Salted Caramel, Cinnamon and Apple Tart

I went away to West Wales for the weekend with my mum and came back to the house to find cream, apples and a block of puff pastry that needed to be used up. Instantly I thought of caramel and cinnamon and came up with this super simple tart. It's soooooo yummy. It was just a kind of 'bung it all together and hope for the best' kind of experiment but I really like it.

 

First of all I made a salted caramel sauce. I've used this recipe numerous times and it's always come out perfectly. I'd definitely do this bit first or a while in advance. It keeps really well in sterilised jars but really isn't that time consuming to make when you need it. For a tart this size I used a whole batch.

 

The other ingredients you need are:

2 eating apples, cored and sliced thinly

1 block of ready-made puff pastry (unless you have ages to spare to make your own, shop bought is perfect)

1 tsp ground cinnamon

2 tbsp. caster sugar.

 

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 220 degrees Celsius.

2. Roll out your puff pastry to about 1/2 a centimetre thick (or however big your tray is, mine was about 30cm x 20cm in a rectangle).

3. Stab the pastry with a fork, leaving about an inch around the edge as a border. This should stop the middle puffing up too much but give you a nice light edge to the pastry. Bake for about 10-12 minutes until golden and puffed up. When you take it out turn the oven down to 160 degrees.

4. When the pastry is golden, take it out of the oven and spread over your salted caramel, leaving about an inch around the edge.

If your pastry has puffed up in the middle too much, feel free to keep stabbing it (I did as I liked jabbing it with the fork) but don't worry too much as the caramel will flatten it down.

5. Once you've got your pastry all covered in caramel, lay your apple down in rows.

6. Mix your caster sugar and cinnamon together and sprinkle over the apple.

7. Put the tart back into the oven (remember its at 160 degrees now) for about 10-15 minutes until the apple is slightly brown and the cinnamon sugar is melted and caramelised.

When it comes out it should look like this:

 

Sprinkle with some icing sugar and allow to cool slightly (the caramel will firm up if you leave it to stand for about 5 minutes) and serve it up. It's also really good cold!

 

Tips

*Serve with ice cream or custard (I made custard the old fashioned way to go with this as I had egg yolks left after making a mousse)

*Don't worry if your caramel looks runny when going on. If you make it in advance and allow it to cool it should be a spreadable consistency for topping the pastry and it'll firm up as it cools after baking.

*If you reeeeeally love cinnamon then when the pastry comes out of the oven after being in the first time, sprinkle on some cinnamon sugar then too before adding the caramel. I did and it was yummy!!

*For a more refined and less rustic tart, try serving the caramel in little jugs, baking apple wedges in cinnamon sugar by themselves (just on a baking tray and sprinkled with sugar until softened) and making your pastry really thin and cutting into small rectangles. Sandwich baked apple between the cooled pastry rectangles and build it up kind of mille-feulle styley. You can drizzle over the caramel just before serving to stop the pastry from going soggy. I've not tried this but it should definitely work. I'll give it a go sometime but if anyone tries it this way, fire a picture over!! :)

 

I served it with the homemade custard (it's quite pale so blends in with the plate) but vanilla ice cream or some yoghurt would work really well too. Obviously there's absolutely nothing wrong eating it by itself! Also, if you want a bigger chunk there's nothing wrong at all with that. I went for a modest serving as I'd just eaten a chocolate mousse I'd made beforehand and been dunking biscuits in caramel as I was getting on with the tart and had caramel cooling... Oops!!

 

It's super simple and has hardly any work or ingredients involved and looks like it's a real labour of love. Give it a go! :)

 

 



Pumpkin Spice Pancakes

I made a pumpkin gingerbread cake based on a recipe I'd seen online. When wondering what to do with my leftover 1/2 can of pumpkin puree, I decided to experiment with some pumpkin spice pancakes. I'd never had them before so didn't really have a guide to go on - it was just a case of making it up as I went along. Considering that, I'm pretty pleased with the result: not bad for a first attempt! The recipe could use a bit of tweaking but they're still a pretty big success already I'd say! For someone who's not a fan of pumpkin in sweet things, they were pretty unusual and went down a treat with a big bowl of fruit and some maple syrup on a cold and rainy morning!!

You'll need:

2 eggs

1/4 cup caster sugar

1 pinch salt

1/2 can pumpkin puree

1/2 tsp ground ginger

1/4 tsp ground all spice

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1 tsp cinnamon (half if you want a more subtle taste but we're biiiiiig cinnamon fans!)

1 1/2 cups of self-raising flour

1/2 tsp baking powder 

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 - 3/4 cup milk (depending on how thick your batter is due to the size of your eggs).

What to do:

1. Firstly I mixed the eggs and caster sugar together with a pinch of salt.

2. I then added the pumpkin, flour, baking powder and spices and enough milk to turn it into a thick paste to get the lumps out of it (I was too lazy to sift it).

3. I then added the remaining milk and melted butter and mixed it again. 

This is what my batter looked like. Still quite thick so it held it's shape on the griddle but not too thick so that it was paste-like.

I heated up the crepe maker and cooked the pancakes on that (each one was about a tablespoon of batter). As I'm pretty sure not everyone has one in their kitchen (I certainly don't I was just making the most of the novelty of having it at my parents' house), a regular bakestone or frying pan would do just as well. When the mixture started to bubble on top (after about a minute), I flipped them over to let the other side cook (about 30 seconds). Obviously the cooking time might be different depending on how hot your pan is; I'm not sure the temperature of my crepe maker.

When they're cooked, pile them up on a big plate and enjoy the smell!!

Mine look really rustic and homemade but if you wanted to take a bit more care over spreading the batter out you could get a much more professional finish! I made a few into heart shapes which I much prefer to the classic round ones. I'll definitely be taking a few extra seconds in the future to 'prettify' them into heart shapes.

We made these after lunch one day so my mum opted to eat hers hot off the griddle with maple syrup, ice cream and a few token berries.

I put the cooled pancakes in the freezer and just took some out for breakfast the next morning (had I known the temptation to tuck in would've been so great I wouldn't have bothered freezing them at all). Microwaved for a few seconds they were as good as fresh and went down a treat with a big fruit salad and some maple syrup.

They're super simple to make and can make a handy quick breakfast (if frozen and microwaved or toasted), great lazy brunch or a super simple dessert. They make the house smell amazing too!!