This recipe is fairly easy – it doesn’t require a lot of fancy ingredients and it’s pretty simple to mix up the ingredients. The time consuming part comes with setting up the tart itself. And that doesn’t require a lot of skill either, just a lot of patience!
You will need:
- Parbaked tart shells: I recommend using the Rich Flaky Pastry with Praline Paste dough. I’ve had the opportunity to use this dough a few times now, and it’s by far and away my favorite tart dough I’ve worked with so far. The texture is fabulous and you can get a nice thin dough without a lot of cracks or breakage in the crust. The taste is great too – it’s not so sweet that you can’t use it for a savory tart, in fact I just used it for a flamiche a few days ago.
- 2 1/2 lbs of baking apples (~6 apples) Peeled and thinly sliced. I’ve used both Pink Ladies and Golden Delicious, in my opinion the Golden Delicious works much better in a pie, the Pink Ladies were a bit too tart for my taste.
- 1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice.
- 1/4 cup packed light brown sugar
- 1/4 cup granulated sugar
- 1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 1 tablespoon + 1 teaspoon cornstarch
In a large bowl combine sliced apples, lemon juice, sugars, cinnamon, nutmeg, and salt. Toss to mix. Let the apples macerate in mixture for 30 min to 3 hours at room temperature. Don’t go beyond 3 hours, otherwise you may find it difficult to handle the slices.
Once the apples have completed macerating, transfer the apples to a colander suspended over a bowl to capture the liquid. I don’t have a colander handy, so I used my tiny strainer. I really need to get a colander. My life would’ve been much simpler.
Boil the liquid with the butter down to about half it’s original amount in a small saucepan over medium high heat. In the meantime toss the apples with the cornstarch nutil all traces of liquid have disappeared.
Pour the syrup over the apples, tossing gently. Arrange the apples, overlapping the slicess in concentratic circles in the tart shell.
Keep adding slices until you have used all of the slices. Pour any remaining apple juices evenly over the apples. You should now have some beautiful rosette tarts!
Bake at 350 F for 30 minutes or until golden brown. And yes, I purposefully used my saddest looking tart that used the last remaining scraps to be baked as this was a taste test tart, and not the real deal. So your real deal tarts should look much nicer than this 
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Of course you can also make this in a regular pie pan. In this case, you will want to cover the pie with aluminum foil with 3 vents cut in and centered on a cookie sheet to prevent the liquids from boiling over. And no, you don't want it to get as brown as I let it get!
