French · Dessert
Tarte Normande
Apples baked into an almond-Calvados custard inside sweet pastry — Normandy's answer to every apple tart, damp-crumbed and perfumed
- Prep
- 40 min
- Cook
- 55 min
- Serves
- 8
Ingredients
- Pâte sucrée: flour 220 g, icing sugar 90 g, cold butter 120 g, egg 1 (55 g), salt 2 g
- Firm apples (Cox/Reinette) — 4 (about 700 g)
- Custard: crème fraîche 200 g, eggs 2 (110 g), caster sugar 80 g, ground almonds 50 g, Calvados 30 ml, vanilla 1/2 pod
- Butter (for the apples) — 20 g
- Demerara sugar — 15 g
- Icing sugar — 10 g
Method
- Pastry: rub flour, sugar, salt, butter to sand; bind with egg; chill 2 h. Line a 24 cm ring at 3 mm; freeze 30 min.
- Blind-bake at 160 °C, 20 min with beans, 8 min without.
- Peel, quarter and core apples; slice each quarter into 3 wedges; sauté in butter 3 min to start caramelisation.
- Custard: whisk crème fraîche, eggs, sugar, almonds, vanilla and Calvados.
- Fan the apple wedges in the case; pour the custard around to just below the rim; scatter demerara.
- Bake at 170 °C for 40–45 min until the custard is set and amber-blotched.
- Cool 1 h; dust the rim with icing sugar.