Apple Tarte Flambé

The apples are just beginning to show up at the farm markets and I am reminded how much I enjoy them.  This week I had the chance to bake something new from Dorie Greenspan's Baking Chez Moi: Apple Tarte Flambé.

It's a yeast dough rolled very thin, topped with a mixture of cream cheese, yogurt, cream, and sugar, with a layer of thinly sliced apples and a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar.  An apple pizza!

Along with apple season, we also get cooler weather.  It was hard to find a warm place for the dough to rise but my son told me a trick he uses when baking bread.  On his advice, I heated a mug of water in the microwave. I left the hot water in the microwave and put my bowl of dough in, too.  Without turning the microwave on, I just left the dough in there for a couple of hours.  Actually, it was more than a couple of hours, but the dough had risen perfectly by the time I was ready to roll it out.

Dorie suggests that both the baker and the dough need to relax.  So I rolled, covered it up, rested, rolled again.  I probably did that three times, getting it as thin as I could.  I slid it into a hot oven onto the baking stone and baked for one minute.  Dorie suggests heating the oven as high as it will go which for me was about 500 degrees.  Hotter is probably better.

Here are the only pictures I took:

The apples sliced paper thin.

Filling spread on the crust.  A layer of apples were added next.

The finished tarte, ready to eat!

I chose to sprinkle cinnamon sugar on top and this is how it turned out!  It was delicious!

Check out what other Tuesday with Dorie bakers baked this week!

Edouard's Chocolate Chip Cookies

It has been a while since I posted with the Tuesday's With Dorie group, even though I've been baking regularly.  True, I have been away for a month during the summer (once to Massachusetts and another  time to Seattle/Portland/Chicago), but part of the reason I didn't bake from the book and post about some of the summer choices has been because our season here in upstate New York is late so when everyone else had strawberries, then blueberries and peaches, we were still anxiously anticipating these lovely fruits.

But chocolate is always available so this week I made Edouard's Chocolate Chip Cookies found on page 298 of Dorie's Baking Chez Moi.  I once did a series of tests about chocolate chip cookies, baking two batches a week for about 15-20 weeks in a row.  I served them to guests and asked them to rate and describe the cookies.  What I discovered was that everyone has a personal notion of the "perfect" chocolate chip cookie.  Some folks like soft and others like crisp.  Some like semi-sweet chocolate and others prefer bittersweet or even milk chocolate.  Some people think the cookie can't be perfect unless it has pecans and others think that nuts of any kind ruin their chocolate chip cookies.

Edouard's cookies have ground almonds which give them a bit of heft and a lovely flavor.  When I served them to my guests at a recent music party, they were completely consumed, even though there were home-made Swedish cinnamon rolls, zucchini bread, and a healthy assortment of veggies from which to choose.   People begged for the recipe and told me that these cookies were so good that it was impossible to stop eating them.

Even thought I'm one of those people who prefers pecans in her chocolate chip cookies, I very much enjoyed this version of a standard American favorite.  To see what other Tuesdays with Dorie bakers made this week, look here.