A food writer has described discovering tarte soleil — a twisted French puff pastry appetizer — during a YouTube cooking show binge, calling it both "great party food" and an "upbeat celebration of the sun itself." The account, published on a personal food blog, positions the recipe as fitting for the week following the winter solstice, when daylight hours begin to lengthen again.
The dish, whose name translates roughly to "sun tart," is made from puff pastry that is twisted into radiating beams resembling a sunburst. According to the writer, the finished pastry can be pulled apart by the crunchy ends and swept through a bowl of whipped lemony feta before eating.
Why It Looks Harder Than It Is
The writer notes that tarte soleil appears to require "tweezer-level pastry cheffing" or "some advanced mathematics," but argues that most French home cooking is "remarkably simple," with soufflés and quenelles reserved for white-tablecloth establishments. The recipe, as described, requires only finding puff pastry "worth eating in the freezer case" and leaving it in the refrigerator overnight. From there, the writer claims the pastry can be brought to a party about an hour later.
The writer adds that they "leave everything to the last minute" and still managed to get the pastry out of the oven and photographed with available light before sunset, which occurred at approximately 3:22 p.m. the previous day — an apparent reference to the short daylight hours around the solstice.
The post also includes a list of recipes published on the same date in previous years, spanning from one to nine years back, as well as a parallel list for readers in the Southern Hemisphere covering the past 4.5 years.
Editorial Notes