Frangipane Tart

I’ve been making variations of this little beauty all summer. Pretty much any fruit goes well with almonds, so all it takes is some fresh fruit and about 125mL of jam in a similar flavour.

The crust is a Martha Stewart recipe, although I’ve tweaked it slightly because it’s pressed into a pan, not rolled out. The frangipane itself is a recipe featured on a BBC food show called What to Eat Now. I’ve tweaked this a wee bit as well since I found the batter to be so soft that the fresh fruit added on top sunk into the batter before it could cook and firm up.

I’ve used plums here, but I’ve also used raspberries, peaches and it would work with apples or pears as well.

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Flour, Sugar and Art at the Queen of Tarts

queencooler

The Queen of Tarts
283 Roncesvalles Avenue
416-651-3009

Not many people can count watching Martha Stewart bite her own leg off as a hi-light of their culinary career, but for Stephanie Pick, proprietor of The Queen of Tarts bakery on Roncesvalles Avenue, it was an event that garnered her already popular shop international attention.

Someone at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia got hold of some of Pick’s gingerbread cookies decorated to look like Martha’s famous getting-out-of jail poncho, and very quickly Pick was invited to appear on the show where Martha happily bit off the gingerbread likeness of her ankle, complete with royal icing ankle monitor.

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Julie & Julia – a Review

First up, I should make it clear that I’m not a fan of French food – either cooking it or eating it. I find it excessively meaty, saucy, heavy and especially fussy. Give me a nice spicy curry or some Ethiopian stewed collard greens any day of the week.

That’s not to say I haven’t cooked and eaten French food, as my year of cooking school was based almost entirely around classic French cuisine, it being the supposed basis and benchmark for all other cuisines (which is complete and utter bullshit, but French chefs, and especially French cooking instructors insist it’s true). So when I first heard about the Julie/Julia Project in which one NYC woman sets herself a goal of working her way through Julia Child’s first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (in a year, no less), my first thought was “Why the hell would anyone do THAT???” Then my second thought was that the only other person I had heard of who worked their way right through that book was Martha Stewart, which to me typifies the type of personality you’d need not to go completely nuts in the process.

Turns out Julia Powell doesn’t have that Martha Stewart perfectionist personality, though, and it works against her significantly during the course of her project.

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