Puffed Double Plum Tart

I started this blog to document baking through Dorie Greenspan's Baking from My Home to Yours.  I'm down to the last handful of recipes!

Today I baked the Puffed Double Plum Tart.  I hadn't gotten around to this recipe because it requires fresh plums and plum season is short.  Last week I bought some lovely plums at the local farm market and so here we go!

This recipe uses fresh plums in addition to prunes which have been simmered in a delicious sauce consisting of red wine, orange zest, orange juice, a cinnamon stick and a bit of sugar.

You roll out puff pastry, smear on a little butter and sprinkle with not-too-much sugar.

The tart bakes up beautifully!

And tastes great, too!  A wonderful pre-birthday treat.

And now I have only 8 more recipes to bake in the book:

1. Mrs. Vogel's Scherben (p. 157)
2. Parisian Apple Tartlet (p. 319)
3. Depths of Fall Butternut Squash Pie  (p. 328)
4. Rosy Poached Pear and Pistachio Tart (p. 370)
5. Honey Almond Fig Tart (p. 373)
6. Creme Brulee (p. 393)
7. Floating Islands (p. 401)
8. Chocolate Souffle (p. 406)

Peach Puzzle

A couple of years ago, I discovered this recipe in America's Best Lost Recipes.  I love peaches and I love puzzles so it seemed a no-brainer to bake this dessert.

Basically,  in a pie plate, a layer of  whole peaches is drizzled with a brown sugar syrup and topped with a biscuit topping.  Pretty standard ingredients and pretty standard assembly.  But here's the fun part:  in the center of the pie plate, you put a custard cup upside down and arrange the peaches around it.

Then you drizzle the syrup onto the peaches and top with the biscuit topping.

When it comes out of the oven, it cools on a rack for 30 minutes and then you flip it over onto a large, rimmed plate.  Voila!  A lot of the syrup has been sucked into the custard cup and can be used to drizzle over the whole dessert!  Ice cream is essential.  The room goes quiet when people eat this!

Cooling on the rack

Flipped over and beautiful!

With ice cream!

Here's the recipe (I've modified the directions just a bit):

Make the syrup by combining the following ingredients in a small saucepan and heating until the sugar dissolves and the butter melts:

3/4 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup water

2 Tbsp. butter

1/2 tsp. vanilla

1/8 tsp. salt

Prepare the peaches.  Place a custard cup upside down in a 9" pie plate.  Peel 7 whole peaches (dip them in boiling water for 30 seconds and the peels will come off very easily).  Cut the peaches in half and remove the pits.  Arrange around the custard cup.

Pour the warm syrup over the peaches.

Make the dough.

Mix together:

1 1/4 cup flour

2 Tbsp. sugar

1 Tbsp. baking powder

1/4 tsp. salt

Grate and stir in:  5 Tbsp. frozen butter.  

Add:  6 Tbsp. milk

Stir with a fork, then pat into a 9" circle.  Place the dough on top of the peaches--don't attach the dough to the edge of the pie plate.  If you'd like to cut a circle of dough out of the center where the cup is and add it to the edges, that will be fine.  (I also think your favorite shortcake/biscuit dough would work fine here.)

Place on a baking sheet.

Bake at 400 degrees for 25 - 30 minutes, until the top is golden.

Remove from the oven and put the pie plate on a rack to cool for 30 minutes.

Here's the magical part:  Place a large, rimmed plate on top of the pie plate and quickly invert the peach puzzle onto the plate.  Cut into 7 wedges.  Top with ice cream and spoon syrup over the whole lovely-tasting, summery, peach puzzle.  Yum!!

Raspberry Blanc Manger

Despite the lack of evidence on this blog, I have been baking a great deal.  I started this blog to chronicle baking through Dorie Greenspan's Baking from my Home to Yours with the other Tuesdays with Dorie bakers.  I joined the group after they had already begun and I've been playing catch up ever since.   The recipes I have left seem to have limiting requirements about them, i.e., they require some special ingredient, they need a seasonably-available fruit, or they need to be served immediately.  I am determined to finish the remaining ten recipes! Today I made Raspberry Blanc Manger (pronounced blah-mahn-jhay) which needs fresh raspberries.

I didn't even know how to pronounce this delicacy and certainly had never made one before. You start by whipping up 1 1/2 cups of cream till it forms soft peaks.  In a small pan you combine milk, ground almonds (I used hazelnuts because that's what I had), and sugar.  That gets heated till it boils.  Meanwhile in a small dish you combine a bit of water and gelatin, then heat that and stir it into the nut mixture.

Then you stir some vanilla into the nut mixture, stir in the gelatin, and cool it  in an ice water bath.  Finally the whipped cream is folded in and then some raspberries.  This happy mixture is poured into a round cake pan and put in the refrigerator to set.  I, of course, licked the bowl at this point and it was delightful~it tastes light and refreshing and will be perfect on this hot summer day.

