A divine dish created quite by accident!

Have you ever had an accident in the kitchen or made a mistake with a recipe, only to realise you've inadvertently created a masterpiece? The infamous and gorgeous dessert, the tarte tatin, is probably one of the best examples of this to date.

The tarte tatin is an upside-down apple tart where the apples are caramelised in butter and sugar before the tarts are baked. Tradition says the tarte tatin was first created by accident at the Hotel Tatin in Lamotte-Beuvron, France in 1898. The hotel was run by two sisters, Stephanie and Caroline Tatin. There are conflicting stories concerning the tarts origin although the prominent one is that Stephanie, who did most of the cooking, was over-worked one day. She started to make a traditional apple pie but left the apples cooking in the butter and sugar for too long. Smelling the caramel she tried to rescue the dish by placing the pastry base on top of the pan of apples and quickly finished the cooking by putting the whole pan in the oven

After turning out the upside-down tart, she was surprised to find how much the hotel guests appreciated the dessert and a classic was born.

The tarte tatin became a signature dish at the Hotel Tatin and the recipe spread through the Sologne region. Its lasting fame is probably due to the restaurateur Louis Vaudable, who tasted it on a visit to Sologne and made the dessert a permanent fixture on the menu at his restaurant Maxim's of Paris.

The tarte tatin is really so easy and such an impressive dessert served with crème anglaise or vanilla bean ice-cream, and it is a dessert you can whip up in no time at all. All you need to do is sauté some sugar, butter and roughly sliced golden delicious apples, in an oven proof pan until caramelised. Top with a bit of puff pastry and place in a nice hot oven at about 200°:C and bake until puffed up and golden.

How amazing is that! I want my chicken liver paté with blood-orange marmalade to be that popular — the marmalade being used one day because I ran out of the usual quince paste combo and had to improvise. A sprig of thyme topped it off and it's been a hit ever since.

My executive chef, Adam Wilcox, has a good one, too. It's his extraordinarily beautiful sweet corn and pickled ginger soup, which he created out of complete laziness. Could he be bothered to sashay across our production floor to the cool room that housed the ginger? Nooo … he’s too lazy! So instead, with great success, he substituted fresh ginger for the pickled variety, which was ready at hand. Wow! How the pickled ginger brings a whole new exciting layer to what could normally be described as quite a pedestrian and ordinary dish.

It’s the star anise that accidentally made its way into our bean gumbo, and the olives that substituted the missing capers that went into our Logue’s Friday night tuna pasta, that are the quirky mishaps that have given these dishes their "wow" value.

Click here for lazy Adam's sweet corn and pickled ginger soup

As I was researching the tarte tatin, I came across a fabo recipe for a banana version in the cook book Matt Moran (Lantern) by Matt Moran and I wondered: Had he run out of apples and decided to use the banana instead? Then when I cooked it up and tasted it, I realised, this master made no mistake. There were no accidents here; he is brilliant and yes, it had been totally premeditated. It was simply sublime!

YOUR SAY: Have you got a great dish that was created by accident?