Peach, Honey and Pistachio Tart - A Random Recipe

The great Random Recipes challenge from Dom at Belleau Kitchen as entered its 3rd year and it's 25th monthly challenge, how time flies eh? Hardly seems like yesterday I was making this all those many challenges ago. 

This month the choice is ours. The recipe needs to remain random but how we choose the book is up to us.

Easy for me this one. I have bought 5 new cookbooks since Christmas to feed my ever growing addiction to cookbooks, I may need an intervention at some point, So I decided to randomly pick one of these books for my recipe. The book I got was Eric Landlard's Tart it up.

For those of you who don't know, Eric Lanlard is a French Master Patisserie who trained under the Godfathers of Food and Pastry, Albert and Michel Roux and became their Head Pastry Chef. Since then he has opened his own cake business, wrote many cookbooks and presents a few TV shows as well.

I was fortunate to witness a demonstration by him at the Good Food Show where he made a West Indies chocolate tart which, as you would expect from a French pastry chef, looked amazing but also effortless in how he made it.

The recipe I randomly chose is a Apricot, Honey and Pistachio Tart. This was quite an interesting one because it uses Filo pastry to make the tart shell which I have never seen or tried before. I also couldn't find any apricots so substituted with peaches which worked well.

The end result is a lovely golden tart with an excellent contrast in flavours and textures, from the crunch of filo pastry to soft frangipane type filling to juicy peaches. The inspiration for the tart comes from the Middle East and it is easy to see and taste why with its similarities to Turkish Baklava.

Peach, Honey and Pistachio Tart
Ingredients
100g melted butter
6 sheets of filo pastry
2 peaches
75g light muscavado sugar
50g clear honey
25g pistachios, roughly chopped
1-2 tbsp icing sugar
Filling
125g salted butter
125g golden caster sugar
65g ground almonds
65g ground pistachios
4 drops of almond extract
1tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs

Method
Make the filling first. beat the sugar and butter together until fluffy then beat in the ground nuts until smooth, add the two extracts and then beat in the eggs one at a time.

Grease a deep tart tin (20-22cm) with some melted butter then press in the first layer of filo pastry into the tin, keep the rest covered under a damp cloth.
Butter the filo in the tin then lay over another sheet of filo, with about 3 inches overlap on all sides. Continue with 3 more sheets in a criss cross method.
Fill the tart shell with the filling until about 2 cm deep, flatten with the back of a spoon.
Slice the peaches and place around the tart.
Fold over the filo layers to create a parcel, butter after each layer is folded over.
Butter the last remaining filo sheet and scrunch up and place in the centre of the tart.
Bake in a preheated oven (180C fan) for 40 minutes until the pastry is golden.