Fig & Frangipane Tart

I have been obsessed with the idea of this tart ever since I saw the tour of Paule Caillat's kitchen here. 

Paule, the owner and operator of Promenades Gourmandes, offers cooking classes & gourmet walks in Paris. I'd written to Paule during the summer in order to make reservations for my 'Paris Encore' trip in December which, quite sadly, had to postponed indefinitely. When I saw her kitchen & the photos of her fig tart I had to write to her again & ask for the recipe. It looked so beautiful. 

Paule wrote back & told me the tart was a simple sweet tart dough with crème d'amandes - which she said was butter blended into equal amounts of almond meal, sugar and 1 egg & I could use any fruit on top. I had to do a little research to find a recipe for crème d'amandes which I had initially thought would be almond pastry cream. But another look at the ingredient list told me it wasn't. And so what she probably meant was Frangipane. 

Once again, there were so many recipes for frangipane that it was hard to pick one to work with. So I just went with the first and simplest one that showed up in my google search (found it at About.com) and made the Frangipane before I started working on the tart shell. Here's the recipe I used:

Frangipane (makes enough to fill one 9" tart shell)

barely adapted from About.com

1/2 cup ground almond meal (I ground my own almonds - I think it took about 120g to make 1/2 a cup)

1/4 cup granulated sugar (I could have used a little more)

1 egg

3 tbsp butter, softened

1 tsp vanilla vanilla extract

Blend the butter with the almond meal and sugar. Add in the egg and vanilla extract, mixing till smooth. Set aside. 

Now there's no reason for me to look at recipes for sweet tart dough anywhere when I've had such great success with Dorie Greenspans' Sweet Tart Dough. However, Paule was the inspiration for this experiment and her recipe involves a completely different, very intriguing technique which I've really wanted to try out since I saw it on David Lebovitz's blog. 

The recipe requires butter, water and oil to be  to be heated in the oven after which flour is thrown into the melted mixture and everything is stirred together till it's smooth. There's no need to chill the dough or to even roll it - all you  have to do is simply press it into a pan and bake. You don't even have to add baking weights because all it needs is a few pricks with with tines of a fork. That's all. really. 

It is so simple to make and yields such a beautiful, flaky pastry shell. This dough will not let you down. Try it out the  next time you decide to make a tart. 

 Paule Caillat's French Pastry Dough

(by David Lebovitz)

(do head over to his blog to see DL's photo tutorial here)

90g unsalted butter, cut into pieces
1 tbsp vegetable oil
3 tbsp water
1 tbsp sugar
1/8 tsp salt
1 slightly rounded cup all purpose flour


Preheat the oven to 410F. 


In a medium-sized oven-proof bowl, combine the butter, oil, water, sugar and salt. 


Place the bowl in the oven for 15 minutes, until the butter is bubbling and begins to brown just around the edges. 


Carefully remove the bowl from the oven (be very careful here - it really sputters!), throw in the flour and stir it quickly. I used a whisk initially & worked it until I had large clumps of dough - then I switched over to a spatula and gave it a stir or two after which it formed a perfect ball of dough. 


I divided the dough into 4 & transferred it to my mini-tart molds, patted it down with the spatula and then worked with my fingers to press it up the sides. I allowed the shells to cool and then pricked them with a fork before par-baking them for 5 minutes. One of the shells had puffed up a little when I took it out, but I simply patted it down with the back of a spoon. 


Once the shells were completely cool, I divided the frangipane between them and baked them for 15 minutes (Paule's instructions were to bake the tart for a total of 30 mins, adding the fruit after 10 minutes - but I was using small molds so I increased the amount of time). I then layered the sliced figs on top and baked the tarts for 30 - 35 minutes. I think I over-baked a little, since I wasn't sure how long to bake them. And so my tarts looks nothing like Paule's tart, but I loved creating them.

Baking With Dorie: World Peace Cookies

It is so hard for me to describe these fabulous & famous cookies and so I can only summarize by saying that these are the most wonderful chocolate cookies I have ever had.

