TWD---French Pear Tart

This week, to start off the new year, our Tuesday's With Dorie recipe from Baking From My Home To Yours was chosen by none other than Dorie Greenspan!  How cool is that?!  Not to mention, she picked a GREAT recipe.  Do you wonder if it was hard for her decide?  I can't wait to check out her blog post about the tart!  You can get the recipe on her link above, but I say it pretty much every week, go buy a copy of the book, if you don't have it!  It's great!  (Thanks, Dorie!)

I've never really made a tart like this before.  I've made lots of pies and galettes and such, but this was my first "tart".  Needless to say, I don't own a tart pan.  And I looked at a few places in our "smallish" city here and did not find one.  So, I made a freeform tart.  I am/was actually pretty proud of how it turned out!

I drew little lines on the back of the parchment paper at 9 inches in diameter and formed the dough around the "circle"  I tried to flute the edges a little with a cookie cutter, but you can't really tell.  There is also a bit of a ridge.  This picture is after I'd spread the almond cream on the prebaked crust.  Last time we prebaked a crust, for the Thanksgiving Twofer Pie, I thought the crust was overbaked, as did lots of others.  And I was very tempted to not prebake this crust for fear that it would also be overbaked.  Darn it all, I prebaked it anyway, and well, I also think this one is overbaked.   Bummer!  So, I probably just won't prebake crusts from the book anymore, or maybe only half the suggested time.  Now, that said, it didn't stop me from eating this tart!

The almond cream was/is delicious (I have about 1/3 of it left, what to do?!).  I even blanched, skinned, slightly toasted and ground my own almonds, never would have done that in the past!  And for the almond cream I used 1 teaspoon vanilla and 1/2 teaspoon almond extract.  Oh, I also added ground blanched almonds to the sweet tart dough (page 444 of the book).  This crust and tart really was quite simple, though it almost seemed like it wouldn't be just reading the recipe.  The recipe called for three pears.  Well, I must have found the world's largest pears----

So after slicing one and rubbing it with a little fresh lemon (I opted not to poach the pears in a sugar bath.), but I took the slices from one of the three giant pears and laid it out on the pear and decided that one would do!

Here's the tart out of the oven--a little too dark of crust for my liking, maybe it wouldn't have been so dark had it been in a tart pan, I'll betcha!

Having not seen anyone else's tarts and there is no picture of this one in the baking book, I have no idea if this looks right, but I do know it tasted great, so I don't really care how "right" it is.

A little sprinkling of powdered sugar and my perfect tart plate---

Still, just not quite enough, though pretty and tasty.

So this is how we served it.

MMMMMM, a little vanilla ice cream and caramel topping.  Now we're talking.  Go make a French tart, you'll feel all sophisticated and you'll have  a simple, yummy dessert to go with it! ; )  Great choice, Dorie, as I probably would have never picked this recipe!   Thanks.

Stay tuned for my next post, I'm branching out.....