Pear Tart

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope you all had a good start to 2011.
Do you have some recipes that you cook every now and then? I have a few and I have already written some of those on this blog.  This is another one that I make very often.  It's a Swiss recipe and I learned this from my husband.  It's one of those easy dishes, where you can easily substitute the ingredients if you don't have everything listed.  If you buy the ready puff pastry as well or a ready tart base, then the dish becomes super practical.  You can also make this tart with apples, plums, apricots, different berries, etc.  Quark and yogurt can be replaced with cream or with each other, you can just use only yogurt or just quark.
This tart just taste delicious because it is a very light dessert. It shouldn't be too sweet but depending on the type of fruit you use, you may want to add another tablespoon of sugar to the filling if you'd like. 

Pear Tart

(Makes 8 portions)

1 round fresh puff pastry (33cm - app 13'')

2 tablespoons of grounded hazelnuts

Filling:

4 tablespoons of Yogurt

1 cup of milk

3 tablespoons of Quark

2+1 tablespoons of sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla sugar

2 tablespoons of flour

4 medium sized pears

1 egg

Start by putting your pastry in a tart tin, preferably over a baking sheet.  With the help of a fork make few holes on the pastry.  Spread the grounded nuts over the pastry and leave it aside. 

To prepare your filling,  mix the quark, yogurt, milk, 2 tablespoons of sugar, vanilla sugar, flour and 1 egg in a bowl by using a whisker.  

Pour the filling in the tart base you have prepared before. 

Peel the pears, take the seeds out and slice them into 1/2 cm pieces. Arrange the pear slices over the filling. They will be a little bit dipped into the filling but that's alright. You can also spread them randomly over the filling if you prefer.  

Sprinkle the left over tablespoon of sugar over the pear slices.  Bake the tart in preheated oven 180° C(356° F) for 40-45 minutes until the crust is golden brown. 

Fudge Brownies with Pears

After all the birthdays and Easter, basically after all the cakes and the chocolates, I thought I shouldn't cook anything sweet or with chocolate for a while and just cook very healthy things like salads and vegetables.  Then I decided to have a look at my long time ago purchased low fat cookbook.  I bought this book, not only because it looked like a healthy food book, also because I really liked the simple recipes and yummy photos in it.  The season being spring and the urge to eat something light and healthy, made me want to make one of those light salads or pasta or soup or noodles.  When I was looking through the book, I came across something I couldn't resist and it was non of those above.  It was a very delicious looking fudge brownies recipe. The fact that it was in a low-fat book made me wonder if it was really this good, so I decided to try it.  As usual, some of the ingredients were replaced with what I had in my kitchen.  It's hard to find self-raising flour here so I never use it even if the recipe calls for it.  I ended up making something quite different than the one in the book but I managed to keep the oil bit more or less the same.  The brownie turned out to be a very moist and a very light one.  The kind that you can eat more than one slice at a time which kind of cancels the low fat factor.

Fudge Brownies with Pears

( Makes about 16 pieces)

1 cup of flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

4 tablespoons of cocoa powder

3/4 cup of brown sugar

2 eggs

1 tablespoon of vanilla sugar

2 tablespoons of butter or margarine - melted

250 g of quark (you can use fromage frais instead)

1 peeled and grated medium size pear

icing sugar for dusting

Preheat your oven to to 180° C(356° F).  Put the first three ingredients (flour, baking powder and cocoa) in a bowl and mix them well.  In another bowl mix eggs, sugar, butter, vanilla sugar and quark. 

Add both mixtures together and stir them well.  Finally, add the grated pears into the mixture.  Put the mixture in a baking tin and bake about 25-30 minutes.  Check if it's cooked by inserting a knife in the middle and see if it comes out clean.  If it's done then take it out and leave it to cool for five minutes. Slice it up and dust it with icing sugar before you serve.