Apple Mosaic Tart with Salted Caramel

Not a lot of time but severely backlogged on posts, so here’s a quick one!

I made this as part of Christmas dinner dessert (yes, very late on these posts) for my dad and I as the final round to my Holiday Bake-A-Thon 2012. He’s diabetic and while I’ve tried to make diabetes-friendly baked goods before, they just aren’t the same. So, I found a dessert recipe on Smitten Kitchen with relatively low sugar in it.

Most of the sweetness comes from the apples. I picked Fuji for this batch since they’re naturally a bit sweeter than Granny Smith. I also cut down on the amount of sugar that the recipe called for to be sprinkled on top of the tart prior to its first round in the oven. This tart wasn’t that hard to make, but it was definitely tedious making every thinly sliced apple layer perfect within the visual masterpiece. While the tart was baking, I started the salted caramel in the last 10 minutes of baking time.

This was my first time making anything with puff pastry, though I’ve eaten my fair share of homebaked goods entailing aforementioned flaky layered goodness… enough to know there are a lot of bad puff pastries out there. I used DuFour puff pastry for this and don’t recommend anything less – it’s the best stuff money can buy and worth every penny! Smitten Kitchen recommends it too!

My dad and I ended up eating about 2/3 of the tart after our hearty dinner (which I’ll post about eventually!). It was so addicting hot out of the oven, and would have been absolute heaven with some cinnamon ice cream on top!