0 Orange Tian

Jennifer from Chocolate Shavings is our host for the March 2010 Daring Bakers' challenge. She presented us with an orange tian which she made for the first time a few months ago at the Alain Ducasse Cooking School in Paris, France. An orange tian is a layered dessert: a base of pate sablee, orange marmalade, whipped cream topped with fresh orange segments and served with a caramel and orange sauce.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did not have time to make my own orange marmalade so I cannot comment on the marmalade making part of this month's challenge. Instead I used one of my favorite local brands, Frog Hollow Farm navel orange marmalade. I also skipped the caramel. I didn’t even make the pate sablee using the recipe Jennifer provided since I already had some in the freezer leftover from some previous baking endeavor.

But I do have an excuse. My March was very busy. At the office my team was at the end of our launch cycle which is typically the busiest and craziest time. To make a busy time even busier I was in Quebec for a week just days before the launch. (My vacation was planned way before the launch schedule was finalized.) I also celebrated my birthday with a lengthy (5 hour!) but wonderful dinner at Manresa in Los Gatos. We had some relatives visiting from out of town and spent a couple nights hanging out with them. And then we had two baby parties (one red egg and ginger and one birthday) to attend. This left me with hardly enough time to devote to this month's DB challenge.

I did manage to whip together a quick version of the tian. I made two 3-inch tians: one using Cuties brand mandarin oranges (see first photo above) and the other with navel oranges (see photo below). Supreming oranges is something I do often since I like the way membrane-free segments look in salads (and I prepare a lot of salads with citrus fruits). All you need is a sharp knife. I only used half the amount of gelatin in my whipped cream layer since I knew that my heavy cream had a high enough fat content to hold its shape after unmolding and I don't like that slightly rubbery texture that cream takes on when gelatin is added.

I didn't freeze my assembled tians. I just let them chill in the refrigerator until it was time to serve them. Unmolding was easy and the orange segments looked really pretty. Unfortunately, I didn't really like the taste of the final product. It tasted like whipped cream with orange segments and a sugar cookie, which is really what it was, but I guess I was hoping that the sum would be greater than all its parts. Maybe the caramel would've made a difference? Even though I was disappointed with my results, I'm glad I was able to complete this challenge.


navel orange tian

The fine print:
The 2010 March Daring Baker’s challenge was hosted by Jennifer of Chocolate Shavings. She chose Orange Tian as the challenge for this month, a dessert based on a recipe from Alain Ducasse's Cooking School in Paris.
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