![\"apricottart\"](\"http:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/apricottart.jpg\")
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Apart from the very practical home-cooking books I also buy those written by famous – usually French – chefs or confectioners with breathtaking, state-of-the-art photos and incredibly long and scary recipes. I buy them not only to leaf through the glossy pages, dreaming of sophisticated dishes and admiring the masters’ skills, but also to find some ideas, tips or bits of recipes I could introduce into my cooking. This is the case of “Plaisirs sucr\u00e9s” by Pierre Herm\u00e9<\/a>, my absolute idol in the world of macarons and confectionery.<\/p>\n If the cover of my\u00a0“Plaisirs sucr\u00e9s”<\/a> starts being used up, it’s not because I use Pierre Herm\u00e9’s exact recipes often. Nonetheless, since I found there the best pastry cream recipe (cr\u00e8me p\u00e2tissi\u00e8re) in the world, (I used it in\u00a0Strawberry Tartlets<\/a>), I decided to look there for a new apricot dessert idea. This is how I came across the thing which makes this upside-down tart unique, namely the extravagant use of moist, sticky, brown sugar, called muscovado. By “extravagant” I mean putting a 1 cm layer of sugar \u00a0I would have never dared in my previous upside-down tarts. Having tried both a thick and a thin layer of muscovado (opting for individual tartlets made this experiment easier), I can affirm the 1 cm layer is obligatory (actually I have put about 1 cm, but Pierre Herm\u00e9 advised 1,5 cm!). One of the tartlets was made with normal brown sugar; it wasn’t even half as good. The apricots are darkened by the muscovado, but the aroma and the taste are simply divine.<\/p>\n TIP: I couldn’t find this sugar in “normal” shops and have finally seen it in both a Vietnamese and a British grocery.<\/p>\n Special equipment:<\/em><\/p>\n individual tart dishes<\/em><\/p>\n pastry cutters (slightly bigger than the tart dishes)<\/em><\/p>\n Preparation: 1h30<\/em><\/p>\n Ingredients (makes 6x 10 cm diameter tartlets):<\/em><\/p>\n 1,5 kg apricots<\/em><\/p>\n 1 thin puff pastry sheet (about 230g)<\/em><\/p>\n muscovado sugar <\/em><\/p>\n 50 g butter<\/em><\/p>\n juice from 1 lemon<\/em><\/p>\n Preheat the oven to 200\u00b0C.<\/p>\n Grease small tart dishes generously with butter (also on the sides).<\/p>\n Put a 1 cm thick layer of muscovado sugar on the bottom of each dish.<\/p>\n Cut the apricots in two, remove the kernels.<\/p>\n Arrange the apricots very tightly (they will shrink) in a nice pattern, laying them on the side. (Not the kernel side or the skin side!).<\/p>\n Sprinkle the lemon juice over the apricots.<\/p>\n Cut out circles from the pastry sheet. They should be a bit bigger than the dish’s bottom diameter.<\/p>\n Cover the apricots with the pastry tucking well the sides downwards.<\/p>\n Prick the surface several times with a fork.<\/p>\n Put the tartlets into the oven for 30 – 40 minutes.<\/p>\n Take them out when the tart is dark golden.<\/p>\n When the tartlets cool down a bit, make sure, cutting around and separating with a knife, that the pastry doesn’t stick to the sides of the dishes.<\/p>\n Put a small serving plate over each tart dish (bottom side up) and carefully turn the tartlets upside down. (Do it over a kitchen sink and wear dark clothes.)<\/p>\n If some fruit pieces haven’t fallen into the plate, simply arrange them in the tartlets and if there is any juice left in the dishes, simply pour it over the turned-upside tarts.<\/p>\n Put them into the fridge and serve cold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apart from the very practical home-cooking books I also buy those written by famous – usually French – chefs or confectioners with breathtaking, state-of-the-art photos…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7,10,23,164,6],"tags":[31],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5595"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16837,"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5595\/revisions\/16837"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.withaglass.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}