Have you ever found a recipe that seemed too good to be true? Four or five ingredients, a handful of instructions, ready in less than thirty minutes unless you’re a food blogger and you need to take 200 hundred shots during the cooking process and ‘voila’ you have a crispy, caramelly I know – it’s not a word – slightly sweet peach tart.
Had I followed the directions as they’d been written, I’m sure my little treat would have been perfect. Sadly, I decided, instead of using a metal muffin tin to bake the commercial puff pastry, I would substitute some much prettier ceramic souffle cups. The blue rim on top of the cup would pop against the red in the peaches. There was some rational behind my actions. I completely ignored the fact that ceramic doesn’t conduct heat like metal so couldn’t possibly crisp up the bottom of the tarts, no matter how long I let them bake! I went over the recommended oven time by 15 minutes trying to get the bottoms to at least brown and in the interim lost the beautiful color on top. It went from a stunning rosy peach to an insipid rusty brown. No amount of whipped cream was gonna fix these puppies!
I also broke my own cardinal rule “use great ingredients”. I didn’t start out knowingly using less than stellar fruit. Look at the photo – they were gorgeous peaches. I’m about to reveal a secret about myself. I don’t taste while I cook. I don’t. I never have. Over the years, I’ve developed a really keen sense of smell that has rarely ever failed me. The peaches smelled awesome.
Ralph walked into the kitchen just as I was pulling the tarts out of the oven.
“Wha cha makin’?”, asks Ralph.
Peach tarts
“With the peaches that were in the fridge”?
Why?, I ask slightly irritated because I know his tone of voice. It’s the ‘I know she’s going to lose it if I tell her’ tone.
“Well, I had one for lunch yesterday and, what do you call it when peaches are kind of dry and tough”? He’s backing out of the kitchen…
Mealy
“That’s it!”
His cell rang and saved him from a barrage of rhetorical questioning that just would have ended badly.
So my end product was an under cooked bitterly vile tasting-nothing-like peach tart that even after a rescue attempt in a metal muffin tin ended up in the trash.
If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you know me well enough to guess that I’ll be trying these tarts again and when I do I’ll share the recipe and I’ll follow the directions!
Thanks for reading.
