Julia Child's Apple Tart

Remember how I told you that my mom and I were stepping up to the challenge of making one Julia Child Recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking? I am happy to report that we did it! We were going to a friend's house for a barbeque and we asked if we could bring the dessert. The hostess said yes and we set out to make the Apple Tart on page 635 - Tarte Aux Pommes.


We started with the pastry shell and that was pretty difficult! We found it tricky to roll out the chilled dough. When we removed the dough from the refrigerator, it was cold and hard, so it was somewhat difficult to roll out. It warmed up, and it began to roll out nicely. But, then, it started to get soft and sticky (yes, we sprinkled it with flour) and it stuck to the counter, making it extremely tricky to pick up, in one piece. ( this is when I started thinking about how I prefer to make fruit cobblers). Eventually, we finished rolling the dough, and somehow we managed to wrangle it into the tart pan (I don't know how we did it, but it was a miracle! Thankfully, it didn't fall onto the floor and end up in our dog's belly). We had our moments with it, and it had its moments with us, but, in the end we thought that our shell looked pretty nice and decent.


Our next step was to peel and cut the apples for the tart. After that, we made an apricot applesauce, by cooking the apples in a pot with other ingredients, including apricot preserves, sugar and some orange zest. It didn't take a long time and I found this to be the easiest part - we didn't have to mess with it to get it into the pan, like we did with the pastry shell.

Eventually, it came time for us to incorporate everything together. First we layered the applesauce on top of the partially baked tart shell. Then, we took the apple slices and carefully placed them, so that they overlapped in the form of three rings. We put it in the oven and we waited.


While that was baking we decided that if we didn't like the way it came out we would have to make another simple dessert since we were responsible for bringing dessert to our friends' house and we wanted it to taste good. We found a recipe for chocolate biscotti on David Liebovitz's blog and made that. But, that's another story!


Finally, it was time for the tart to come out! We took it out and OMG it looked beautiful!!!!!! Overall, I thought that it was a little too bland.