Welcome to a special, unsanctioned edition of the The Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off. Usually, Kelsey and Chris attempt to complete the technical challenges from the newest season of The Great British Bake Off in their own home kitchens, with the same time parameters as the professional-grade bakers competing on the show. Today they are just baking, as a treat.
There is something worse than Stockholm syndrome, and it is whatever disease the two of us have. Sure, it seems bad enough to develop positive feelings toward your captors in your trapped state. But imagine being freed from captivity—allowed to do whatever you want—and choosing to return. We could have spent last Friday afternoon reading a novel leisurely, going for a walk outside, or planning our summer gardening. Instead, your beloved Defector Idiots erected a makeshift tent and chose to enter it.
It has been long enough. A mammoth three months have passed since last season's finale. Like someone who gives birth, we had forgotten about the pain and suffering of the tent.
That's not actually true, though. That's a convenient metaphor. The truth is bleaker. We remember that the tent made us miserable. We remember that we hate Paul Hollywood. We remember that the timer haunts us even in our waking days. And yet ... we crave the tent. Is this masochism? No. It's worse. It's a desire that cannot be expunged and which we are stuck with forever: the desire to make something with your damn hands!
So, on a whim, we erected the tent. When we published the finale of last season's baking tournament, commenter iamjen said, "Honestly, I'd read the hell out of you both making something like, normal. Maybe just once as a special treat." Congratulations, iamjen! We did it! You can read it now.
This week, we have prepared for you tarte soleil, a pull-apart bread appetizer that looks like a sun and is made of puff-pastry. There was no time limit for this bake, on account of us being in charge of this illegal tent. We ended up baking for about three-and-a-half hours. Here is what happened:
Kelsey McKinney: Well well well! Hello Chris! Fancy seeing you here in this very impromptu and extremely unofficial tent, which I have erected with no warning or forethought for us!
Chris Thompson: This is one of those fancy camping tents. Not like a wedding tent, but like something that is bigger and roomier than you expect, in the sense that evidently it can hold multiple ovens.
KM: Like a circus tent, but white! Certainly it is a bigger tent than the one on the Great British Bake Off, I think, because there is more luxury here. Would you like to explain to the people, from your perspective, what we are doing here? The show isn’t even in season right now!
CT: Certainly. There I was, minding my own business, when here comes my friend Kelsey McKinney, hunting around for ideas for a baking project. And you know when the words “Kelsey McKinney” and “baking” come together in my brain, I am thinking of one thing: CHAOS MODE.
KM: We were kind of predisposed to be thinking about CHAOS MODE. Maybe it came up in a meeting or something recently? Or maybe I’m becoming more mentally ill each year and missing the tent earlier and earlier.
CT: Truly it is never very far from my brain anymore. As I understand it, you needed to come up with something reasonably impressive to bring to a social gathering.
KM: Yes! Correct! My friend Hira (who is very cool and has lots of cool beautiful friends) invited me to an Iftar party, and I was supposed to bring something with me. Obviously, you cannot bring wine to this, so I needed a food. Then suddenly, I realized that I did not have a go-to party dish, and I felt very overwhelmed.
CT: To me, there is maybe nothing more intimidating than being asked to bring food to a gathering of cool and beautiful people. Terrifying! It’s bad enough having to bring myself to such a gathering.
KM: Exactly! To be clear, no one asked me to be terrified. I could have rolled up with like a bag of delicious pistachios, and it would have been fine. But the bar for myself is so high! I wanted to bring something celebratory to the Hot Girl Iftar!
CT: My first suggestion—possibly because I had just eaten this item and enjoyed it a lot—was the apple turnover. Delicious, not very hard to make, reheats reasonably well, has icing (fancy).
KM: This was such a good suggestion, but because it was a fast-breaking meal, I felt that it should be savory.
CT: You presented me with this notion, and while I was scratching my head and gazing off into the distance, you hit me up with a pair of French words that I have never seen before: Tarte soleil.
KM: Well, you had INSPIRED me by reminding me that puff pastry exists. And I wanted to actually bake, which means I wanted to do a lot of steps, so puff pastry was perfect.
CT: This tarte soleil business, is this something you’ve had before? Long admired from afar?
