Once again, I am mixing up the order of a series of 3 posts about a dinner party with the dessert, this time, in the middle. This is not because of any wish to be contrary, but because the dessert is generally complete before anyone arrives. So it's easy to photograph ahead. Just so you know.
This dessert is not a birthday cake, per se. But I think it is charming, and it is easy and of the season. It looks dark and sticky, because it is. The Gourmet Cookbook,where I found it, notes that this would be a satisfying project for a beginning baker, because of its simplicity. I would qualify that , saying that for pastry, it is very easy indeed. But if you want to talk really easy, and good, there are any number of excellent cakes that are even simpler. This would include the one I'm making next. (Link at the end, read on.) I added the glaze, because I thought the homemade preserve would make a nice one. (Also, I was on a roll with this concept, after success with an orange almond cake glaze.)
This tart is made with italian-style prune plums. I was inspired by the raptures of my child, the redfox, with respect to the neglected, oft-ridiculed and entirely fabulous dried plum, a/k/a the prune. The prune type fresh plums have been especially good of late, even the supermarket ones. It may be that like grapes for wine, plums intensify in flavor in a dry growing season. Don Kretschmann, the farmer behind my CSA Farmbox, opined that this may be the reason that the tomatoes here in western PA have been so particularly good this year. (Last summer, which was rainy, the tomatoes were less stupendous.) Perhaps, if dried, these plums would make exceptional prunes. In any event, I got these tasty prune plums right at the old Giant Eagle. I had a hard time not eating them all up fresh. This is what I did with them:
A day ahead I made the tart shell and macerated the plums. I put the tart shell, covered, in the freezer, and refrigerated the plums in a ceramic bowl.
For the tart shell you need:
1 stick plus one tbsp good unsalted butter, chilled, and cut into cubes
1 1/2 cups flour
1/4 cup sugar
pinch salt
pinch grated lemon zest
3 egg yolks (my eggs are small, 2 extra larges would work)
Put everything but the yolks in a food processor and process in short spurts until it is about like oatmeal in texture. Add eggs and process just until it starts to clump. Remove pastry/dough in handfulls (handsfull?). Smear each handful across a clean surface (I used my big cutting board) with the heel of your hand, and then gather the lot up into a flat disc. Place the disc inside a 9" loose bottom tart pan, and spread the dough out evenly across the bottom, and up the sides. Bring it up a little bit higher than the pan sides. Chill, wrapped, until ready to bake. (I froze mine.)
For the filling you need:
about 26 little italian prune plums- halved and pitted
1/2 cup sugar
2 tbsps of cornstarch
squeeze of 1/2 lemon
Mix this up gently in a ceramic bowl. Crumple up some parchment paper, dampen and cover bowl with the paper, resting gently on the fruit. Refrigerate overnight.
Preheat oven to 425F. Arrange plums in pastry shell, skin side down, slightly overlapping, in concentric circles. (If you overlap them, when they shrink, they will still cover the whole tart bottom.)Pou all their juices and sugar over them. Put in oven for 25 minutes. Turn down to 375, cover loosely with foil, and cook for another 40 minutes or so. Remove from oven, to a rack.
Optional but very nice: Heat a jar of plum jam. If it is homemade plum jam with gewurtz and vanilla, that can be a plus. I think it would be pretty hard to find a plum jam that was unacceptable, though. In general, my plum jam consuming experiences have been very good indeed.
Pour about 3 tbsps of the liquified jam over the warm tart, and brush it over the plums with a pastry brush. This tart will look very wet when it first starts to cool ,even if you don't add jam, but it thickens and shines up nicely in the 2 hrs it takes to cool completely. After that you can take the sides off the pan to serve. Some creme fraiche is a good gilding for this lily. Very nice with coffee. Some port would not have been amiss. It is very prune-y tasting stuff, and I'm all for that.
Soon to follow (though in life it went before): Wild Mushroom Lasagna.
Next week when it's my turn to make Friday night dinner, I'm going to look for some more of these fine prune-plums, and make my daughter's plum cake for my friends. I will, however, beware of contact with the "Heat Bombs of Death." Let the plums continue....
Beauuuu-tiful!
Posted by: jeanne | September 13, 2005 at 09:20 PM