Almond Apricot Tart

Right around the time when Mini was going on her cherry pie reverie, I woke up with a craving for almond apricot tart. Which is sort of strange because 1)I don't know if I've ever had one before and 2) I don't really care for fresh apricots. However, I firmly believe that cravings are your body's way of telling you what your cells are starving for, and apparently my cells spent all night yelling "FRANGIPANI!!"

Almond Apricot Tart


4 tablespoons butter
1 cup sliced almonds (or chop them up)
1/3 cup sugar
pinch of salt
1 egg
6 apricots, sliced in half and pitted

Preheat oven to 375F.

Prebake this crust and let cool.

In the bowl of your beloved stand mixer, place butter, sugar, salt and almonds. Beat until combined -- about five minutes or more. Scrape down the bowl, and then add the egg and beat to mix.



Spoon mixture into bottom of tart shell. Top with sliced apricots. Brush tops of fruit with butter. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until the filling is golden brown. Let cool before slicing. Good with ice cream.

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Happy (*@#$^@# Birthday : Part II

This is a basic pastry cream, suitable for a whole plethora of things: filling eclairs, filling my raspberry tart, serving with fruit, bribing children, licking out of navels...whatever. You can also flavor it however you like: add chocolate, Grand Marnier, etc. But for this, since there's already chocolate and hazelnut in the crust, I kept it simple. Also, this is really easy and quick.


Pastry Cream. Or Creme Patissiere.

1 1/2 cup whole milk
1 vanilla bean, split -- or --
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 egg yolks from room temperature eggs
1/4 cup sugar
1 tablespoon flour
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 pint heavy cream

Put milk in a heavy saucepan with the vanilla bean and bring to a boil. Remove from heat and set aside.

Beat egg yolks and sugar together in a medium-sized bowl until thick and light yellow. Add flour and cornstarch and beat a bit more.

Take the vanilla beans out of the milk, scrape the insides, and put the seeds back in. If there is a skin over the milk, remove it. Now, very, very slowly add the warm milk to the eggs. The milk should not be hot to the touch. Whisk like crazy while you're adding -- you don't want the eggs to cook.


Once it's all in there, put the whole shebang back in the milk pan and put over medium heat. While stirring, let it come to a boil, and then reduce the heat to a simmer (which you won't notice because you're stirring, right?) and let it cook until thickened, which will be quite quick, and then cook for about two minutes more. If you're adding flavorings or chocolate, do it now. If you're using vanilla extract, use it here also.

Pour into a bowl and cover with plastic wrap, pressing down so the plastic wrap touches the cream. Let cool for a while, and then put in the refrigerator.

Before assembly: whip the cream and fold about half into the pastry cream.

Assemble: spoon into the tart shell and smooth. Top with raspberries. Or any fruit. Except bananas.

If you want to glaze it, you can use about a 1/4 of a cup of melted red currant jam (for red fruit) or apricot jam (for orange & yellow fruit). Glaze as close to serving as possible, though: it makes the crust soggy.

A word about this tart in general: it doesn't travel. If you're planning on bringing it to a party, you're going to have to assemble it there. Just put the cream into a container or a zip-top bag, bag up the fruit, put it all in a little cooler and hit the road. Because otherwise you will just have a tartshell full of sliding goo.

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Happy *&$%&# Birthday: Part I

So, check this out: I get a voice mail from a friend of mine last weekend, inviting me to a surprise party on the 21st for my friend Francis. And she asked if I would make a cake. Which is fine, but the 21st is MY birthday. Just to be clear: dissed by friends on birthday plus asked to bake.

Now, a better person might get angry. I, however, chose to approach it as a perfect opportunity to casually remind people at how I really felt via my favorite medium: passive aggressive behavior. That is: I said I thought it was funny, and then made sure everyone at the party heard my latest funny story. I also made this:

Raspberry Tart


Crust:

1 1/2 cups flour
1 stick unsalted butter, very cold and cut into 1/2 inch pieces.
1/4 tsp salt
1-2 tsp sugar*
3 tablespoons ice water
1 very good chocolate bar, chopped

*A word: This is my mom's (Mrs. Rathead) pie crust recipe, and I use it for everything, regardless of filling. If I'm making a savory filling, I leave out the sugar. In this instance, I used 2 tablespoons sugar, because I wanted it to be a bit sweeter. You can also use a butter/shortening mix if you want -- it does make a more stable crust, but don't go over 50% shortening.

Place flour, salt and sugar in the bowl of a food processor and pulse a bit to mix. Scatter butter over the top and pulse a few times until the mixture resembles coarse meal. Leaving the food processor running, add the ice water in a thin stream. Keep running until the dough forms a ball. Remove, shape into a ball, flatten, wrap in waxed paper, and let rest in the fridge for an hour or so. This will keep in the fridge for three days or the freezer for three months.

Preheat the oven to 400.

Take the dough and roll out. This will fit a 10 inch tart pan. I actually used two 7 inch tart pans and it fit both of them, but barely. Anway, roll out on a floured surface and get it into your tart pans. Trim the edges and prick all over with a fork. Put back in the fridge for about fifteen minutes. (This all works better if the dough is really cold before you bake it.)

Take a sheet of heavy-duty aluminum foil and butter it. You want to make a butter circle about an inch wider than your tart pan. Place this, butter side down, onto your chilled crust. Make sure it's touching the sides. Put your tart shell on a baking sheet, if you want (it's easier to move around.) Fill with pie weights (I used dried peas).

Bake for 15-20 minutes, then take out and reduce the heat to 375. Let the crust sit for a minute or two while you drink the aroma of toasted pea pie. Take off the tin foil and put back in the oven for about five minutes, until golden brown.

Let cool completely.

Either in a microwave, in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over extremely low heat, or in a double boiler (or, if you're me, in a copper jello mold shaped like a fish over a saucepan of barely simmering water) melt your chocolate.

A word: If you are going to melt chocolate all by itself, I recommend using one with a lower content of cocoa. You know how all the fancy chocolate bars are all "85%" like they think they're better than you? Chocolate with that high cocoa content burns really easily. For this, I used a Valhrona bar with 61% and it melted like a dream. Also, it had hazelnuts in it, which I didn't see when I bought it, but it worked great.

Spoon or pour the melted chocolate into the pie crust and spread with the back of a spoon until the entire bottom is evenly coated. Let cool, or chuck into the fridge for a minute or two to set.



I'll do the rest of this in a separate post.

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