KM: I have long admired it from afar! I love things that look like the sun (including the actual sun), and the tarte soleil is essentially two circle pieces of puff pastry slapped together with filling inside of them. I love filling! I love puff pastry! I love the sun! It feels very celebratory to me!
CT: Yeah! It has some of what is good about a turnover, but in basically a pizza form, and it can be made savory. Whereas basically no one would accept a tapenade turnover.
KM: I felt extra sold on it because you found a nice Deb Perelman Smitten Kitchen recipe that we both kind of decided to ignore, but was very inspirational. Why did you decide to do this with me?
CT: Well, last week I was home alone for a few days and feeling aimless, so the idea of taking on a fun cooking project was appealing. And I do like puff pastry. Also, Deb’s recipe seemed extremely delicious to me, and I was excited to eat this thing. And then I just thought about having a few hours of CHAOS MODE, but without the actual time pressure, and the weird part of my brain that thrives on this madness fired up.
Ingredients and Shopping
KM: The first question here, I guess, is what were you making? Because we were both kind of going rogue, our ingredients might have been different!
CT: Right. So Deb’s recipe uses frozen puff pastry, which presented a problem for us because we wanted to make puff from scratch. Right away, we were deviating from any recipe. This led to a sense of freedom in the selection of ingredients. We do not often get to enjoy the luxury of choice in our baking challenges, bound as we normally are to the limitations of Paul Hollywood’s imagination.
KM: For people asking Why would you make puff from scratch when you could simply buy some at the store, is it your first day here? Please go back to the beginning and read the other installments of this column. This one is particularly demented. Chris and I are beyond help. We have lost our damn minds.
CT: Honestly, there are many much worse ways of spending a couple hours of time than making rough puff. Try it sometime! It's fun!
KM: It’s so fun! And honestly, even if it doesn’t work, it still tastes good. It’s just butter!
Anyway, we did end up kind of shackling ourselves to Paul Hollywood, because you had a recipe of his for the turnovers.
CT: Yeah, I’ve bookmarked a Paul Hollywood turnover recipe, because every time I make rough puff I have to remind myself of the ingredients. Which, I’ll admit, isn’t all that common a thing! But this will be at least the second puff pastry thing I’ve made since we wrapped the most recent round of Not-So-Great Defector Bake Off, so it does come in handy sometimes.
For my filling, I went with basil pesto, low-moisture mozzarella, and a sprinkling of toasted pine nuts. These are just things I like to eat. What about you?
KM: I also went with “flavors I like,” which meant that I decided to use Castelvetrano olives. This was also convenient, because I had a lot of these without the pits in my fridge, and I like the ones with the pits much better, so I kept not eating them. I decided to turn them into a kind of pesto, like you, by adding garlic and lemon zest and walnuts and parsley!
CT: Delicious! I assume this was wonderful to eat. Did you have any shopping to do for your ingredients?
KM: Oh my god. OK, so I did, but it is because I googled “is butter halal” and learned that not all butter is, but that some Kerrygold is. God bless the Irish. So I went to get Kerrygold butter at the store, and unfortunately I also needed eggs, because we needed to do an egg wash. While I was there, I bought pomegranate seeds impulsively, like I'm a millionaire or something, and I also bought yogurt so I could make a little side dip! Did you have to shop?
CT: I did, for basil and mozzarella. I almost always have pine nuts in my pantry, because every other time I make pesto I buy a stupid amount of pine nuts. Everything else was already on hand.
KM: That’s me with the walnuts, which is why I used those instead! It’s funny, because the recipes we chose (made up) were just “shit we like,” we had all the flavors already. Instead of being forced to buy …I don’t know … currants.
CT: Freakin’ currants. And jam sugar. Those bastards.
KM: No thank you! I want to be fully honest and admit that I also bought some vegetables, so in case my bread completely failed, I could at least bring the dip and pretend I had intended to make a crudité all along.
CT: That was smart. As I had no social obligations, I allowed myself no backup. It was tarte soleil or bologna sandwiches, or both. Or neither! I’m my own boss!
KM: I love the idea that your idea of a “bachelor meal” is making a full tarte soleil from scratch. Masculinity can be so beautiful.
