Tuesdays with Dorie: Parisian Peach Tartlet

My apologies, this is a long post, with lots of photos! For such an easy recipe! lol.

This week was such the easy recipe for us TWDers. Jessica of My Baking Heart chose Dorie's Parisian AppleTartlet, but I made it into peach. It was so easy I could tell you off the top of my head the ingredients...puff pastry, apple, brown sugar and butter. The first ingredient listed, is what made it a little more difficult for me. I chose to make my own!! What!? I have never even baked with puff pastry before, and here I was making it from scratch!

I searched the web for recipes and video how-tos here and here, after some TWDers mentioned their recipes they were trying. I already knew about "Baking with Julia," by Dorie Greenspan, and fell in love with the book. I just had to return it to the library since it wasn't mine. I found this video to give me a "hands on" approach with great tips and decided to use the recipe from her book. I hurried and checked online to see if my library had the book in stock and pre-ordered it in my name. I heard there were step by step photos, so I wanted to see those and use the book for photo purposes -of course! I had the puff pastry recipe from online already.

So basically you pound cold butter into a square, make a pastry dough in the processor, roll it out and fold the butter square up in the dough. Pound that out and roll it into a rectangle. Fold it up into thirds, chill, roll again, fold again and chill. Repeat 6 times!! Do you know cold dough is not easy to roll out! You don't want it to be soft either, keep it cold! At first I tried rolling it out on a chilled cookie tray, but there was so much dough it didn't fit. I need more work space. That's why my stove top became an awful floury mess. By the end of the 6th turn, the dough looked so beautiful!

Anyways, I worked my arms so hard from rolling 6 times, they hurt SO bad from my forearms to the backs of my upper arms. Hahaha! I cursed that my homemade puff pastry better had turned out after all that.

I put it in the fridge for the next day, and took off to my oldest daughter's race that night. (I had hoped for a day devoted just to the puff pastry, so I was a little rushed). I did buy some Pepperidge Farm puff pastry sheets in case I chickened out making it, or it didn't turn out. I am glad I made it. Will I make it again? Probably, but no time soon. lol. I still have half of it in the freezer for some other treats to plan.

OK....now for the rest of it...I went for a peach tartlet. The problem though was even living in So CA, the stone fruits are always rock hard, yuk! They are my favorite too and I never get to buy them. I like them soft and RIPE. I decided to buy some anyways, and hopefully they'll ripen in time. I asked my Twitter followers for tips on that, and someone replied with a link to here! You put them stem end down, covered in a tea towel! Just 2 days later they were ripe and beautiful!! I assembled my tarts, using a large glass to cut out the dough, fit perfectly for the peaches.

So I decided I would try my puff pastry against the store bought, for taste and comparison. I will admit, that I don't know if mine worked so great. I think all the butter pats on top made the pastry sink and not puff so much. The store bought puffed a lot more than mine. I don't know. Maybe they needed a longer bake time? They already baked 25 minutes.

I had some scraps of dough left and tossed some cinnamon sugar on them before baking, and they puffed right up. I also made turnovers with (apple filling, that my oldest made for pancakes earlier that day).

We all loved them anyways! Sorry for the ramble about such an easy recipe! I just decided to make it more difficult than it really could be. =)

enjoy,