Pear and Almond Tart

Hannah (my eldest daughter) has had a friend stopping so I felt I had to do a pudding with yesterday's dinner.

Having been given some Conference pears I found that they were within the 10 minute time slot between being like iron and going black in the middle so thought I'd better use them. What is it with pears? Or is it just me? One minute they're so hard as to be inedible and the next, 'poof', they've gone bad!

I made a pastry with 6oz plain flour, 3½oz butter, 2 tbsp icing sugar, one egg yolk & a little milk. I lined a pie ring with the pastry then made a frangipane using 3½oz sugar and 3½oz butter (creamed), mixed in one egg and one egg yolk, then added a packet 100g of ground almonds, a couple of tablespoons of plain flour and a few drops of almond extract (the real stuff not the horrible chemical one).

The frangipane was spread in the pastry with 3 pears, peeled, halved, put on top – baked at about 200°C for about 10 mins then at 180° for about ½ an hour or so.

It was bloomin' lovely.

I took a picture but being a bit of a numpty I had left the setting on the manual ones used the day before. Here see what I mean:

Anyway, you get the idea of what it looks like!