Rose Apple Tartlets

With Valentines Day quickly approaching.  It may be a good idea to for prep your special night.  A beautiful make ahead dessert that will taste just as good as it looks.  I originally made these little rose apple tartlets for girlfriends wedding; however, I thought they would be perfect for a sweet treat on a Valentines Day.

The recipe originated from Preppy Kitchen.  It was a great recipe and we made a few changes to fit our event and tastes.  Please see Preppy Kitchen for the full recipe.

The pate sucree recipe worked perfectly.  It was my first time using a food processor and it worked well.  The only tip I would suggest is that you place a kitchen towel around the food processor just to make sure you don’t get flour all over yourself and your kitchen.  Definitely, not something I thought would happen.  For some odd reason our food process managed to spray flour everywhere, even with the lid on.  Yes, I remembered to do that. lol.  

Make sure you follow the instructions and let the dough rest overnight and chill.  We had a harder time working with the dough as the hours went on.  Mind you we made 3-4 batches of these, but anyway cold dough was a lot easier to work with.

We used cute egg tart shells from Amazon.com.  As we were placing the dough into each tart tin.  We found that it was easier to use our fingers to press the dough into the tin rather then using a pie tamper.

When par-baking your dough, make sure you don’t over bake.  Although the recipe calls for a bake time of 8-10 minutes make sure you adjust based on your oven.

When we did our first test run of these tartlets, we found that there wasn’t enough filling for our liking.  There was too much apple and not enough of the gooey cinnamon taste.  We filled each tart shell approximately half way with filling rather then the recommended 1/2 tsp.  Keep in mind, this caused the shells to over flow a little, so you may want to adjust according to your taste.

One of the most difficult and time consuming parts of this dessert has to be rolling each individual apple rose.  We found that the quickest way to get even slices was to utilize a mandolin rather then a sharp knife.  The knife caused us to have uneven slices and often they were too thick to be shaped into our pretty little roses.

The mandolin that we purchased had a guard that came along with it.  I would use it because well lets just say I tried not to waste any of the apples and shaved a few fingers here and there.  As you can see thats why I needed to wear a glove when making the rest of the tarts.  “Safety first.”

When rolling your roses.  Try to roll them as tight as you possibly can.  We found that the tighter we rolled our roses the nicer and fuller they looked in the tart shells.  We also used more apples then recommended to make them extra full.

When placing the roses into your tarts make sure you wiggle them around a little pit and get them to fill the open space.  Your last apples that were added on should fall to create open petals at the outer edges, while the center will stay wrapped tightly.  This should give you the effect of a rose.

We planned to make ours ahead of our event and bake them the day o,f so they were nice and hot.  You can do the same.  We made our apple tarts the day before and set them in the refrigerator overnight covered with plastic wrap.  These tarts need to be baked again, so just make sure to bake them a second time according to recipe directions on the day of and you should be good to go.  Freshly baked rose apple tarts for a sweet treat.  Happy Valentines Day everyone.