This week's Tuesdays With Dorie recipe is Cranberry Crackle Tart. A perfect choice for Thanksgiving. I think one of the things we (my daughter and I) will enjoy most about baking along with Tuesdays with Dorie is that we will try all sorts of recipes we never would have tried on our own. This being the first. We are all chocolate people in my family and under the impression that fruits do not belong in desserts. That being said, I am looking forward to being proven wrong with some of these recipes. We are making this for Thanksgiving so our family can enjoy it with dinner. I'm hoping my daughter will taste this tart after making it, because this is a dessert she might not taste otherwise. She already tasted the cranberries and liked the tartness.
We started with the pie crust. We prepared the dough a day ahead of time and froze it overnight in the pan. We've never made a crust with powdered sugar in it before, but the dough came together nicely. This morning we cooked it and allowed it to cool before filling it. It came out a perfect golden brown.
Next came the filling. First we spread the jam on the cooked crust. We chose raspberry jam.
Next came a small hiccup. We followed the directions for the meringue, but seemed to have trouble. We could not get the egg whites to thicken or peak as you can see from the photo below.
So, we decided to scrap that bowl and try again. Again we added the egg whites and salt, waited for it to turn translucent and then slowly added in the sugar. We beat the mixture for quite some time and it just didn't seem to be getting thick enough. Then I came back to the computer and checked on some of the blogs to see if anyone else had the same problem. I didn't see any other notes about it, so I sent a comment pleading for help. Then I went to the kitchen and took out my last two eggs to get them to room temperature. While I was doing that I turned the mixer on again and just let it go. The next thing I knew the egg whites were thickening and forming peaks. I guess we just didn't beat the first mixture long enough. My only complaint with this recipe is that the recipe did not mention how long we had to beat the egg whites. I stopped timing, but am sure we beat them for more than 10 minutes. Here's what it finally looked like before it went in the oven.
Everything else about the recipe was very easy. Next time, I would just spend more time beating the egg whites. We can't wait to try this tonight. Happy Thanksgiving!
You can find the full recipe in
(Sugar art by my daughter while I was back at the computer trying to figure out what was going wrong with my egg whites.)
A couple of things I forgot to mention earlier - We cooked the crust at 350 and the tart at 275, and it came out perfectly. We had been worried that the temperatures called for were going to burn everything and were very glad we made the adjustment. It was very yummy...although the pecan pie seemed to be a bigger hit.