Closely related to sablés in texture, these cookies are light and sandy but with a stronger burst of chocolate flavor. The tiny bits of hand-chopped chocolate & intense cocoa flavor make them seem almost like a fudgy brownie. In fact the thicker they are sliced the more fudgy-brownie-like they taste because their middles are soft & the edges crispy.  I'd say this is a rather sophisticated, yet unassuming cookie.

Since I have zero will-power, I halved the recipe & wanted to use a Lindt Chili Bar in place of the dark chocolate required but then I discovered I didn't have it on hand like I usually do. So I added in just a little over 1 teaspoon of ground Chipotle Chili Pepper. That may have been a little  bit too much since I had halved the recipe - of course that didn't occur to me while adding it in. 

I had a few problems with the dough - it came together really well because I used softened butter. But after the dough had been shaped &refrigerated and I began slicing it, it would split in half. I pressed the sliced & split rounds together and baked the as they were while I refrigerated the log again. Eventually the problem solved itself when I sliced the cookies very thick which also meant very fat cookies. But I'm not complaining! 

I have to say the chipotle pepper added a deceptive heat to these cookies and, for me, it was an interesting blend of flavors. I should have added a little less chili powder because it pricked a little at the back of my throat. But here's the real surprise: my kids ate them. Not one each, but several - and they think 'the chili pepper is kind of nice' but 'these cookies are so, so good - they would be even better without the chili pepper'. I guess I was really pushing my luck with those chilies, wasn't I?

That said, I'm not done talking about these cookies yet. I wanted to compare them to chocolate sablés and figure out which I like better because I really couldn't decide.

Here are the sablés I used for comparison purposes:

One bite is never enough to decide. I took several: 

 

Was I any closer to deciding? No. 

The verdict: I love them both! The sablés taste far more buttery and were slightly little less sweet than world peace cookies.

The addition of fleur de sel  intensifies the cocoa flavor in the world peace cookies which, along with the hand-chopped dark chocolate, satisfies every chocolate craving I could ever have. They're not really like shortbread but taste more like double chocolate chip cookies with a pleasant saltiness.

Thanks for picking this recipe Rebecca! It was a wonderful way to roll in the new year. You can find the recipe for World Peace Cookies on Rebecca's blog Beurrista or pages 138-9 of Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan. 

Next up we're making Apple Coconut Family Cake. If you'd like to join our baking challenge, please email me at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

Happy New Year to you all & I hope 2011 brings peace to all mankind!

Baking With Dorie: Sablés

I love Sablés - especially chocolate ones. But since we're baking World Peace Cookies  next & they're almost Sablés-like (and may I mention they are the best cookies, ever!), I decided not to tinker with this recipe too much and wait to get my chocolate fix next time.

So I went ahead with the spice version suggested by Dorie Greenspan & while I was fumbling around in my kitchen cabinets looking for coarse sugar, I came across a packet of peppermint candy & thought what fun it would be to roll these cookies in crushed candy . . forgetting the fact that the candy would melt in the oven . . . and so 20 minutes later I was scraping all of this from the bottom of the cookies . . 

Just remind me to stick to the recipe next time! 

That said, the cookie dough was slightly tricky. I haven't made this kind of cookie in a while & Dorie's instructions said to not over-mix the dough. So I was over-cautious but then I was using a hand-held mixer so I had to beat just slightly longer than I was supposed to, and my resulting cookie-dough was just a little smoother than it was probably meant to be. 

I divided the dough and used just one half to make cookies this morning. They're really good: buttery (though not very crumbly because I figure I overmixed the dough), sandy, and taste somewhat like a snickerdoodle. But since I'm not very fond of snickerdoodles, I have a feeling I would have loved the lemon version more and intend to try it out some time between now and the next BWD challenge. 

Please do check out the other BWD bakers here. For the recipe, head over to Laurie's blog Cookin' up North, or page 131 of Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan. 

