Baked Fruit Tart

This fruit tart resembles the fresh fruit tart from last class, except it is baked. Basically it's a pâte sucrée crust filled with pastry cream (flavored with vanilla and a little kirsch) and topped with plums. Apparently any stone fruit works, as well as some other types. Then you put it in the oven and bake until the crust is golden and the fruit is cooked. So it's the same crust and similar filling--minus the crème d'amandes and with different fruits--as the fresh fruit tart had. And wow it couldn't be more different! Baking it like that makes a huge difference in the texture of the pastry cream and the flavors come together much more because the juices from the fruit do, to an extent, flavor the rest of the tart. Unfortunately, it wasn't as pretty as the fresh fruit tart, perhaps because I really needed an extra plum to fill in the center better or perhaps because a couple of my plums exploded a little, making it all look messy. Even though it didn't look quite as impressive as I would have liked, it certainly tasted excellent. And I suppose with food that's what counts!

By the way, I'm very proud of my little pastry class team--we work in teams of two to make some of the recipes, like cookie dough or custards, to save on time and ingredients. This is only the second time we've made pastry cream, which is a lovely stirred custard. The first time it came out quite well indeed; this time it came out nearly perfect! I'm very proud of the two of us!

P.S. It's quite late I'll upload the photo tomorrow after work.

P.P.S. We also made another type of apple tart, cookie dough--for cookies that we'll make next class to serve with our pots de crème--and even more tart dough! I'll write about that tart tomorrow or Wednesday morning.