Topped with a bit of Rich's homemade raspberry jam (heated up for easier dribbling) and some fresh raspberries, this was indeed a pretty dessert.  And as expected, it tasted light and summery.

Apologies for only posting one picture:  I've recently had eye surgery and feel rather proud of myself that I have been able to do this well!  This morning I decided to make bread in the bread machine and picked up the measuring cup to measure the flour.  I measured out 4 cups before I realized that I was using the 1/2 cup measure rather than the 1 cup!  I am so looking forward to improved vision and depth perception after the surgery on my other eye tomorrow!

Oasis Naan

Twice a month the Tuesdays with Dorie crowd bakes from Baking with Julia.  This week the recipe is Oasis Naan, a flat bread made of a very plain dough, seasoned with coarse salt, scallions, and cumin before it goes into the oven.  It's supposed to be a FLAT bread.  To make it flat, you roll it out and prick it determinedly with a fork.  Actually, you're supposed to use a special tool.  Perhaps the tool really is important, because mine were rather poofy.
Or maybe too much yeast.  Or maybe mine was determined to be poofy -- take a look at the bubble that formed when the dough was rising:

I chose to let the bread dough rise overnight in the fridge.
It rose beautifully and grew an impressive bubble!

I divided the dough into 8 more or less equal parts and let them come to room temperature.

Rolled them out, dribbled on water, pricked them, sprinkled on salt, scallions and cumin.
Into the oven on the pizza stone.

They came out poofy.  Here they are, cooling off.

Served warm with hummus, olives, carrot, celery and red pepper sticks,
stuffed grape leaves, mushroom & tomato bruschetta with parmesan . . .  

. . . an assortment of cheese and a bottle of wine!

A delightful dinner!

Hungarian Shortbread and Gooey Chocolate Cakes

It's not that I haven't been baking, it's just that I haven't been posting.  Somehow without the regular once a week deadline that I had when I was baking through Dorie Greenspan's Baking from my Home to Yours, I have fallen out of the rhythm of posting every week!  Then, too, to be honest, baking through Dorie's own recipes was much more exciting/interesting/wonderful than baking through a collection of other folks' recipes.

Today I'm catching up a bit.

I baked the Hungarian Shortbread in Baking with Julia and brought it to a potluck brunch with friends.  Highly complimented, not too sweet, pretty, easy to serve.  The technique was interesting in that you make the dough, chill it, then grate it.  I froze the dough and grated in the Cuisinarte which worked great and I used some delicious blackberry preserves which were given to us by house guests.  I think I could make this again--especially if I remember to make the dough ahead of time.

I am still playing catch-up with the last few recipes in Dorie's BFMHTY.  So last week I made her Gooey Chocolate Cakes which are made in muffin tins.  They are supposed to be served warm because they are gooey inside.  Dorie suggests using disposable aluminum tins which seem to be just the right size.  I made these to serve to a small group of people coming to our house for a meeting.  Anticipating that they would be really rich, I cut them in half, added a scoop of ice cream and a fresh blackberry.  Quite tasty!  Very chocolatey!  Really needed an ice cream friend on the plate!  

I now have just 10 recipes to bake from Baking from my Home to Yours.

This looks like a small portion, but actually it was just right.  Very satisfying chocolate, lovely ice cream, and a berry to finish it off!

Lemon Loaf Cake

This week's Tuesdays with Dorie  treat was a lovely lemon loaf cake.  You can find the recipe in Baking with Julia or on the blogs of the hosts this week:  Truc of Treats and Michelle of The Beauty of Life. 

This is a pound cake that is wonderfully lemony on its own without having to dress it up with a glaze (although that would have been good, too!).  Delightfully simple:

The zest of three lemons.

One lovely loaf.

Pizza Rustica

When I saw the title of this week's choice for the Tuesdays with Dorie bakers I was really excited.  We have been conducting weekly pizza experiments in our house--thin crusts, preheating the pizza stone to 500 degrees, lovely toppings--oh, my mouth was watering.  And then I looked at it and saw that it was more quiche-like than pizza-like.  I must admit to momentary disappointment.

Despite the name tease, this was really delicious.  The crust rolled out like a dream, and while not flaky after all that beating, it was perfect.  The filling of eggs, ricotta, and prosciutto was just right.  And it was fun to do a diagonal lattice that wasn't woven but looked quite pretty.

I made this exactly according to the recipe in Baking with Julia but I can easily imagine variations:  mushrooms, bacon, spinach would all be good.  

We ate it warm and then had it cold the next day.  They were equally yummy!  My husband has mentioned about 5 times that I can make it again any time and I'm sure that I will.