. And the tarte needed 20 extra minutes in the oven, while we only gave it minutes to cool.
We served this with Fior di Latte Vanilla Ice Cream - while the ice cream was very nice, I had expected something heavier, creamier to go with the tarte tatin.
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