One of the best aspects of working for a cookery school is that I get to experiment in the kitchen! Sometimes it is having an idea in the middle of the night and spending a happy afternoon playing around with ingredients in an attempt to make it work but other times it is revisiting and tweaking an old recipe for a particular class
This week I took a trip down memory lane with an apple tart that I used to make when I very first started having dinner parties. It took me straight back to my early twenties and feeling incredibly grown-up and sophisticated as we sat around a tiny table with chairs borrowed from everyone’s bedroom and a mishmash of cutlery that had to be collected and washed between courses as we didn’t have enough.
This was a great pudding as you could make it in advance and importantly didn’t need blind baking which at the time was my absolute nemesis (lots of tears and burnt and / or soggy pastry). Although deceptively easy to make it looks very impressive. Sadly, from my (rather hazy) memory of those University days, the dinner parties were rather boozy affairs so I am not sure anyone ever fully appreciated its beauty.
This time round, since it was destined for one of the kids cookery classes I not only needed to double check and simplify my old recipe but I also needed to tweak it to remove the alcohol from the ingredients list!
As always, these tasks have to fit around the kids and so the placing of the apples was done at the same time as playing a game of monopoly. I lost the game but the tart got finished.