Stage One: Making Dough, Making Filling
CT: We had no timer for this bake, but I think we both found it hard to escape Timer Mentality.
KM: God. I really had a hard time breaking that habit. The minute I messaged you that I was beginning, I began darting frantically back and forth. I didn’t need to do this!! But I have been cursed in body and soul, I guess. The tent comes for you. Did you have any Chaos Mode symptoms?
CT: I found myself engaging in the usual rituals of, like, getting myself psyched up for a major challenge, as if I was about to summit some huge mountain. I had to remind myself, a lot, that I was just baking something in my own kitchen, at my own pace—a totally normal and not stressful thing to do. Even well into the bake, I found myself reflexively glancing at the timer over my stove, even though I had not set the timer and it was not ticking.
KM: I think we should note that we were also both actively trying to have a good time. We were doing things the slow, beautiful way. We were doing this for fun! It was a Friday!
CT: Yeah! Unfortunately, we did pick a bake that imposes a certain amount of time pressure on the baker, although certainly nothing like the hard time limit of a technical challenge. Puff pastry has to be handled delicately and efficiently in order to produce a good thing to eat. You can’t take quite as much time as you might like to finesse the dough.
KM: The thing I found the most freeing was that I was able to think more about what I wanted to do, and trust my instincts throughout, because I wasn’t on a super strict time schedule. The first thing I did was mix my dough: flour and salt and a little butter. I made a double batch because I wanted to have a big tarte. That was easy enough, but my dough was kind of messy, so I let it rest for 10 minutes in the fridge before rolling it out to add the grated butter. This felt like a LUXURY! I loved it!
CT: I also mixed the dough ball first. I have come all the way around on the rub-in method of adding cubed butter to dry flour, and now I love doing it and find it pleasingly meditative. I rubbed butter into flour and then added splashes of ice water, just enough to allow the dough to cohere. I have learned via many failures that you have to err on the side of too little water, and I now have a certain unexpected level of confidence in this task. Even with the phantom timer bearing down on me, I really enjoyed this early phase of the bake.
KM: I love doing that too! It’s very satisfying. It was kind of funny to actually read a Paul Hollywood recipe instead of … uh … just flailing around based on vague words. And I liked his description of it as a “breadcrumb consistency.”
CT: Ha! The first time I read that, years ago (possibly in a Prue recipe), I was actively angry about it, because I simply could not produce something that felt like breadcrumbs. But I no longer worry about this. I have transcended worry.
KM: I think the British are blitzing their breadcrumbs a lot more than us, to be honest.
CT: I mean, it truly would not surprise me at all to learn that no one rubs in their butter anymore. We are losing recipes!
At what point did you begin on your filling? During this first chilling, before folding?
KM: Before the first fold, I found my molcajete. You had said you were making your filling by hand, and I was so jealous. I knew it was somewhere in my kitchen, but it was unclear to me where. Once I found it (on a shelf!), I removed my dough from the fridge, and my butter from the freezer, and I grated it and folded it. The Kerrygold butter was so much more yellow than the normal butter I usually buy (cheaper), so this was very satisfying.
CT: Those Kerrygold folks know how to make a tasty butter.
I have allowed myself to be browbeaten into making pesto in a mortar and pestle whenever it is possible, and because we were allowing ourselves to move at whatever pace in this bake, it would’ve felt somehow like a cheap shortcut to go processor mode for this step. So I hauled out the big granite sucker and got to grinding and smashing, also after I did the first fold.
KM: God. It’s so fun to use a giant rock in another hollowed out rock and smash stuff. I was genuinely having a great time smashing stuff in there. It was, however, rather slow to get it to the consistency I wanted. After the first rest, I was still making my filling, so I stopped and pivoted. I pulled my doughs out, rolled them, and folded them again. Then I went back to grinding stuff up with the rock. Was yours faster?
CT: Well, it certainly was not fast. I am checking the Slack record, and it appears that at least 39 minutes passed while I was smashing together my pesto. It felt twice as long. Had we been under the gun, I might’ve thrown my mortar and pestle through a window. This activity is very tiring on the forearms and wrists.
