Bite me, apple tartlets

At the pastry shop near my house, you can buy apple tartlets for about $4 each. After making them from scratch last Sunday, I've decided that forking over a few bucks is well worth it!

I found a Cook's Illustrated recipe for apple tartlets online, and they ended up tasting great -- especially the crust, which has a cream cheese base. But the process drove me batty, and I felt like throwing in the towel at several points during the process. Basically, I've learned that pastry dough is a delicate operation, requiring cold dough and limited handling/futzing. Which sort of conflicts with my cooking, um, style.

Anyhoo, the pictures below highlights some of the process that I totally recommend for people who are more patient than me! (Nao and Myrtie, I'm looking at you...)

Here's the lil' food processor, filled with dough. You pulse the dough ingredients until they're nice and sandy.

Mmm. Look at that tasty dough ball. After you form it, you flatten the fucker and slice it into wedges...

And then it's back into the refrigerator. After cooling, you turn these little wedges into disks.


Then it's time for the delightful rolling-between-parchment-paper process. Roll on a surface with some sort of grip/friction, because they can slide all over the place. Feeling almost done? Nope. It's time for more dough refrigeration and apple peeling, coring and slicing.

Finally, you throw the apple mixture on, do your best pinching the edges of the dough to form some semblance of crust, and bake. About halfway through baking, you coat the tartlets with egg whites and sugar. And, if you're like me, this is when you drop a bowlful of egg whites on your kitchen floor. Then clean up the egg whites, while cursing apple tartlets, Cooks Illustrated and the sink full of tartlet-related dishes. Bon Appetite!