Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and today we're making this rose apple pie.
Now there's a secret to making these and keeping the apples red on the roses and I'll show
you that later.
But first let's make the pastry.
Pre-heat your oven to 350F or 180C.
To make the pastry you'll need egg, flour, finely-processed pecans or you could use other
nuts or you could leave it out altogether if you prefer, sugar and butter.
And I'll put all the recipe quantities on the HowToCookThat.net website in grams and
ounces and cups and I'll link to the below.
Rub the butter into the flour using your thumbs and your fingers until it looks like fine
breadcrumbs.
Add in the sugar and the pecans and stir that all together until it's mixed through.
I like the flavour that the pecans give the crust but as I said if you don't want nuts
in it you can just leave those out.
Then add in your egg and mix that in and keep mixing until it forms a soft dough.
Put that on some plastic wrap and roll it out with another piece of plastic wrap on
top.
Keep rolling it we want it quite thin because we just want a crisp layer around the edge
of our tart.
Peel off the top layer of plastic and then use the underneath layer to help you lift
it up and flip it over.
Press that into the dish, trying to make sure there's no air bubbles and then just press
it into all the grooves all the way around the edge.
Then remove the plastic and use a knife to trim off around the edges.
Then take a fork and gently press all over the base, this is just making little indents
through that will help it to cook evenly and it will also help you to get rid of any air
bubbles, like I've got one there, just to get that out so that it's nice and flat.
Place that into your oven and bake it for about 20 minutes and we are just wanting it
to be nice and crisp and golden.
For the custard filling we need egg yolks, sugar, milk, corn flour, cream and vanilla.
Place the eggs and the sugar into a pan and whisk them together.
Now you want to keep whisking that until you can't see any more sugar and it's all even.
Then add in your cornflour and a little bit of the milk, not too much.Then whisk it again,
now you want to keep doing this and making sure that you don't have any lumps at all,
if you have lumps of cornflour here, you'll have lumps in your custard so just keep whisking
it until it's all dissolved, all smooth in there.
Then add in the rest of the milk and stir that through.
Put that over high heat and stir the custard continuously, now it is important that you
stir the whole time because that's how you get a smooth custard.
It will start to thicken up and I want you to keep it over the heat for one more minute,
just to make you've cooked all that cornflour.
Then you can turn off the heat and add in the cream and stir that through well.
Then just set that to one side.
To make the glaze you need jam and water - easy.
Put them both into the saucepan and then put that on high heat and stir it and keep stirring
until it starts to bubble and steam and it will be thinned out.
Now at this point you can strain it but if you don't mind a few lumps you can just leave
it as is which is what I'm going to do.
Take your pastry shell out of the oven, that's nice and golden.
And then brush it all over with that glaze.
And this just seals the pastry and it will give it a bit of a barrier between the custard
filling and the pastry so that it stays a bit more crisp.
Now if you take a beautiful red apple and put it into the oven it will start to get
warm and then the skin starts to change from that bright, vibrant red into a dull brown.
So I've been experimenting to find a way of softening the apple so it has a texture like
it's been cooked but without applying any heat so that we can still have nice red roses.
And here's the secret.
Place melted butter, orange juice and sugar into a bowl and stir them altogether.
Now this mixture can be slightly warm but it cannot be hot for obvious reasons.
Then use a mandolin to finely slice the apples and then add those slices to the mixture.
Now if we try and roll this apple now it's so crisp that it will just snap so we need
it to be softened.
You can fill your bowl right up with the apples, just make sure that your apples are at room
temperature or if they're cold they're going to make the butter set which is not what we
want.
After 10 minutes the texture of the apples is now soft and flexible like this, it's like
it's been cooked but because we didn't use any heat, the edges are still bright red.
To assemble the tart pour the warm custard into the base and spread it out.
Take a circle of apple and roll it up tightly, then take the next one, wipe off the excess
mixture and this will just drip off as you make the rose as well.
Wrap it around the centre one.
Take another one and wrap it around, just like you're adding petals to a rose.
And you can add as many petals as you like, depending how big you want your roses to be.
Then flatten the base just using a knife, just trim it off there.
And add it into the custard.
Then use a knife just to hold it in place while you make the next one so it doesn't
unravel.
Now if you want to use less apples in this pie, you can cut the apple slices in half
and make shorter roses, but I like the full height of these ones so I'm doing it this
way.
It's up to you.
Add more roses so that you fill up your tart and this is easy to do but it does take a
bit of time so I'd suggest you make this dessert with a friend.
And there you have it, ready to serve to the table a beautiful and yummy apple rose custard
tart with pecan pastry.
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Make it a great week and I'll see you all on Friday.