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| Dessert should always be served with fairy lights |
I ripped this recipe out of a magazine, intrigued by the combination of cardamom and pears. It didn't say whether to use black or green cardamom, but I assume the citrussy green ones are more suitable. I cheated by using ready-made pastry, but I was pleased with the result.
Ingredients
- 1 pack of ready-rolled shortcrust pastry
- Plain flour, for rolling out
- 15 green cardamom pods
- 100g of slightly salted butter, plus a little extra for greasing
- 100g of caster sugar
- 1 lemon
- 100g of ground almonds
- 3 eggs
- 5 small pears
- Creme fraiche, to serve
Method
- Preheat the oven to 200°C.
- Use the extra butter to grease a pie dish (mine's about 23cm across).
- Use the plain flour to dust the inside of the greased dish.
- Unroll the ready-rolled pastry and roll it to twice its size. The crust of the tart should be really thin. Wrap the leftover pastry in cling film and put it in the fridge to use on another recipe.
- Line the pie dish with the pastry, and prick the base with a fork. Cover with baking parchment and fill with baking beans.
- Blind bake the pastry shell for 15 minutes, then remove the beans and paper and return to the oven for a further five minutes. This will give you a really crispy, browned pastry.
- Crush the cardamom pods with a pestle and mortar until the shells split, then discard the shells and grind the seeds a bit more.
- Grate the zest of the lemon.
- Put the butter, sugar, cardamom and lemon zest into a bowl, and beat together until light and fluffy.
- Crack the eggs into another bowl and beat together with a fork. Then gradually beat the eggs into the butter/sugar mixture.
- Stir the almonds into the mixture to create a thick paste. Pour it into the pastry case.
- Squeeze the lemon juice into a bowl.
- Peel three pears, keeping the stalks intact. Take out the cores with a corer but leave the tops with the stalks intact. Then cut the pears in half around the middle (not lengthways). Make cuts around each piece of pear and then roll in the lemon juice.
- Peel and slice the remaining pears and roll them in the lemon juice. Really you could just slice all of the pears to give yourself an easy life.
- Arrange the pears on the almond mixture.
- Bake for 30 minutes. Mine came out looking very pale, so I gave it an extra 10 minutes at a very high heat just to brown it off a bit.
- Serve with the creme fraiche.
