French Pear Tart (TWD)

Happy New Year! Welcome to my first 2009 post for Tuesdays With Dorie, and it's a special one indeed. Our hostess for the week is none other than the baking goddess and cookbook author herself, Dorie Greenspan! Dorie has been a wonderful supporter of the TWD baking community over the past year, and her cookbook Baking: From My Home To Yours has been a wonderful source of delicious treats.

Dorie selected French Pear Tart for this week's baking exercise, and it's a perfect recipe to take advantage of the abundance of pears available right now. This tart is composed of a sweet tart shell, almond cream, and poached pears --- I know, what's not to love! I ended up with a 9" square tart and had enough extra filling for a round mini tart (as shown in the first photo).

I opted to poach fresh fruit, using bartletts for the large tart and petite seckel pears for the mini tart.

For the crust, I substituted with this recipe (I believe this is a Viennese dough, but don't take my word for it):

1 2/3 C AP flour

4 1/2 oz unsalted butter

2 egg yolks, hard cooked and seived

1/4 C sugar

pinch of salt

1/4 C ice water

Cut together the flour, butter, yolks, sugar and salt. Add ice water and form the dough into a disc. Chill for one hour.

The resulting dessert is HEAVENLY! The delicious almond cream is a perfect complement to the sweet and juicy pears, and this tart provides just enough sweetness to satisfy a sweet tooth.

If you'd like the recipe, please visit Dorie Greenspan's wonderful blog. I know that my fellow bakers are flaunting some gorgeous tarts, so make sure to visit the TWD blogroll.