KM: The whole time I was making the pesto, I was thinking about just the concept of being in an Italian villa. I was imagining that I was doing this in some sun-drenched kitchen where my friends were drifting in and out while drinking white wine. I really liked doing it. It felt very romantic to me to be folding the dough and making the filling with my hands.
Stage Two: Laminating
CT: I did not do the second fold mid-pesto. I don’t know if this means that my dough sat in the fridge too long or whatever, but it never seemed to cause a problem, except for my tired elbows.
KM: I still don’t really understand the science of rough puff, to be honest. I’m just doing some folds until I feel like the dough REALLY does not want to be rolled out, and then I’m like good enough!
CT: Yes. The problem I’ve run into in the past with rough puff, in times when I’ve been too aggressive rolling it or too ambitious with the numbers of folds, is that the dough layers break down, and the grated butter and shredded dough just become this mess with no structure. But other than that, I still don’t really know if I’m supposed to be promoting gluten development or inhibiting it. I just really like the rolling and folding.
KM: If you’re a pastry chef, can you tell us in the comments or something? We are just two idiots rolling and folding and vibing. Sometime between my second and final fold, I had to scrape all the filling out of the molcajete to have enough room in there to grind up the parsley. This felt crazy to me, because this worked so much better than trying to blitz herbs in a food processor. The leaves actually became fully mushed!
CT: You’ve got mushing skills!
So you did three folds? I also did three folds. I think Paul’s turnover recipe calls for two folds, but it’s hard for me to accept that I can’t get a third (or possibly even a fourth or fifth) fold in there. Gimme the flakes! Baklava has like one hundred damn layers.
KM: Something about an even number of folds feels very cursed to me. I can’t explain it. If I thought the dough would let me fold it five times, I would have loved to do that. I just kind of want to fold the dough forever, if we are being honest. I love the flakes. But baklava is filo dough, right? It’s not laminated? Didn’t we do that at some point?
CT: Sure, baklava is a different dough, but what I want is All Those Layers.
I also love doing the folds. I’ve gotten better at rolling dough out into a decent rectangle, whereas a couple years ago I was rolling awful amoebas and the folds were just so cursed.
KM: I also noticed that! My doughs are kind of behaving now. They fold up and look like the dough on the actual shows. Whereas before I just had a big globby oval that was kind of smushed together. Very well-behaved dough!
CT: Did you at any point put your dough into the freezer?
KM: Oh. Actually, I put it into the freezer for the first five minutes after I handled each turn and then into the fridge for the rest. I’m not sure why I did that, now that you ask.
CT: This was smart, I think. The idea is to keep the butter as cold as possible, but without requiring that the folds take all day. I never used my freezer, but when it came time to assemble I wished that I had, just so the dough could be that much colder and somewhat more resistant to the extra time it spent out in the air.
KM: My kitchen is also pretty cold, so that really helps me with a bake like this, even though it destroys me any time we make a dough that rises. I wish we could have kept folding for a lot longer.
Stage Three: Rolling, Cutting, Filling, Brushing
CT: So you had a big damn envelope of dough! I keep forgetting that you doubled the recipe. This was a big sucker!
KM: No! I had two regular-sized envelopes of dough! I made them separately the whole time! I don’t like it when the dough becomes too big. It stresses me out.
CT: OK, that was the right call. I was suddenly picturing you rolling out this table-sized rectangle of dough and then having to grate an ungodly amount of cold butter to cover it.
KM: No, no, no. But I did have a LOT of dough.
CT: When it came time to roll it out and cut it, I assume you just cut one circle per envelope?
KM: What I did was I traced a bowl onto parchment paper, and then I rolled out one dough, cut out my circle, and put that circle on a cookie sheet in the freezer, while I did the next envelope of dough. I had so much dough left over, which felt wasteful. My partner was also not going to the party with me, and I felt sad that I was taking the whole delicious treat. So instead I went ahead and used the scraps to make another half circle from each envelope. Did you have extra dough?
CT: I did. I cut my envelope in half and rolled out the first half, and then used a dinner plate to trace a circle in it. Then I repeated this with the other half. But after I was done I was really struck by how much leftover dough there was on the counter. It felt very wasteful, but the scraps were too ragged to form into another baked item, and I knew if I just baked them like chips or whatever that I would spend the rest of the night snacking on puff pastry, which would be bad. But it annoyed me to waste so much dough.
