I have Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours book and I love it. It's a great book to leaf through and look at the pictures. It contains a ton of easy to follow recipes from simple recipes to more elaborate ones, suitable to bring to a party.
I decided that it was time to make the french pear tart. The french pear tart contains a lot of almonds and the two are very complementary together. It turned out that this tart was really simple to make and one I'd make again. It contains three components:
1. Pate Sablee
2. Frangipine
3. Pears
The pate sablee is the crust and it has lots of ground almonds mixed into it. This was very simple to make, especially since I had my trusty food processor to do all of the heavy lifting for me. I particularly liked working with the pate sablee because I didn't need to roll it out. I simply made the dough and pressed it in the pan with my hands -- what could be easier?
Frangipine is the almond filling for the tart. It contains an egg, ground almonds, and butter. It's sinful but very delicious. Again, my food processor mixed everything all up in a jiffy.
It is March and I didn't think that pears were in season so that put me in a bit of a dilemma: how do I get nice, juicy, sweet pears at this time of year? Luckily for me, Dorie recommends that you use canned pears instead of fresh pears. Canned pears? Really? I don't like canned fruit but I was willing to give it a shot. If the author endorses it for the recipe then it must be adequate.
I made this in two days rather than a single day since I've got a day job and I must do something to pay the bills. ^_^ The first night I blanched the almonds and ground them up. It was my first time blanching almonds before and it was really easy to do. I forgot to take a picture of all the discarded hulls but it was quite a large amount. I had Ming to help me with the almonds and we blanched >1cup of almonds in 15 minutes. I made the pate sablee and the frangipine and put them in the refrigerator. The second day I assembled everything and put it in the oven.
As you can see, my results didn't look wonderful (I need to work on my pear arranging skills) but it was very tasty. This recipe is a keeper and I'll be making it again in the future
Side view of the tart
Close up