Next up, we're baking World Peace Cookies, picked by Rebecca. If you'd like to join our baking challenge, please email me at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

Baking With Dorie: Brown Sugar-Apple Cheesecake

Cheesecake had never been my forte until I discovered Dorie Greenspan. And so I felt pretty confident about tackling this recipe when Jen picked it for this week. Besides, what was not to love about the thought of apples, cinnamon and brown sugar in a cheesecake?

The only thing was - I didn't want to make a big cheesecake, but then I also didn't want to do the math & divide this recipe in half. What's a lazy girl to do? 

I didn't divide the recipe in half but baked 6 mini-cheesecakes in my muffin tin as a trial version & saved the rest of the filling to use later tomorrow. I expected an epic fail once I realized that I was out of sour cream & had to substitute with yogurt. I was sure something would happen to compromise the texture of the cheesecakes & sat around with fingers crossed the entire time they were baking.

I need not have worried because the texture turned out to be everything it promises to be: creamy without being too dense, and  the surprise layer of caramelized apples is deliciously pleasing.

This may not have been one of my prettiest BWD bakes, but whatever it lacked in visual appeal is made up for by its' apple-infused dreamy-creaminess. 

Thanks to Jen for picking this recipe this week! Please head over to Jen's blog for the recipe, or to pages 238-9 of Baking: from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan. Do head over to the blog roll & check out how the other BWD bakers' did this week. 

Next up, we're baking Sables (picked by Laurie). If you'd like to join our baking challenges, please drop me a line at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us! 

Taste & Create: Aloo Fry (a Potato Curry)

This is my first time participating in Taste & Create & I've been paired with Padmajha of Seduce Your Tastebuds. Padmajha has a treasure of Indian vegetarian dishes featured on her blog and I would have loved to try some of the ones I've never heard of before. But I had to pick something simple due to time constraints & so I went with Aloo Fry.

This is a simple, flavorful side dish that requires little preparation. I followed Padmajha's recipe exactly and the only minor changes I made was to add a squirt of lemon juice to the potatoes at the end. The other thing I did differently was that I waited till the onions were light brown before adding the whole spices (mustard seed, coriander seed, cumin - and a pinch of kalonji/black onion seed, which was my own addition) - quite simply because I thought if I added them in the reverse order, the spices might burn by the time the onion was browned.

You can find the recipe for Aloo Fry here.

I figured Taste & Create was a good way to shake me out of my complacency & try out new recipes. I'm looking forward to my next challenge next month! You can find out how it works here.

Baking With Dorie: Applesauce Spice Bars

I finally made these! After looking through everyone else's blog posts this week, I knew I was going to love this bake & I was sure to double the glaze, as suggested by the other BWD bakers. 

These bars came together in no time at all, which made me realize I could have tried to make them sooner. And they were fabulous! Ultra-moist and almost spice-cake like, the glaze is what sends these bars truly over the edge and makes them completely irresistible. 

Thanks for choosing such a winner Chaya ! Please head over to Chaya's blog for the recipe, or to Page 117 of Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan.

Next up, we're baking the Brown Sugar-Apple Cheesecake (Pages 238-8). If you'd like to join our baking challenge, please drop me an email at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!

Baking With Dorie - Links to BWD Bakers this week (Applesauce Spice Bars)

I'm late with my bake again. I've been far too preoccupied lately & haven't had the time to bake or blog. I promise to have it up tomorrow!

Meanwhile, here are the links to all the other BWD bakers:

Beurrista
Bright Morning Star 
Cookin' up North
Chaya's Comfy Cook Blog

Gluten-Free Baking 101

My Domestic Bliss

The Rookie Baker

The challenge was chosen by Chaya this week.  Please head over to Chaya's blog for the recipe, or to Page 117 of Baking from my home to yours by Dorie Greenspan.

Next up, we're baking the Brown Sugar-Apple Cheesecake (Pages 238-8). If you'd like to join our baking challenge, please drop me an email at needfulthings at ymail dot com. We'd love to have you bake along with us!