Bake 52 Week 22 - Rustic Caramelized Onion Tarts

Here's my first recipe with this baking group. I decided to make the pizza crust from scratch. If I'm going to bake it doesn't make sense to buy a pizza dough, right??

This was the first time I've used my food processor for a dough recipe. It seemed to come together really well and very quickly. I let it rest for the two minutes the recipe requires and then blended it for 30 seconds as called for in the recipe. I don't know what that did since it just seemed to spin around and made my food processor just about vibrate off the counter.

I had some flour left in the bowl of my processor but the dough wasn't sticky at all so I didn't worry about it. I was supposed to let it double in size before using and the cookbook said it would take 1 - 1.5 hours to do that. I have had terrible luck with dough rising as expected so I was worried it wouldn't be ready in time to finish my recipe before I had to leave for church. The house was 70 degrees and to my amazement and hour and a half later...

It was double in size!!! About a half hour before it was supposed to be ready I started getting the rest of the ingredients ready for the tart. The dough was looking good so I figured it would be ready and for once my timing was spot on.

I started with cutting the new potatoes (1 lb) with my mandolin. I was worried they would go brown while I was working on the rest of the ingredients so I put them in water.

I almost forgot to cook them but luckily I caught that part of the recipe just before I had to assemble the tart. But then I burned my fingers (not bad) trying to assemble the tart because I didn't have time to wait for them to cool down. But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I started out cutting the onions with a knife because I thought my mandolin would cut the to thin but after cutting one and my eyes starting to water I decided whatever thickness I got from the mandolin was good enough.

That's a big bowl of onions!

My oil never did seem to shimmer but it had been heating for a while so I dumped all the onions in. After the 10 minutes of cooking them covered I had no idea if they had "released their juices" but most of them seemed pretty soft so I cranked up the heat and worked on getting them brown, which took longer than the recipe said. But I think that's because my stove is electric and it takes a bit to get hot.

They look pretty good right??


Now I was ready to assemble the tart. I rolled half the dough out and tried to make it into an oval, not much luck there but then I spread the olive oil on the dough, seasoned it with pepper and then spread on half the onions. I topped the onions with the cooked potatoes, rosemary and feta cheese. I was supposed to use goat cheese but I'm not a big fan of stinky, smelly cheeses which is why I picked the potato, rosemary, goat cheese option because the original recipe called for blue cheese - yuck!

The final assembled product.

It was pretty good but I couldn't taste the onions very well, which was a bummer. I think using the whole wheat crust obscured some of the onion flavor. Plus there were too many potatoes. I followed the recipe there but it ended up covering the whole tart in at least one to two layers of potato. So the flavor of the onions was buried under the flavor of potato. But I had some leftovers (cold) for breakfast this morning and it was actually better. Go figure...

So probably not something I'll make again but I'm sure going to be looking for an excuse to use carmalized onions!


Check out Michelle's blog for the full recipe. If you want to make the potato version it just took 1# of new potatoes (but I'd decrease that), 1 cup of cheese (goat according to the recipe) and 1/2 tsp of chopped rosemary. You just split all that between the two tarts.

Test Recipe

So this last weekend I wanted to make a treat for the guy that sold us our house. He was incredibly sweet and generous and let us move in five days before we actually closed. Since I'm planning on joining this baking group when I get back from Utah I thought I'd try out taking some pictures as I baked so I could do a blog post about the recipe. Well, I didn't do so well. I forgot to take any pictures until the brownie batter was mixed up and in the pan ready to cook...

