Tier Tart Sept. 4-8
Having nowhere in particular to start in the the wide world of pastries, I decided to try my luck with tarts. We were on the verge of what my boss at Bollo's Cafe & Bakery called "Pie Season," and my pie game was weak to say the least. I wanted to take this opportunity to practice my great grandmother's pie crust recipe and use my completely-under-utilized Amazon Prime account to order tart pans in all sizes.
Thinking more about the dome form, I started sketching out how to combine the tart dessert with a caramel fountain spouting from the center. This idea had me thinking about how the tart could spout from the center into the caramel and make a golden honey dome of sugar that you would have to crack to get to the gooey tart center.

But this led me to the conclusion that there would be too much caramel to reasonably expect someone to eat while they enjoyed their dessert. While the experience would be something exciting, the functionality of it was not there. I decided that the caramel could possibly be used as a structural element to display the tart or tarts, taking special care to design with the material's transparency in mind. I began thinking about how I could make a tart tier display for an event where the caramel was the supporting element to the tarts.
This led to the following concept sketches:


I decided that the bottom tart would be chocolate while the top tartlet would be cream cheese. Then to link the two tarts together, each would be garnished with fresh raspberries. To see the recipes I made for each tart click on the following links:
I also keep trying to manipulate the molten caramel in various ways. This week I discovered I could brush a thin layer on to parchment paper and form it around different sized cylinders to create a spiral. Here is a picture of the first one I ever made:

This form became the essential element of a final dessert I created months later.
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