Pear Tart (with Strawberries)

Hello everyone (everyonebeing my sister!)

I clipped the pear tart recipe out of Parade Magazine. The author is Gail Simmons, who was on Top Chef Just Desserts. I haven’t seen the show or heard anything about her, but the recipe looked delicious and I have a tendency to make dry, bland, marginally okay tasting pastries at best, so I need something in my arsenal to feed my parents when they come to visit their grandchild.

I did actually review the recipe before I started so I am improving! The first step is to butter a 9” springform pan. After Googling “springform pan” and learning it is a pan where the sides come off so you can magically slide out beautiful desserts, I decided to be cheap and just use a round cake pan I already have. In the grand scheme of things, I am not selling my baked goods and they are going to get eaten (please be eaten in lieu of thrown in the trash as inedible)!

I peeled the pears in advance of starting. This is of course where I discovered that if you buy pears five days before you use them, one will go bad in the fridge. The good news is, I had some strawberries as a back up for this recipe and I pat myself on the back as I decided to make a strawberry pear tart. As an important note, the recipe says a pound of pears cut ½” thick. I used one pear with the slices cut ¼” thick, give or take since my slicing skills aren’t that honed, and about five strawberries. In short, don’t slice up a bunch of pears or you will have pear sliced wilting in your fridge in no time. The recipe didn’t specify peeling the pears, but I did. I took half a lemon and squeezed what I think was about half of the juice over the fruit. Since the rest of the juice also ends up over the fruit later in the recipe, dividing it seems like a waste of effort.

Mixing the dry goods and setting aside was a no brainer (I did stop as I talked on the phone so I wouldn’t lose track. I’ve made that mistake before!) I started creaming the butter (which I was so proud I remembered to thaw from the freezer) without cutting it up first. This made for a slight splatter on the countertop, but I stopped, cut up the butter into little chunks and continued. The eggs blended in without drama and once the dry goods were added, sticky dough appeared. I scooped the dough into the pan with a spoon and spread it around. It ended up in the fridge uncovered so I could run to set the DVR for Mad Men. I have priorities!

Once I arranged the fruit and sprinkled on the cinnamon sugar mix (I used a heaping half teaspoon of cinnamon, who doesn’t love cinnamon?) I put the tart in the oven. I checked it at 45 minutes using a toothpick in the center and it needed more time. I gave it 5 more minutes and pulled it out of the oven and let it cool. Once it cooled for about 20 minutes I took a picture and cut into the tart. It came out of the pan cleanly after running a knife around the edge. Really, you wouldn’t even need to separate the edge from the pan if you kept the fruit from touching the pan’s edge. This is something I would watch next time. I sat down with Don Draper and wow! The tart portion is light and moist and the lemon gives the overall tang to offset the sweetness. I had two pieces (Mad Men encourages excess, you should never eat and watch simultaneously) and went to bed. This morning I brought the rest of the tart to work to avoid consuming more and it got good reviews. I guess Top Chef is Top for a reason!