When I looked through the chosen recipes for January for Tuesdays with Dorie I saw that the Bakewell Tart was on the list. After looking through the recipe I realized it sounded familiar. In fact, I had seen this once before, on the CBC Great Canadian Baking Show (Season 4, pastry) for one of the technical bakes!

But, what is a Bakewell Tart? The Bakewell tart is a British classic dessert and usually has a short crust pastry, frangipane and jam (typically raspberry). From what I have read, there can actually be different variations. 

To me, it feels like you you are mixing the essence of a pie and cake together. Perhaps that simplifies it a bit, but let’s go into how it went for me. 

To make the recipe in Dorie Greenspan’s Baking with Dorie you first make a pie crust. Hers is a pate sucree (mixture of cold butter, flour, egg and sugar).  The dough is then rolled out into an 11inch circle, then partially blind baked (where you add pie weights onto the crust – to keep it from bubbling up in the oven). 

Blind baked pie crust cooling

At this point, you can decorate with just a drizzle of icing (icing sugar mixed with water). However the first time I decorated my Bakewell Tart it turned out terrible. So in an effort to make it more aesthetically pleasing (for myself) I added icing all over the tart and then attempted to make some pink lines for a feathering effect. That didn’t go nearly as well as I had hoped but it looks decent! 

In all honesty, if this was a real technical bake in a real baking challenge I would have failed on the presentation alone. My feathering (for the lines) did not go very well as I was trying to work fast as the icing was starting to set! 

I love how tasty this Bakewell Tart is. It isn’t too sweet, despite the icing on top and the haskap jam went very well with the rest of the tart. The cake part of the tart has a nice almond flavour from the almond extract as well as the addition of almond meal and flour. I personally also love the nice crispy pate sucree crust at the bottom as it is my favourite part about pies. So, there you have it, my experience of baking up my first Bakewell Tart! 

You can get the recipe for Steph’s Bakewell Tart on pg.298 of Baking with Dorie or here.

Wow, time is flying by. Sorry that I have been neglecting the blogging part lately, though, rest assured I am still doing a lot of baking and recipe testing over on Instagram. After this post, I hope to work on a macaron post! I have been spending some time working on my photography skills, photo editing and making pottery (for food props and more!). Creating my own pottery and glazing them in all sorts of fun colours have been a recent obsession of mine. If you look through these photos you will see some of my pottery pieces! 

Making the pie dough is a breeze. Just process flour, sugar, salt and butter in the food processor until slightly lumpy (as above). Then, roll the pie dough out until it is a wide flat circle. Next, place the dough between two sheets of parchment paper in the refrigerator for at least an hour before using.

For ingredients, Dorie uses Mushrooms, Leek, Green Onion, Onions, Bacon and the addition of walnuts! The walnuts certainly gives the galette a distinctively crunchy bite.

The main ingredients of leeks, green onions, onions and mushrooms are cooked down in a pan before walnuts, bacon and cheese is mixed in.

Then a splash or two of some dry white wine followed by some heavy cream to give the filling additional flavour.

The beauty of a galette is that nothing has to be perfect. Just quickly fold in the dough and it will naturally crease as you go. If it rips, that’s okay too! The dough is so forgiving that no one will notice once it is baked. Everything comes together so fast that you are able to do other things in between. In fact, we had a guest over for dinner and we did all of the dinner prep (and photography shots) while we snacked on appetizers and entertained.

Now that you know how easy it is to make this mushroom bacon galette, you should make one too!  Also, check out how everyone else from Cook the Book Fridays did with this galette!

I prepped all the ingredients according to Dorie’s instructions. After the prep, I realized that I didn’t have a big enough stove top pot, so I used my instant pot on saute mode for most of the recipe. The recipe is fairly straightforward. First, you start cooking shallot and garlic in hot butter and oil. Then sliced and cut leeks are added in and cooked until softened but not browned.

Next, 5 cups of chicken stock followed by sliced zucchini, asparagus and two sprigs of basil. I also added in a few pinches of salt at this point as the chicken stock I used was an organic no sodium one.

Once all the veggies have softened up and the chicken stock has started to bubble, carefully spoon the soup into a blender or food processor. Then blend away! Dorie says to keep blending until you think you are done and then blend a little bit more for a smooth green soup.

When serving, scoop a dollop of greek yogurt into the middle of each bowl, followed by a squirt of lime juice and some basil!

I loved how fresh this soup tasted. Plus it was rather hearty! Dan and I both had a bowl of soup and still had enough for soup the next day. The colour does change in vibrancy, but otherwise the taste is the same. Since I had made it in the instant pot to begin with, I could easily pour the blended soup back into the Instant Pot and set it on slow cooker mode until Dan came home from work. The soup (without the yogurt topping) would also be a great soup to serve for guests that are gluten or dairy free.

Dan also had his soup the next day with some sliced smoked cheddar. That was also super delicious. Overall, a great soup to have in the recipe banks. Plus, it really is a breeze to pull together. Go see how everyone else from Cook the Book Fridays thought about the soup here.

The recipe calls for slicing the potatoes in a mandolin or to cut them to approximately 1/16 inch thick. Using a mandolin made slicing consistently much easier! I borrowed one from a friend in order to do this part of the recipe. Definitely use one if you are able to get access to one as it makes this part of the recipe preparation super quick.

Making sure all the ingredients are prepped (washed & cut) ahead of time will help with the assembly of the entire potato tourte because all the pieces will be ready and all you have to do is put it together. Layer herbs, followed by potato slices, garlic, butter pieces and repeat!

I prepped my potato tourte to the point where I topped the top crust and cut the air vent. Then I wrapped the potato tourte with saran wrap and refrigerated the tourte to be baked up for dinner the next day. 
The next day, I took the potato tourte out of the fridge an hour or so before I baked it. I did this to make sure that the heat differentiation would not cause the pie dish from breaking in the oven (which has happened to me in the past!). Egg washed and then popped into the oven at 400F for 45-60 min.

The layers of the potato tourte! Turns out there were at least 9 layers of potatoes in there! The one difference is that after the tourte has baked for almost an hour, you take it out and then gently pour in 1 cup of heated cream. It’s amazing how the cream is able to just flow between all of the layers.

 

I would most definitely make this potato tourte again. Though next time, I am thinking I’ll have to use a different herb. Don’t get me wrong, sage and rosemary go perfectly well with potato but I am thinking the sage that I used was super fragrant and seemed to overtake the flavour in the tourte. Mushrooms would certainly go well in this potato tourte, which I intend to try next time!