One bite and you’ll be going bananas for this dessert. # 79: Banana Tarte Tatin

Happy Sunday! I couldn’t get this Great British Baking Show recipe out of my head all week. If you know me, you’ll know that I LOVE BANANA DESSERTS. None of that fake banana flavor (lookin at you, Laffy Taffy.) Anything with real bananas in it – banana ice cream, bananas foster, chocolate chip banana muffins, etc. They are naturally super sweet and meld nicely with chocolate (huge plus in my book.)

A tarte tatin seems closest to an upside-down cake with puff pastry instead of cake as the base. I’ve seen it mostly with apples as the fruit topping (a lighter alternative to apple pie!) but you can use any fruit that can hold it’s shape after 20 minutes in the oven.

Originally attributed to a French hotel owned by the Tatin sisters in the 1880s, it’s the classic story of made-a-baking-mistake-and-everyone-thought-it-was-delicious. This yet again proves my theory that baking is an art and didn’t your mamma ever tell you that there are no mistakes in art? If it doesn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, then give it a unique name and serve it anyway! It’ll probably still taste delicious.

First step: make a rough puff! Or a full puff pastry depending on how much time you have. Rough puff is the adorable name for a cheater version of puff pastry. Instead of folding the rolled-out dough around a flat sheet of butter and laminating it, you cut the butter into chunks and mix it into the flour with a food processor (or by hand!) I kind of did a half-half version, where I roughly added the chunks of butter, but then did a few extra laminations.

Pre-roll pile of goodness.

Squished into submission between two layers of plastic wrap. Trust me, it’s worth it. No sticking, smearing, or huge clouds of flour.

Voila! It always comes together in the end.

Here’s the magical step to get a few extra layers in there: roll it up! Then flatten the dough log back into a thin sheet. Time for it to chill! (I took it back out a half hour later and did two more laminating turns and chilled it again.)

 

While the puff chilled in the fridge, I prepped my topping. Butter caramel, cooked until golden brown and bananas sliced medium-thickness.

Like little golden coins.

The next part went pretty quickly: spread the caramel over the bottom of a round buttered cake pan and add a layer of sliced bananas, shoulder to shoulder.

Cut out a circle of dough and tuck it in the pan over the bananas.

Post-sauna. Look at that puff! It loses a little height as it cools, and will flatten more under the weight of the bananas once flipped.

Flipping is hard, man. I blame my caramel for not solidifying enough. But let’s not play the blame game. I scooped the lazy bananas out of the pan and arranged them on top of the pastry like nothing happened.

See? Like nothing happened.

Look at all those layers of buttery delicious!

Warning: you can’t just have one slice.

Happy munching!

Rough puff pastry recipe from: https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/quickest-puff-pastry-recipe-1927422

Caramel recipe from: https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/banana-tarte-tatin