KM: Would that have been so bad? It seems delicious!
I think it’s really nice that the instincts we are building are kind of shared! We have learned so much! It is pretty annoying that you can’t just like ... shove the scraps of rough puff together and roll them out like you can with other doughs. At this point, did you put your filling on a circle?
CT: Right, I mean I could’ve tried that, but I’m sure by the time the dough had gone through all of this it would’ve lost all of the qualities that make puff pastry yummy.
Yes, here is where I did the filling. For this part, I was back to the Deb Perelman recipe, following her method for spreading the filling and leaving an inch of space around the perimeter of the bottom circle. I discovered here that my pesto was significantly wetter than it should’ve been. I made the pesto as if planning to dress pasta. I definitely should’ve stopped with the oil when it had more of a wet-cement texture. Alas.
KM: Okay, but your pesto looked so delicious. Because I was making mine in the molcajete, it had the exact thickness of guacamole and looked like guacamole because it was green. But, in fact, it was olives. It was very briny and I wanted to eat it all on a chip, so this seemed good. I did not read that part of the Deb recipe and took all my filling right to within maybe a centimeter of the edge.
CT: Wow, living on the edge! The Kelsey method.
Laying the second circle over the first was no big deal, and cutting the little rays that turn it into a sun was simple enough. But I ran into trouble as soon as I started doing the signature twists that make it a tarte soleil.
KM: You also did this so quickly. You messaged that you were done, and I had maybe cut like half of mine out. Deb called for the rays of the sun to be so skinny, and I was kind of scared of accidentally cutting one off.
CT: So skinny! I had to double-check her math because I was like, “Wait, 36 rays? That cannot be right.”
KM: Imagine if we had 36 Rays on staff. The editors would never catch up.
CT: An army of Rays, absolutely dominating the blogosphere. I wonder what Devin the Dugong knows about advances in cloning technology.
KM: Good idea! Let’s ask him later.
We AGAIN had the same instinct at this point. The rays of our suns were so so skinny, and we needed to twist them. But also, they were warming up, so this was becoming harder. I threw my assembled and cut-but-not-twisted tarte into the freezer for 10 minutes only to return to slack and see that you had already done this!
CT: I also put mine in the freezer before twisting, yes, because I really felt that I’d blown it by not freezing my dough along the way. Then when I started twisting, I knew instantly that things had gone sideways. For one thing, the bottom circle of dough turned out to be a few millimeters thinner than the top one. For another, the pesto was indeed too wet. And because my dough was not cold enough, the pesto had started to soak into it, so that when I started twisting, the bottom layer of dough came perilously close to shredding even when handled very delicately. I was feeling pretty bad for those first two or three twists.
KM: That does sound very stressful and upsetting, but the idea of pesto dough is so exciting to me that I feel excited about it still. My dough actually got a little too cold in the freezer, and so then I had to wait for it to thaw for like a minute before I could get the rays to twist in a reasonable way that felt okay. It also took a while to do my twists, and because I also had a whole other half a tarte to twist, I started with that one so I could make mistakes there. This turned out to be lucky, because I ripped like four rays off the first tarte.
CT: Whoa! I never ripped any off, but I did have to handle the rays a lot more than I would’ve liked, getting my fingers all the way under them so that I could twist them without stressing them very much where they were most thin. This was messy and stressful, but by the time I’d finished I was feeling proud that I’d found a way to avoid a full-blown catastrophe.
KM: Once my suns were twisted, I found them very mesmerizing. I liked how all the rays sat together in their beautiful twisty circle.
Stage Four: Baking
KM: What temperature did you preheat your oven to?
CT: Ah ha! First I went with 425, because that was the temperature Paul had for his turnovers, and I figured that must be right for the dough he’d described.
KM: I think 425 was probably right, to be honest.
CT: Yes, probably. I then read the Deb recipe and saw that she was shooting for 325 or 350 and freaked out at the huge difference between the two temperatures. I went with Deb’s because I was, after all, making a tarte soleil. But I’m not sure this was right.
