Blooming Apples (with Step-By-Step Tutorial)

An excess of apples and a relative leaving the country? That calls for apple tarts!

At some point while I was preparing to bake this apple tart, I thought it was high time for me to do a step-by-step tutorial for apple tart (seeing how this is my 12th time making apple tart, if I can trust my own records on this blog).

First make the applesauce. Of course you can use pre-made, but it tastes better homemade. Simple: dice apples, put in a pot and cover with water, add some sugar, and cook. Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-low, and cook for around 20 mins with a closed lid. Once translucent, remove the apple pieces with a strainer (reserving the liquid for glaze later), and mash with a spoon, and strain once more to remove excess liquid. Then let it drain some more in the strainer while you get to work on the crust.

Unfortunately, by the time I decided to do a step-by-step, the crust dough was already made, so I took pictures from there on. The crust isn't hard to make. You can find the recipe here.

First take the dough and roll it out with a rolling pin. Make sure to dust flour on your working surface and rolling pin, otherwise it'll stick! Once done, roll it around the rolling pin to lift it, then drape it into your pan, and break off the excess dough.

Poke it full of holes with a fork, otherwise it'll rise and make awkward bubbles.

Bake at 180°C for 10 minutes. Watch it in the meantime, because despite the holes, it'll still bubble, so you can stab the bubbles with your fork to pop the bubble and let some air out.

Yes, I'm at home now, so I get to use a nice, big oven instead of the small toaster oven I have at my dorm.

Once pre-baked, remove from oven and let it cool a little.

Spoon on the applesauce. If too dry, you can mix it with a little drained liquid.

Sprinkle on cinnamon.

And arrange your apples! I decided to do multiple roses this time, since my mom was complaining that I don't put enough apples on the tarts. To get them soft enough to bend without breaking, I sliced them thinly and zapped them in the microwave. Depending on the microwave and the apple type, it can take anywhere from 30 sec to 1.5 min to get it soft enough.

If you don't like the microwave, you can cook the apple slices in the reserved liquid from the applesauce until softened.

Also, if you're short on time, you can just slice the apples amd arrange them in concentric overlapping circles without precooking.

Dust more cinnamon on the arranged apples.

Bake for about 20 minutes at 200°C. Most recipes I have looked at before told me to bake the tarts for around 30 minutes, but since the apples are already cooked through the microwave, they don't need as much time in the oven.

Bake for 25-30 mins for uncooked apples.

Removed from the oven:

Then with some glaze, which is made by adding sugar to the water used to make the applesauce, and reducing it to a thicker substance. If you let it cool a bit, it may get a bit jelly-like due to the pectin in the apple, but a bit of water and some heat should work to loosen it again.

Close-up of one of the "flowers."

There was leftover dough, so I decided to make mini ones with single roses on each. Made 16 of them (plus 2 circles of crust with no topping because I wasn't about to cut 1/4 of an apple just for that... I had already snacked on a lot of failed apple slices by then, so...)

Mini Tiramisu

For the last hallway dinner of the semester, I volunteered to make dessert. To feed 9 (+ my cousin), I either had to make a large cake, or a bunch of mini-desserts.

Our hallway is funny: we have someone who's slightly lactose intolerant, someone allergic to gluten, and someone who's vegetarian (me). So I decided I would try to make tiramisu, and minimize the amount of lactose in it.

The first thing I did was bake a batch of gluten-free spéculoos. I am not used to working with gluten-free flour, and although I was mentally prepared (by Google) for extra stickiness while making the dough, it wasn't anything I could have prepared for without experience. I ended up having to add a lot more flour to make the dough possible to work with, which may have been the reason why the flavor wasn't as prominent as in all my other versions. I used a cleaned tomato concentrate can to cut out the circles, though the shape didn't need to be regular, since it would all collapse after a good coffee soak.

Then the usual soaking in coffee, layering with cream mix (whipped soy cream, ricotta, sugar, and a dash of coffee). I have 12 silicone cupcake molds, and seeing how there were 9 of us to feed, I figured making enough for 2 per person would work best. I used clear glasses and small jars to make up for the lack of recipients, but filled each about the same amount as I filled the cupcake molds.

Then simply the usage of a cut-out template to dust chocolate hearts on top of the tiramisus. I messed up the few first ones, as my template wasn't very good and I had to fix it, so I just covered those completely with chocolate powder.

Isn't this a nice view?

I took a picture of the one with the neatest heart.

And here's one with the heart after the chocolate dissolved a bit.

Mini Calzone

Yesterday, my cousin and I had some friends over for dinner. To make it easy, we decided to make mini-pizzas (using the same recipe as last week's). Some changes were made: the pizzas were smaller, and we pre-cooked the dough a little. I made a double batch of dough, thinking we'd eat more, seeing how there were 4 of us. Instead, we ended up with roughly half of the dough as leftover.

While we used up most of the leftover dough on more mini-pizzas for lunch today, I thought it would be interesting to try to make one mini-calzone, just for fun.

I stretched one of the little balls of dough into an oval, then piled on ingredients: some cream cheese (ricotta being saved for something else for next week), followed by leftover tomato pizza sauce, then some defrosted frozen spinach, on top of which I added a few chunks of cream cheese so it would melt into the spinach.

Then I folded the dough over, and closed it, crimping the edges. Cut a few holes over the top to let steam escape, then brushed some olive oil on top.

Once baked at 140°C for some time (and raising the heat a bit to brown the top), it looked a bit disheveled due to some unforeseen leakage at some parts of the edge that wasn't closed well enough.

We nevertheless enjoyed it~

Homemade Pizza

Last weekend, I had some Greek yogurt leftover, and had been itching to try this very easy pizza dough recipe. So I got to work with some flour, baking powder, and yogurt. After the dough was ready, I sliced some vegetables (zucchini, eggplant, bell pepper, mushroom, tomato, mozzarella), then got to work.

First, I spread the dough. Not having a rolling pin (and my friend wasn't home, so I couldn't borrow hers, I just stretched it with my hands.

Then, I spread on some tomato sauce (equal parts tomato paste and water, then seasoned with Provencal herbs, salt, and sugar).

Add topping.

And bake until golden, approximately 20 minutes (to make sure the dough cooks). The middle was a bit soft and soggy though, so there's room for improvement.

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2-INGREDIENT PIZZA DOUGH RECIPE

  Ingredients

• 1 1/2 cup self-rising flour
• 1 cup Greek yogurt

  Procedure

1. Add ingredients together.
2. Mix and knead until it comes together, dusting more flour as needed.
3. Top and bake until golden.

  Tips

• If you, like me, don't have self-rising flour, you can sub each cup with 1 cup of all-purpose flour, 1 1/3 tsp baking powder, and a pinch of salt.
• To make sure it's not soggy in the middle, and that it cooks through, bake the dough alone in the oven a little before topping it and baking some more.