Sweet & Savory

SHF 9 - Peach and Almond Tart

We saw the the notice for SHF 9 posted on Life in Flow about 2 weeks ago. With the theme being tarts, I remembered Amanda Hesser's Cooking for Mr. Latte contained a recipe for peach and almond tart that I wanted to try. Peach season is starting to peak in California. It was perfect timing.

I am really really sad as A and I missed the deadline for SHF 9. The tart dough and the frangipane were made on Wednesday night with a plan to blind bake the tart dough and stew the peaches on Thursday and to assemble and have the final baking on Friday, just in time for the deadline. Well, everything went downhill after Wednesday. I ended up staying at work until 4 am on Thursday only to get up and make it to work by 10 am Friday. Got home after work around 7 pm on Friday and promptly slept until 10:45 pm. No amount of poking or prodding by A could arouse me from my sleep. Poor A was left to manage our SHF endeavor by himself. When I finally woke up, A had already finished poaching the peaches and had started to the blind baking of the tart dough. (What a delightful man!) Our SHF project was not finished until 2:30 am. Though tired and dealing with pounding headaches, we were happy with our finished tarts.

A and I, in the past, have posted the recipes we used to make our creations, whether they are our own inventions or lifted from some cookbook. Lately, I've gotten a little paranoid about copyright laws so no more posting recipes from cookbooks. (Can you imagine if I posted something from the French Laundry Cookbook and Mr. Keller got so mad he banned me from EVER eating at French Laundry again?! *shudder*). If you would like to make this tart, the recipe can be found starting on page 310. The tart consists essentially of three components: the crust, the poached peaches, and the almond frangipane. Trust me when I say the tart dough and the frangipane were unbelievably easy to make. At least 50 times easier than the puff pastries we made for Clement's SHF 5. Poaching and preparing the peaches was not difficult either but more time consuming. The peaches were poached in a mixture of rosé wine, peppercorns, cloves, cinnamon, salt, sugar, lemon and vanilla. We liked the remaining poaching liquid so much that we saved it and made it into a sorbet.

When all three components are prepped, they are assembled together to be baked until the crust is golden brown and the almond frangipane is puffed and browned. The entire house was awash in the delicious scent of a home-baked tart. Here is our peach and almond tart with a scoop of peach and rosé wine sorbet.