This is possibly the most photogenic thing I have ever made. I am so proud of myself! I randomly made it because I’m staying in a house with very good knives and a cast iron skillet and suddenly remembered that the tarte Tatin is made in a cast iron skillet. Ha! 

Audience information session: the tarte Tatin is a French upside-down apple tart created by two sisters, last name Tatin, who ran their own restaurant in the French countryside. Legend tells that a supremely happy accident was responsible for bringing the tart into existence. 

So I looked up some recipes online and came up with Jamie Oliver’s and this other dude also named James, weird I know. Also Jacques Pepin’s recipe, kind of. But not really, because his recipe is too hardcore and makes you make your own pate brisee. How about… No. Anyway what I usually do with recipes is use the methodology as pointers and ignore the measurements completely. Because I’m crazy like that.

Ingredients:

4 large eating apples

1 sheet ready-made puff pastry (I used Pepperidge Farm)

2 tbsp butter, cubed, plus a little bit for greasing the skillet

8 to 9 tbsp sugar (sugar content of this entire dessert = 1 can of Coke. Not bad eh?)

After gathering the ingredients I made it in the afternoon while watching Band of Brothers, because there’s nothing like baking to the sounds of gunfire and dudes drinking in a pub. Yeah.

Thaw out your puff pastry at room temp for however long. I didn’t re-roll it out because I don’t have a rolling pin. Also, am lazy. Cut the puff pastry sheet into a circle, diameter slightly larger than the skillet you are using. Make it about an inch bigger all around than the size of your skillet. Chill pastry in the fridge.

I used 3 large pink lady apples and 1 Fuji apple, because Jamie specified a variety of apples. So 2 kinds = more varieties than 1. Apples get peeled and cored and quartered. Preheat your oven to 375 F. Or its metric equivalent.

James X (I don’t know his last name) says you should butter the base and sides of your skillet, which sounds like it makes lubrication sense, so I did that. Then I covered the bottom of the skillet with, I believe about 8 tablespoons of granulated sugar. Now you should have about a quarter inch of sugar covering the bottom of your skillet. This totally depends on the size of your particular skillet. I think this one is only about 9 inch in diameter, so it’s not that big. Then you make the caramel by heating up the skillet with the sugar in it. Use fairly high heat and WATCH this caramel like a HAWK because between caramel = delicious and carbon = snafu is a fairly quick change. 

Once the caramel forms, as in the sugar turns liquid and makes bubbles, you take it off the damn fire and put the apples in. They say, they say it turns this lovely chestnut brown color which I’m sure is true but cannot verify since the skillet I used is black. Arrange apple quarters in concentric circles on the skillet, hope like hell it fits and return to the fire for about 5 minutes or so. The apples will start cooking and turn soft, kind of. But people who tell you to stir your apples at this point? You can just ignore them because they lie. I just kept patting them down with a wooden spoon so that they’d really absorb all that caramel.

At this point according to Jamie Oliver you should put little cubes of butter all over your apples. Then, cover all the apples with the puff pastry sheet. This will be the base of your tart. Before I put the pastry on I scattered another tablespoon and a half of sugar over the apples, you know, just to make sure. 

Bake with your skillet in the center of the oven for the next 30 minutes. Which I did while watching the Dutch get liberated so I could fangirl over Damian Lewis. 

And then the pastry puffed up like it was supposed to and turned all poofy and golden brown! Wiiiild. I took it out and let it sit around for about 10 minutes. Then with a deep breath I paused the liberation of the Dutch and flipped the skillet over the plate… 

And lo, it was a miracle! It’s alive!!!

I feel like I’d just made Frankenstein’s monster! I never actually expected it to work because of my incredibly haphazard methods that made sense only to myself. The only tragedy was that about a tablespoon of caramel fell all over the stove and was lost to posterity. Then I hopped around taking pictures like mad before I finally sliced into it and ate the damn thing.

It’s bloody delicious if I do say so myself. The French, what can I tell ya. They are geniuses. Geniuses. And the tart itself kept bleeding caramel from every crevice so I had to pour it out into a little sauce dish thing to keep the rest of the tart from going completely soggy. 

I feel pretty badass now, like I can continue with the invasion. Of Normandy. In the kitchen.