Perhaps the most challenging recipe was the dessert that actually inspired me to start the business, the caramel apple tart. I started by filling tart shells with apples tossed in cinnamon sugar, baking them like open-faced pies, then drizzling freshly melted burnt sugar on the top. The sugar would harden before I could drizzle it over all the tarts, and I started to think in the back of my mind that this might become a problem if I was going to produce these in any decent volume. Also, they were great within a couple of hours, but by morning, the caramel melted into the juices coming out of the apples making little cups of messy sticky goodness. We got several comments on how great the tarts were, but how tricky they were to eat. I tried several different caramel recipes; tried several different techniques for assembling them to prevent weeping, and almost decided that the danger involved in eating the tarts would be part of their charm. Also, the apple tarts didn’t look as pretty or finished as the other tarts. I was also making a raspberry white chocolate tart which was a tart shell filled with a cake-like filling and then topped with raspberries and drizzled with white chocolate. I thought about it for a second, and then thought that what the caramel apple tart needed was the same sort of little sponge to catch all the apple juices. Almost that same day it seemed, I got one of those apple/peeler/corer contraptions and decided to use it to prep the apples, thus making nice thin slivers of apple instead of the ultra-rustic chunks that made the tart look so out of place. Finally, I decided to tuck the caramel under the apples because then I didn’t have to warm it up and drizzle it over the tart, where it would just melt off and look weird soon thereafter. So the final tart was crust on the bottom, nice spongy cake (actually a browned butter filling), caramel apples (dredged in cinnamon sugar) and glaze. In my mind, it was genius, any caramel apple juicyness would just drip down and soak into the lovely sponge cake, also preventing a soggy crust, but preserving all the flavors I loved. Doesn’t that sound good?
So in my mind things were progressing nicely, and we had reached a major milestone with the technical difficulties of our favorite tart. We still had a few kinks with the caramel chocolate pecan tart…the ganache was cracking after about a day. We read that adding a little corn syrup to the ganache would help with cracking so we experimented with that. It helped, but the ganache still cracked. Eventually, it turned out that switching brands of cream was the big help.
Things were coming together, we had a business plan, we had some of our products almost finalized, the people at my work seemed to be starting to get suspicious about all the pastries I was bringing in, but they were enjoying them too much to really suspect I was planning to change careers. I knew I loved to bake, and felt a strong sense that I could make it work somehow. John and I had long discussions about our finances, and we did some planning to figure out how much money we’d need to survive on.
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