Tarte Tatin

I love working with pastry. I like making it from scratch, but puff pastry is a bother to make that way, so I buy the full butter stuff if I can. And you can get perfectly decent ready made pastry these days anyway.

I also like cooked apples. Paticularly ones cooked with sugar and butter. So when the house is full of apples and I've managed to find good puff pastry, what other choice is there - tarte tatin.

It's a very popular recipe too, one I've made before and will make again. Unfortunately it was in the oven a little too long today (it really needs to be made just before eating, but I put it in with the oven on timer when we sat down for dinner), which meant that it was a little drier than usual - meaning that there was less sugar syrup than usual. Still, with a scoop of Fior de Latte ice cream - or even better, cinnamon ice cream if you can find it - it's an amazing desert. And this recipe is nice and light too.


Apples, sliced - enough to cover the base of a small pan.
Ready-made puff pastry
2tbsp butter
2tbsp caster sugar
1tbsp brown sugar
ground cinnamon.

1. Put the butter and sugar in a pan and heat until the butter is melted and slightly golden.
2. Add the apples and cook for 2-3 minutes.
3. cover the apples with a round of pastry to just fill the pan.
4. put in an oven at 190°C for 8-10 minutes, until the pastry is golden.
5. Turn out onto a plate and sprinkle with cinnamon.
6. Serve with ice cream or double cream.

Morocco (2)

So I can't put up more than five pictures at a time. And I'm still lazy. But here are a few more.

A nougat stall in Fes Medina - very yummy nougat too.


A dried fruit and nut stall. My introduction to the joy that is dried figs.


Homemade pastilla. This is a traditional meal made of very thin pastry, stuffed with a mixture of chicken, egg, onion and sugar, and sprinkled with icing sugar and cinnamon. It works suprisingly well. The picture below is the inside layer - don't let the colour put you off!



Finally, me in the kitchen and our homebase, trying my hand at making moroccon breakfast pancakes (or mwnm. In all honesty, that is their actuall name. Now try pronouncing it). And I was vaguelly successful. At any rate, it tasted nice.