TWD: French Pear Tart, My First Successful Attempt!
Lovely, sweet and absolutely delicious!! As I’m extremely pleased with the result, I am still grinning away while typing this. Readers who have read my previous post about my Twofer Pie will come to know that my crust went totally wrong. But this time, it’s perfect for me! The right amount of butter and proper tart pans were used and the French pear tart came out looking so good.
The recipe uses a sweet tart dough to make the crust which is actually cookie dough. It’s the base for French sables or shortbread. As I do not have a food processor, I used my hands again to rub in the butter into the flour. I halved the recipe to make 2 small tarts. Best of all, there wasn’t a need to roll out the dough. All I need to do was to press the dough into the fluted tart pans.
Canned pears were used as I couldn’t find any fresh pears in the supermarket. You can replace with other fruits like peaches, it should work well too. I didn’t really understand the instructions on the arrangement of the pears on the tart as there wasn’t any photo that came along with the recipe. My first tart looked weird and ugly as it was my first time arranging fruits on a tart. B came to my aid and helped me arrange the pears for the second one. Boy, the tart looked quite professionally done. He insisted that I take a photo of both the tarts to show everyone who did a better job.
A little problem I encounter was when the tarts were in the oven baking, the almond cream overflowed. The one that was nicely arranged had a lot of cream flowing out. I guess it’s because there were more slices of pears? And this one, the almond cream didn’t set well, still soggy after it was baked. Perhaps I forgot to pat the pears dry before putting them on the tart. On the other hand, the uglier tart didn’t have the almond cream ooze out much, and set much better.
With the nice sweet aroma lingering in the kitchen, I couldn’t wait to eat the tart! Just a few quick shots of the pear tart, I quickly got a knife to slice the tart. Oooo… Awesome!! It’s a little tart and I thought it tasted a bit like pineapple tarts. The almond filling goes so well with the pear and the sweet tart. It’s pretty hard to impress B but he commented that this pear tart is good. And that puts a smile on my face.
This week’s recipe is chosen by none other than the author of the book herself, Dorie Greenspan, for the first Tuesdays with Dorie bake for the year 2009. With Dorie choosing this French pear tart, this must be one of her favorites. It indeed was a very satisfying dessert. Thanks, Dorie!
