Butter Tarts Bake-Off

On Friday I came across this ad:

3rd Annual Great BC Bake-Off
Think you’ve got superior baking skills?
Prove it in our amateur baking contest!
Enter all three categories or just one.

1. Fruit Pie – any kind of fruit cherry, peach, apple, berry etc.
2. Open – anything goes within the outlined rules – entries must not require refrigeration
3. Butter Tarts  – this is a Canadian competition after all!

How could I possibly resist? Answer: I couldn't. My first thought was to enter all three categories, but that I actually had plans last weekend so I didn't really have time to do a bake-a-thon. For some strange reason I decided on butter tarts. I don't even really like butter tarts. I am not a pastry person. It's a guilt laden confection full of butter, or as I found out in my preceding research, lard - more on this later.

It's tart time. *Rubs hands together excitedly*. Normally I would go straight to google, but this, this is butter tarts. Butter tarts are an old people thing (and I say that affectionately). This is a grandma recipe - I phone her immediately. Her phone is busy. sigh. Three minutes later, she calls me back at work - the old broad has call display! I ask Nancy for her recipe, which she digs up and recites for me. The pastry recipe is my great grandma's. Apparently she was a great and avid baker. Must be where I got my mad skills from. My grandma then tells me she almost always just uses pre-made, frozen tart shells - such an ungradma move ***Face Palm*** twenty-five minutes of chit chat with grandma and I am armed with a butter tart recipe that looks deceivingly simple. I get scared and turn to google to counter research. At the same time I throw out some feelers in the office to see who has butter tart experience, advice or preference - there are lots of takers and I file their comments under 'uninformed nonsence'.

My research results pretty much showed that butter tart recipes are all fairly similar. There are only a few ingredients, so the amounts range slightly and there is a grand debate on whether or not adding nuts in is OK. I immediately, without a second thought, deemed nuts a Yes - pecans are god's gift to baking. In regards to pastry, all signs pointed me in the direction of the Tenderflake Pastry Recipe. It's as old as the hills (total grandma saying) aka tried, tested and true. For those of you who don't know- tenderflake is a brand of Lard. LARD! I've spent 25+ years avoiding lard. I don't even know, or want to know what it consists of. The fact that it doesn't need to be refrigerated, is colorless and mostly tasteless are enough for me to kill any and all Lard-yearnings. However, I sometimes must concede my snot-face and just bite the bullet and join the masses in their lardy lifestyles.

I borrowed Mom's tart tins, I believe they were wedding gifts to her 33 years ago. I thought it was kind of neat that I was using vintage tins to bake an old family tart recipe (kind of). Turns out old pans suck- they are not non-stick. Insert super aggrieved face. My first three dozen- that's 36 bloody tarts - stuck to the stupid vintage tart tins. I probably spent 1.5 hours rolling, cutting and filling those old, ugly tins. I even used an adorable flower shaped cookie cutter. Imagine the horror at having to scrape these pretty confections out of the tins - losing all the delicious crust of which I had so deliciately placed. IMAGINE! you probably can't. that's okay- I live that nightmare over and over again, certainly enough for the both of us. Following my scrape fest I went to bed.  By this time it was midnight. and I was tarted out.

6am, Saturday morning - up and at'em. I took my wonderfully chilled dough and grabbed my non-stick muffin tins and made fast work of three more batches. I even tried a batch in my new SQUARE individual brownie pan. they all came out lovely. I delivered some to neighbour Wendy and downstairs neighbour Cam. I dropped a dozen off for my parents, complete with my mom's tart tins. I packaged two dozen up to take to work on Monday and one more dozen to go to Nick's. I left a few at my house and set six aside for the Bake Off, of which I was now wavering on. Somewhere during this process, I realized that i might not be ready for a butter tart bake off. I mean, there's people who have been baking butter tarts for 30 years. I've only done one batch. True, everyone who ate them gave them a 10+ rating, but people are liars. I decided to bow out of the competition this time. I am officially on the lard bandwagon though and plan to perfect my pastry over the next little while. Pies, anyone?

 

 

Lone Dimple

"Hey, you only have one dimple," someone pointed out to me the other day. "Oh yeah!" I responded cleverly, in a super squeaky high pitched voice, face full of surprise. It wasn't even a fake mocking face of surprise either... it was an honestly shocked face. It's really not something that I've ever though too hard about.

I haven't always had this loner dimple- I think it grew in when I was a teenager. Now it's just kind of part of my face. Okay well not just kind of... it IS a part of my face. Ugh why do I use so many non-words? sigh. One day I'll get educated, I plomise.

Anyways, the reason this person pointed it out is they too had just one dimple. I think they thought this somehow provided us with an innate kinship. I disagreed. It did, however, provide me with a whole set of questions that I needed answered.

First off. Why just the one? I tried smiling super hard to see if I could make a matching one appear on my other cheek. No matter how hard I tried my left cheek refused to dimple. I examined my smile to see if perhaps it was a bit lopsided and maybe years of smiling crookedly inhibited a left dimple from forming... The only thing that proved was that I had food in my teeth.

I then checked pictures of Manda's face to see if perhaps she got the other one, but she did not- dimpleless that girl is.

So where has it gone, or perhaps more accurately, why does it cease to be? Why am I a one-dimpled-wonder? Lucky for you this is not a rhetorical question. I have answers! Their legitimacy may be arguable, but at least it'll help me sleep at night.

OK. Firstly, as per usual, Wikipedia.

Dimples may appear and disappear over an extended period.[2] Dimples may play a role in sexual selection.[3] Some cultures, for example Asian and Indo-ethnic sub-groups, prefer dimples as a sign of attractiveness and veracity.[4] Dimples may be genetically inherited and have been called a simple dominant trait.

Next, I decided to see what WiseGeek.com had to say on the subject. I tried StupidIdiot.com, but they didn't have anything to say on the topic.

The genetics of dimples is actually rather interesting. Dimples are a dominant trait, which means that it only takes one gene to inherit dimples. If neither of your parents has dimples, you shouldn't have them either, unless you experience a spontaneous mutation. If one of your parents has dimples, you have a 25-50% chance of inheriting the gene, since it means that parent inherited the gene from one or both parents. If both of your parents have dimples, you have a 50-100% chance of inheriting the gene, depending on how they inherited their dimple genes.

In most cases, facial dimples appear on the cheeks, although they can also pop up on the chin, and they are typically not visible until someone smiles. The changes in the face caused by a smile will bring out the dimple. However, some people only have a dimple on one side; this physical trait can actually be rather endearing.

Did you read that? RATHER ENDEARING! I am officially storing my dimple for special occasions now, or when I need to pull out the big guns to charm someone. Beware world!

After reading that dimples are inherited I polled the family to see who else has an affected face. You'd think I'd just know off the top of my head. You'd be wrong. Lisa says she kind of does. Amanda doesn't have bbm any more so is no longer reachable- but I am 80 percent certain her face is free of dents. I assume Mommadukes and Daddykins have or had them when they were young and fresh. If I had to take a guess, I would go with Glenn....

BREAKING NEWS> Carol just text me back. She has two dimples apparently. Interesting. Unfortunately, she's working so I can't get more than an affirmation from her at this time. Glenn's dimple status is still yet to be determined. But really, I feel my work here is done. We all can leave here a little bit more educated on something super non-consequential. You're welcome.

xo shelly.