What types of desserts dressed your table on Thanksgiving day? If you read my previous post, you know that I offered pecan pies, White Chocolate Cheesecake, Chocolate Pot de Creme and Cranberry and Pear Tart. I wanted to offer a fruit dessert because my husband’s family really enjoy them. They particularly love crumbles and those heavier tarts. Their favorite are made with plums and apples. I chose this one because pear to me has a much refine taste than apple, and cranberry gave a Holiday flare and color to it.

I also found this recipe in the latest publication of Fine Cooking called Holiday Baking.

This recipe was not hard to do. All was fairly easy to do besides laying out the dough into the mold ( the dough is so soft and crumbles easily…) You ought to try anyway, it was very very good!

Ingredients for the dough: 1 cup of toasted walnuts, 1 cup of sugar, 2-3 cups of flour, 1 tsp of cinnamon, 1 tsp of finely grated lemon zest, 1/2 tsp of salt, 2 hard cooked egg yolks crumbled, 2 sticks of butter cold, 2 raw egg yolks, 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract.

Ingredients for the filling: 5 pears peeled, cored, and diced, 2 cups of fresh cranberries, 6 tbsp of flour, 1/2 cup of sugar.

Ingredients for the finish: 1 egg yolk, 1/3 cup of milk.

To make the dough, first grind the walnut with the sugar in a food processor to get a sandy texture. Add the flour, the cinnamon, lemon zest, salt, crumbled-hard yolks and pulse briefly to combine. Add the butter and mix again to combine. Add the raw yolks and mix again. The dough  should be sticky and moist like a cookie dough. If the dough is too soft, add more flour. Cut the dough in half and make 2 disks that you will use for the tart. Place the disks in a plastic bag and refrigerate for an hour. Once the dough has refrigerated, roll one of the disks into a 11 inch round. Place one of the disk into a pie mold. I used the 9 inch pie mold from Demarle.

In a bowl, add the diced pears, the cranberries, the flour and the sugar and mix well. Empty the content into the tart.

Take the other disk out and roll it out until the dough is about 1/4 inch thick. Cut strips of 1/2 inch wide and place them over the tart. You can criss cross them to make diamond-shaped windows. Mine did not look like that because I made all my strips criss cross in the center, and I cut out leaves for the outside of the pie. Obvisouly you can’t see… Oh well, i tried… Whatever you do, trim the ends of the strips and press them into the edges to close the pie only leaving windows here and there.

In a small bowl, mix the egg yolk left and the 1/3 cup of milk, and brush the tart with a rubber spatula.

Bake in an already warm oven at 350 for 1 hour. To remove the pie from the mold, peel the mold and place the pie onto a plate. Serve the pie cold or warm with whipped cream or vanilla ice-cream. YUM!!!!!!!

Bon Appetit and Happy Cooking!!!