Sweetened Dreams: Sweet Tarts

Today in class lecture we learned the difference between pies and tarts ... but to me, who cares about the difference. They both are extremely sweet, pretty bad for you and DELICIOUS.

We focused on mass producing as many little tartlets we could in the short 8 hour class day. While pies traditionally have tops to them (think apple pie), tarts are left open faced which leaves plenty of room for a variety of different fillings.

The most disappointing part of the day -- the Pear Chibouste. The whole class was looking forward to eating this because the ingredients were unreal. A chocolate almond cream filling with fresh pears we poached ourselves, topped with a Meringue Italienne (which I don't know how else to describe but heaven.) We were running around so much that someone put it in the oven and forgot about it. The worst part is, the oven was accidentally turned up to 500 degrees. When our instructor pulled the burnt dessert out of the oven, I felt like a little part of me died.

And this all happened about ten minutes after our Master French Pastry Chef instructor was telling us a story about a shop he worked at in France where someone was late once, got a sheet pan thrown at the back of their head and was then paralyzed. Even though he's a nice guy and assured us that this would never happen to us, I'll never be late for class again.

Our instructors are pretty amazing. They all come from different backgrounds and levels of experience. One shared an invention of his with us today -- brown butter filling. I guess one time, he burnt butter and in an attempt to save it, added some more ingredients and invented this tart filling that I didn't think I was going to like it. It doesn't look appealing while you're making it ... it looks like burnt butter. But with the right "saving" ingredients, it tasted amazing. I was totally licking the spoon on this one.