Luckily this is a layered brownie recipe so there was more to do and take pictures of after the brownies cooked. So my inspiration for this dish is a combination of a couple of recipes from Mel's Kitchen. She has a section on her blog where she puts her "best of" recipes. I wanted to make her best classic brownie recipe but I also really liked her layered brownie recipe. This is a typical problem for me - I love sweets and want to try every conceivable variation of them (especially chocolate ones!). But since I don't want to be the size of a house and I have very limited self-control when it comes to sweets I try and minimize my exposure to them. My latest method is to limit myself to one sweet per weekend and I have to bake it. But then the leftovers go to work on Monday where they typically disappear by lunch. Well, I figured why not have the best brownie as the base for the best layered brownie?! So that was my plan. The recipe is for a 13 x 9" pan but Jonathan wanted a big batch of dessert because the guy who sold us our house is also the owner of the Ace Hardware store in town. Jonathan's plan was to take the treats to him at work, so he wanted to make sure there were plenty for everyone that works there. So my original plan was to make the recipe in a half sheet pan. I've done this with 13x9" recipes in the past and it works pretty good. The brownies are thinner (obviously) and it's always a bit of a guess how long you should cook it, but you get a lot of servings and since brownies are so rich anyway the thinness is a bit of a benefit. Well, when I was shopping I couldn't find a disposable half sheet pan in either of the two stores I went to. I've bought them before so this was really frustrating but I wasn't going to go all over town for this either. So I settled on a edged cookie sheet and figured I'd use one of my own pans for any excess batter. I followed the recipe for the brownies exactly. I'm an engineer so when I say exactly that's what I mean. I used the parchment paper instead of foil. I poured the batter into the cookie sheet until it just filled it. The rest of the batter I placed in a 8x8" pan. It filled it to about the same level as the cookie sheet. I got them both in the oven on the same rack and cooked them for 20 minutes. I couldn't check the doneness with a toothpick because I haven't found them yet but it looked done. I figured how undercooked could they be...

I let the brownies cool for a little while and then helped myself to one out of the 8x8" pan. I had to try them just as a brownie. I think they probably should have cooked 5 minutes longer - they were very fudgy. I don't know if they would have become cake like with more time but I think they would have been better. After letting the brownies cool for an hour and a half I started on the brown butter frosting. This time I tried to take more pictures...

While the butter started melting at low heat I assembled the rest of the ingredients. The butter was supposed to go in the bowl first but I forgot and put in one cup of the sugar before I remembered.

The recipe said it would take about 15 minutes for the butter to brown. Typically I would set a timer in that kind of situation so I know when it should be done. But I forgot. When I did remember I figured it had been about 5 minutes. When the timer went off 10 minutes later the butter still looked the same as when it first melted. So I set the timer for another 10 minutes. Still yellow... Ten more minutes and I finally start to see some brown. It's just the butter fat so you can hardly see the brown in the picture I took but it was good enough for me.

I mixed all the frosting ingredients together but I had forgotten to buy heavy cream so I had to use milk (1%). It was really runny

so I added about another 1/4 of a cup of powdered sugar. I probably should have added more but I was worried it would overwhelm the browned butter flavor. The one thing I failed to take into account with the larger pan was that I'd need more frosting to cover the brownies. I would have been fine if I realized that right off the bat and just frosted the cookie sheet but I'd already put some frosting on the 8x8" pan so the frosting is a little thin.

I thought about making more frosting but I was running out of time to finish the brownies before church. The last step was a chocolate glaze.

It was just semi-sweet chocolate and butter. I melted it on the stove top because I didn't want to get another dish dirty. I finished just before church.

I was so rushed to get the brownies finished I missed the step to chill the brownies and that they taste best chilled. I waited until after dinner to have my brownie. It was worth the wait!

Well, I can't get this to put in any paragraph breaks in this and the pictures didn't end up positioned where I expected but I'm tired and don't have the patience or energy to try and figure out how to get the formatting the way I want. It's annoying. I'm going to have to find someone to give me a blogger tutorial.

First Post...

So I'm thinking of joining a baking group. In order to be in that baking group I have to have a blog. So today at lunch I thought I'd play around with it a bit. Next thing I know I've created one. I figured I'd better throw a test post out there while I was at the "start blogging" page. Here's hoping I can figure out how to get back here when I actually join the baking group!