Thing 339 Bake A Tart

In typical Sluggery fashion, that's me, rolling dough with an empty wine bottle. We're all as classy as each other in this place. Except Lady Northy who's way classier than us all, and Token Northy who's at the other end of the spectrum.

Now while this one is undoubtedly similar to "bake a cake" Thing, there are significant differences. They are as follows: My Mam and my Nana never baked cakes. They baked tarts. Also, since pie is another word for tart, I'm also baking a pie, and as we all know, pie is awesome.

Unlike the mediocrity that was the cake, I was pretty determined to get the tart right. My Nana and my Mam mastered the art of tart making. Mam still does them every so often, and you can smell them the second you pull up outside our house, tongue hits the ground, Wile E Coyote style and you've to drag it behind you all the way to the oven. Nana's not with us anymore, but oddly it's one of the strongest memories I have of her. That, and how she used to tell me that she'd "soften my cough" for me, or "give me what size boots fit me" when I misbehaved. She was class.

So it's in the family, on both sides. Surely there's a tart making gene right? What a gene to have.
If there's a mess making gene, well I definitely got that one. It's spectacular the amount of mess I can make. This was a basic apple (and strawberry, I got adventurous midway through, when I forgot that I'm Dan Mooney and not Jamie Oliver) tart. From the state of the kitchen/my clothes afterwards, you'd swear I was baking a wedding cake for fifty people. I'm pretty sure there was more recipe ingredients on me than there was in the apple tart itself.

Thanks be to Little Flower for the help by the by. While The Frenchman laughed (in that haughty French style) at my efforts to make dough, Little Flower just calmly assured me that I was doing fine, and didn't shriek at me when I was getting it wrong. Which I was doing for nearly all of the baking.... You know me.

Got it finished though; wonder of wonders.

Some notes on the baking. I'm something of a night owl. Unhappy with mornings, which I believe were invented only to prevent people's night times from running into their afternoons, I tend to stay up late, and I function better when the sun's gone down. This goes some way to explaining why I was shopping for ingredients at midnight, like some kind of nocturnal baking freak. I didn't start actually baking till one am...

Who bakes a tart at one in the morning? I do apparently. Also, given my tendency to take forever and a day to do anything, it wasn't till after three that I got the thing out of the oven. Still, it looks awesome right? And it tasted great too. Honestly. I'm totally chuffed with my own baking abilities, which I expected to tank, but surprisingly, were excellent. Very tasty pie. Could done with some sweetening, but altogether, a fine pie.

The the stupid Frenchman takes the leftovers and makes a "Apple Strawberry Crumble" which absolutely blows my tart away with its awesomeness. Sometimes I hate that guy...