For Thanksgiving this year, we hosted a small dinner at our house for family. Food was a joint effort: my husband took charge of the turkey and creamed spinach, my cousin Cindy brought the stuffing and brussel sprouts, and I made a potato tart and handled dessert. The Baked Sunday Mornings group helped test the recipes in Baked Occasions, and it so happens that I tested both of the recipes in the cookbook provided for Thanksgiving, a Brown Butter Apple Cranberry Galette and a Sweet Potato Tart with Gingersnap Crust and Heavenly Meringue. I thought both recipes were terrific when I tested them. But I wanted to serve a more formal dessert, so I decided to go with the Sweet Potato Tart.
I decided to try a new gingersnap recipe to make the cookies needed for the tart crust, from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie (I generally make my own cookies when they're required for crusts, with the exception of graham crackers). One of the reasons I chose this recipe was because the headnote describes the cookies as having a crisp texture, which I thought would be particularly well-suited for grinding into a crust.
To make the cookie dough you cream room temperature butter with sugar and chopped crystallized ginger until light; beat in eggs; add molasses and lemon zest; and incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, ground ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and salt). You need to chill the dough for at least 30 minutes before baking. I used a #50 scoop to portion out balls of dough, which I flattened and sprinkled with sanding sugar before baking.
Perhaps I underbaked these a bit (even though I kept them in the oven a few minutes longer than specified), because the cookies were not crisp as I had hoped. They were quite chewy and were on the softer side of the spectrum. In any case, they were still delicious, and they ground up nicely to make crumbs for the tart crust. Because the Sweet Potato Tart will be coming up on the Baked Sunday Mornings schedule at some point in the future, I'm not going to go into detail about it now; I'll save that for a Baked Sunday Mornings post.
For now I'll just leave you with the above photo. My meringue was unfortunately a little flat and I happened to run out of butane as I was trying to brown it with my kitchen torch. But this tart doesn't even need the meringue; it was freakin' delicious. And the intensely flavorful gingersnap crust might be the best part -- it had just the perfect amount of spice and was a wonderful complement to the sweet potato filling. I'm definitely going to stick with this recipe to make cookies for this tart crust in the future. It was well worth it to make the gingersnap cookies just to be able to enjoy the tart!
Recipes: "Gingersnaps" from The Good Cookie by Tish Boyle, and "Sweet Potato Tart with Gingersnap Crust and Heavenly Meringue" from Baked Occasions by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.
I decided to try a new gingersnap recipe to make the cookies needed for the tart crust, from Tish Boyle's The Good Cookie (I generally make my own cookies when they're required for crusts, with the exception of graham crackers). One of the reasons I chose this recipe was because the headnote describes the cookies as having a crisp texture, which I thought would be particularly well-suited for grinding into a crust.
To make the cookie dough you cream room temperature butter with sugar and chopped crystallized ginger until light; beat in eggs; add molasses and lemon zest; and incorporate the dry ingredients (flour, ground ginger, baking soda, cinnamon, cloves, and salt). You need to chill the dough for at least 30 minutes before baking. I used a #50 scoop to portion out balls of dough, which I flattened and sprinkled with sanding sugar before baking.
Recipes: "Gingersnaps" from The Good Cookie by Tish Boyle, and "Sweet Potato Tart with Gingersnap Crust and Heavenly Meringue" from Baked Occasions by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.
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