Tuesdays with Dorie: French Pear Tart
So this week of Tuesdays with Dorie marks a special occasion – the one year anniversary of TWD! Dorie Greenspan, the author of the fabulous Baking: From my home to yours book we’re all making our way through, chose her French Pear Tart for all of us to try. She also answered questions from the OSI featured bakers. Pretty cool.
This French Pear Tart is a super easy dessert. It’s just a tart shell with an almond cream and pears. You can poach the pears yourself (which I did) or use canned pears to make it even easier. I forgot that I didn’t own a large tart pan (which happens when you have cabinets and closets stuffed to the brim) so I made this in a springform instead. I wasn’t sure how using a different pan would affect it. I found out the tart didn’t get done all the way even after 65 minutes of baking but I didn’t care, it was still good. And what it may have lost in looks from not having the detailed edging on the crust, it made up for in taste. I loved this.
Please visit Dorie’s website for the recipe and to check out all the other amazing things she posts. If you haven’t gotten the Baking: From my home to yours, I highly recommend it. I’ve made enough recipes from it now where I can name off tons of my favorites, but if I had to choose my least favorite I’d have a really hard time. That equals a great book.
I’m looking forward to another great year with TWD. I got the book for Christmas 2007 and joined the group back in April 2008, starting with Bill’s Big Carrot Cake. Last year, I made 44 of the recipes selected. I did a lot of “Blast From the Past” posts when I had extra time and calories to spare where I made selections from before I joined. Now, I’m only 9 behind before I’ve made every single recipe the group has done.
Still need to complete:
Quintuple Chocolate Brownies, Black and White Chocolate Cake, Brown Sugar-Apple Cheesecake, Almost-Fudge Gateau, Russian Grandmothers’ Apple Pie-Cake, Caramel-Topped Flan, Gooey Chocolate Cakes, The Most Extraordinary French Lemon Cream Tart, and Marshmallows.
Special thanks to Laurie for starting this amazing group that led me to the food blogging world. And, of course, thanks to Dorie Greenspan for inspiring me and so many other bakers to get in the kitchen every week and do what we love doing.
Use it or lose it… (and my 40th TWD)
“Use it or lose it” may just be one of my favorite phrases right now. It’s the reason I’m currently on vacation instead of at work. It’s great to find out you still have a week’s worth of time off in the last month of the year. It makes things seem more do-able. Like I actually have time to Christmas shop, time to veg out during Netflix instant viewing, and time to make some cookies.
Here we have Linzer Sables. They are a tiny spiced cookie sandwich with a layer of jam in the middle and a powdered sugar dusting on top.
There are tons of flavor combinations you could decide on for these. Since the dough is made with ground nuts you could choose one or more different nuts to use. The jam in the middle leaves you open to almost any flavor of jam you could find. I chose to use almonds as my base with a raspberry jam for the filling.
These dough was pretty easy to roll out between two sheets of plastic wrap. I let the dough chill overnight for the first batch and two days for the second batch.
There are specific cookie cutters made just for these types of cookies. See here and here for examples. I just used a cutter that I already owned and a Wilton tip to cut out the hole in the middle.
I liked the taste of these. The spices in the cookie really come through and I liked the raspberry jam a lot with them. They were crispy, not really soft. I’m actually not sure I’d make these again, although I’m glad I gave them a try.
Linzer Sables were chosen for Tuesdays with Dorie for the week of December 2nd by Dennis of Living the Life. The recipe can be found on Living the Life here. This was my 40th TWD recipe. I’m proud of myself for sticking with something this long. 
More cookies coming your way as soon as I can tear myself away from CSI Season 9 on Netflix.
Grandma’s All Occasion Sugar Cookies
Buttery Jam Cookies
Lenox Almond Biscotti
In my late teens, I worked in a small, locally owned coffee shop and biscotti was always a very popular purchase. At the time, I didn’t understand it’s appeal. I thought it was too trendy, dry, crispy, and just not good. As I got a little older, I gave biscotti another try and (like most foods I thought I hated) found that it wasn’t that bad.
I had never attempted making biscotti at home. I mean, it’s so easy to buy during my daily Starbucks run, it’s right there at the register for like a dollar. Well… Starbucks already lost a Madeleines customer to TWD (I haven’t bought them there since) and now they have lost a biscotti customer as well. It’s just too cheap and easy to make at home and Dorie’s recipe is a definite winner. The one downside I see to all this homemade business is that before I just bought ONE and would only eat ONE. Now, making this stuff myself, I have fifteen biscotti sitting here and I just ate four in a row.
So after eating four in a row, I can say that I loved this recipe. It’s one of my top favorites from the group so far. Then again, I’m very partial to sweets made from just the most basic baking ingredients like flour, sugar, butter, eggs and extracts. So really it was no surprise for me, I expected this to be one of my faves. My dough spread a lot in the oven so my advice would be to stick very closely to Dorie’s rectangle measurements, unless you want super thin biscotti like mine. I know I made my rectangle 12 inches long but it was fatter than it should have been so when it spread, it spread big. The second bake time seemed a little off maybe. Next time, I would bake longer so they might crisp up a little more.
I will say though that this is the first time one of Dorie’s recipes left me kind of confused. Usually everything in her directions is so detailed that nothing can be misconstrued and you don’t even need pictures to determine what things should look like. In this one though, it was the whole “stand them up like a marching band” thing. I was like “huh?!?” Now, I’ve seen marching bands in my lifetime but maybe I haven’t seen enough because I kind of stood in my kitchen unsure of what to do for a few seconds. I ended up just cutting and separating them a little bit and baked them like that. It all worked out fine.
Thanks go out to Gretchen for picking Lenox Almond Biscotti for this week’s Tuesdays with Dorie selection. Make sure you stop Gretchen’s blog Canela & Comino to see the recipe and read what she thought about her choice.
For next week, Kelly of Sounding My Barbaric Gulp has selected Pumpkin Muffins!!
