Crostata Con Frangipane Al Pistacchio E Rosette Di Mela

I discovered this delicious cake in the magazine “La Cucina Italiana”, and I was blown away by the look of it. Reading through the the recipe has confused me a little, because it is more in the format of the French cuisine. The note to the recipe did shed some light though: it said that this cake is a kind of a tribute to the French “Tarte Bouquet de Roses” and its creator Alain Passard, the 3-star chief of the restaurant “L’Aprege” in Paris. Which makes this tart an Italian-French one. Either way, let’s get to the baking!

Preparing the dough: mix all ingredients (see above) with a pinch of salt to a smooth, pliable dough. Add the egg yolks last. Wrap the dough in plastic wrap and let it rest for 1 hour in refrigerator.

Preparing the pistachio cream (15 minutes before the dough is rolled out): ground pistachios with the sugar in a blender. Stir the softened butter with the yogurt, giving it the pistachio mixture. Then add the egg and pinch of salt, and stir everything into a smooth, creamy mixture.

Preparing the rosettes: boil 1 / 8 gallons (700 ml) of water with the sugar. Slice apples with the peel into very thin slices (preferably with a slicing machine). Put the apple slices into sugar syrup, boil and strain. Let apples cool down, and then form them to rosettes (you need approx. 3 apple slices per rosette).

Baking: Roll out the dough approx. 1/8″ (3-4 mm) thick, place it  in a 10 1/4″ (26 cm) round baking pan. Pull up the dough so that it is completely covers the pan’s walls. Fill in  the pistachio cream up to approx. 3/8″ (1 cm) below the top edge. Put the pan in the oven and bake for about 35 minutes at 330F (170C).
Take the pan out of the oven, let cool down for 5 minutes – so that the pistachio cream hardens -  and insert the apple rosettes atop. Sprinkle with powdered sugar, and put back into the oven for another 10 minutes. Then let cake cool down and garnish with chopped pistachios.

Note: for the sake of photo shoot I’ve used a pan of 15 cm (approx. 6″)