KM: I set mine at 350, and my sun took so long in the oven. If this had been a timed bake, I would have been freaking out from the beginning. Deb’s recipe said it should only take 35 minutes in the oven, and I think at the 35 minute mark, I raised the oven to 400 because I could tell it was nowhere near done, and in fact, after all of my loosey-goosey baking, I was running out of time before I needed to go to my party!
CT: Yeah! These damn tarte soleils took so long to bake! I checked in with mine at 30 minutes and it was nowhere close—pale all over and just barely gold around the edges.
KM: At 30 minutes, my tarte still looked like it had never been in the oven. Awful. At some point while my tarte was in the oven, I also made a little dip. Dips are so easy to make. I love them so much. I mixed delicious yogurt with lemon juice and za’atar seasoning and olive oil and salt, and topped it with pomegranate seeds so it would look cute for the party.
CT: That dip sounds outrageously yummy.
I never bumped up the heat in my oven, because I still do not trust my oven, but my tarte soleil wound up sitting in there for a hilariously long time.
KM: I had to bump mine, because my friend Fred (who astute readers may remember from a previous installment of this) was picking me up in a ride-share, and he texted that he was leaving his house in 10 minutes, which sent me into a frenzy. But luckily by the time he texted that he was five minutes away, my tarte looked good enough. I pulled it out of the oven and put it onto a plate and prayed in my heart that it was done. I think it spent 50 minutes in the oven in total.
CT: Yeah, that’s about as long as mine was in there, as well. Eventually, I just got sick of waiting. It never quite got the color that I would’ve wanted, but it was in there so long that I was starting to worry about it just completely drying out.
KM: Mine also did not get as crispy and golden as I would have liked. I’m not sure why! Maybe the very expensive eggs of 2025 work less well.
CT: Maybe pre-frozen puff pastry cooks differently than homemade stuff? Who the hell knows. I allowed myself to become very mildly irritated at Deb Perelman, who I otherwise consider to be the best.
KM: I personally chose to continue my eternal annoyance with Paul Hollywood. It’s not really his fault, but he’s such an easy target.
CT: Yeah, screw him.
The Finished Product
CT: Show tarte soleil?
KM: Here is my tarte soleil:
CT: Gorgeous! Nicely risen, very orderly and neat, and it looks delicious.
KM: Show tarte soleil?
CT: Here is my dreadful tarte soleil:
Flat as a damn frisbee.
KM: It looks great, Chris! What are you talking about??? I can see the layers from here! I don’t know how your layers are always so much more distinct than mine when we do the same thing. Also, yours is more gold. I was only saved by the fact that Iftars are famously after the sun sets.
CT: How was your tarte soleil to eat?
KM: I wish it had had more of a crunch to it. But it did taste good. I love those flavors, so it was a delicious treat for me. How was your tarte soleil to eat?
CT: Well. After I finished making it, it occurred to me that my wife and child were due to arrive the following afternoon, and so I convinced myself that I could leave it alone for one night and then reheat it the following day, and we could all enjoy it together.
KM: Oh no. Could you not? What happened to it?!
CT: Well. You see. They were flying home from Tennessee by way of Atlanta, and that day the American South was being hammered by huge winds and terrible thunderstorms. They wound up stranded in Atlanta for an extra night, which was terrible for my tarte soleil and also not great for them.
KM: Noooo! Nightmare for them and nightmare for you! You should not be punished for trying to be a family man! Did you try it at all, or were you too discouraged?
CT: I eventually tried it, Sunday afternoon, by which time it was stale and flabby and not really very good to eat at all. The pesto tasted yummy! But the actual pastry was lousy. A loss. We ate about an eighth of it.
KM: What we’ve learned here, I think, is that we are still better cooks than bakers. My dip and my filling were by far my most successful attempts. But people did eat it at the party! So in that way, it was a success.
CT: That’s what counts! It was, after all, a party food! A smashing success.
KM: Thank you for joining me in this impromptu and unsanctioned Chaos Mode Event, Chris. Do you think we will end up here again anytime soon?
CT: The tent is always calling. It whispers from the darkness. It pulls at our very souls.
KM: Wow. That’s haunting. Just as we are haunted by the tent.
