Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Baking Bouchon: Recipe 42 - Apricot Flan Tart

Apparently, I am easily misled.  Put something in a bin with a sign on it and I'll believe that whatever is in the bin matches what's on the sign.


I have no idea what an apricot looks like.  It seems that I think apricots look like nectarines.  I did think they looked pretty similar to the nectarines in the next bin that were labeled nectarines but I didn't think that meant that what I saw in the bin labeled apricots were nectarines.  That would be silly.  Who would mislabel fruit bins?

CA knows exactly what apricots look like - he looked at the nectarines, asked what they were for, and proceeded to tell me that apricots have fuzz on them... like peaches.

No wonder I didn't need 18 pieces of fruit.  I guess apricots are small.


Despite my fruit mix-up, this tart came out fine... yes, just fine.  Not amazing or fantastical or spectacular... just fine.

The tart starts with pate brisee (pie crust).  I was supposed to bake it in a cake ring... whatever the heck that is.  I looked at the photo and decided that baking it in a springform pan (like you use for cheesecake) would yield the right shape and height and I was right.  That small victory made me feel better about mixing up my fruits.

The crust gets baked and ready for all the filling.


The filling is basically pastry cream... Thomas calls it custard but I don't know difference.  I guess it's a little different but not enough for me to understand why I couldn't just make pastry cream...

I don't know what else to say about it, I feel like we talk about pastry cream every week here.

I guess the one difference here is that the custard gets baked again for a very long time so it firms up enough that you can slice the tart and is stays together.


To assemble this tart, you take your baked pie crust and layer in the apricots nectarines.  On top of that goes the custard (a lot of custard... this joker is tall).

All that goes in the oven forever... like 90 minutes.  I was really worried the crust would get fried from baking that long but it is totally covered by the cream so it was well insulated and didn't burn one bit.






The verdict?  Meh.  It was fine, but really just fine.

It definitely baked and sliced nicely which was good.  However, the custard was a little flavorless as were the nectarines.  Maybe apricots would have tasted better but that wouldn't have changed the custard.

Because this was called a flan tart, I expected it to have the soft caramel on top but there was no caramel.

CA didn't care for this too much either.  Let's just say that we didn't eat the leftovers and I took it to work and no one else ate it either.

It's too bad because now I have 14 nectarines and no yummy tart to put them in.  Maybe I'll make a crisp... I love a good crisp.

Julie













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