How To Make Tarte Tatin

Here's a recipe for making delicious Tarte Tatin.

Turn to page 422 in Jamie Oliver's Cook with Jamie. Ignore the bit about using pears, ginger, thyme and almonds, and decide to go classic all the way with apples, butter and sugar.

Ignore instructions that advise you to use a 20cm pan for making the caramel, on the grounds that your regular 30cm pan will do just fine, right?

Ignore instructions that advise you not to stir or agitate the sugar in any way while it melts, on the grounds that c'mon, it's sugar, what's the worst that can happen?

Spend half an hour scraping the resulting grey unappetising crackling mass off the bottom of the pan.

Start again with a 20cm pan full of sugar. Wait for 40 minutes without stirring, and marvel at the resulting golden brown caramel.

Misread instruction about leaving caramel in melting pan and adding apples, and instead pour caramel into tarte tatin tin, and then try to add apples. Realise that as soon as caramel is taken off the heat, it hardens almost instantly and sticks in a particularly stubborn manner  to whatever it was touching when it hardened. Spend another half an hour trying to melt the caramel off a variety of pans, spoons, knives, forks.

Eventually get the damn thing into the oven. Remove from oven after 20 minutes to find your tarte tatin looks like this - so far so good:

Put pretty silver patterened serving plate over top of dish, and quickly flip the entire thing over while simultaneously trying to dodge any hot caramel spillage.

Put plate down on work surface, and hear glorious sound of tarte tatin dropping out of the cooking dish onto the serving plate.

Whisk cooking dish away to reveal a perfect tarte tatin in all its delicious caramelly buttery appley glory:

Squeal with glee like a little girl at how delectable it looks:

Serve as dessert to a family whom you have sneakily force-fed with such huge amounts of braai food that they are unable to manage more than half the tarte tatin before throwing in the towel.

Eat the rest yourself. Muwahahaha!