I am feeling rather underwhelmed having just made a Shredded Apple Tart from Nick Malgieri's Bake book. This is only my second recipe from his book, despite the fact that I have it for well over a year now (this is a terrible terrible habit of mine, but we'll go there another time when I'm doing confessions of a book hoarding baker....) Quite frankly, the first recipe of his that I tried, a variation of chocolate cookies, didn't inspire me to try another and after today's effort, I think I will be retiring this book for yet another year or so.
The problem? The rather anemic custard filling was the texture of a half cooked pancake and had a similar type flavour The recipe had potential; you know how you can imagine how the cake/cookie/tart whatever will taste just by perusing the ingredients. Although it did occur to me that a noticeably absent ingredient from the 'custard' recipe was butter. "Butter!" I hear you cry. Now, I know that butter is not your typical ingredient in custard, but this tart filling was seriously lacking, and definitely needed something to bind the flour and give it more of a sponge, rather than a clafloutis, type feel. The texture was reminiscent of my first baking failure - Yorkshire Puddings - but again we won't go there now....
I googled the Apple Shredded Tart recipe to see if there was indeed an ingredient missing, but all instances of it (the Nick Malgieri version) did not feature butter. I did, however, find another version of SAT that listed butter and I will definitely be including butter should I attempt this again. A fellow baker who had made this stated that the flavours develop overnight, so this has given me some hope of a sweeter tomorrow. Anyway, it has made the house smell of apple and cinnamon if nothing else!
