French Apple Tart

I made this yesterday, I promise. I just got sleepy and went to bed before posting. Maybe that has something to do with this taking FIVE HOURS to complete.

First I heeded Kristina's advice to make half the pie crust dough recipe. The actual Tart recipe says to make a quarter of the recipe, but I can't do that kind of math. If you want to know what 6 minutes and 30 seconds minus 2 minutes and 45 seconds is I'm your gal. If you want to know what a quarter of 5 1/4 cups is I can't help you.

Trouble is, I got distracted watching my mixer to see what the constitency of the dough was... Then I read "ice cold water" and panicked because I needed to pour it in and it was not ice cold. So I start running the water and dump it in. Then I read "just mix until combined" and I thought, "geez, that's going to take forever... why is this so wet?" Ah crap, I forgot to halve the water amount.


So I started again, and at the point of adding the water I just threw in the sopping wet dough.
I froze the other 3/4 of the recipe. I guess I need to make three pies this month.

Problem #2 - apparently the only difference between a pie and tart is sloping edge vs. straight edge of the crust. I made a pie.

Problem #3 - that's a lot of apples to peel. Whoever made my peeler didn't take into account that metal piece stabbing into my thumb while I peeled 8 apples.


Problem #4 - I really should have taken heed when they said "large bowl". Basically I should always use a bowl one size larger than I think. If only to help with my clean up later.

I don't think this is what Julia had in mind when she said to use a potato masher to mash up the baked apples, but this is my potato masher:

I thought I'd bake the apples while the pie chilled, but then didn't realize the crust was supposed to bake at 400 degrees, while the apples were 375. So after baking my crust looked like this:


Not exactly flaky and golden brown. So I threw it back in for about 15 minutes.


Mandolin sliced up apples (thanks Jackie!):


Mashed apple filled crust:
Putting the slices on the tart/pie:

Craig likes the look of this:


And, five hours later (with Craig's urging of peace in the background) she's DONE:


Just missing a small part of the crust that fell into the oven: