- Few desserts are as beautiful as fresh fruit tarts. Aren’t the bright rows of seasonal fruits the first things that catch your eye when you walk into a bakery? The Fig, Berry and Sheep’s Milk Cream Tarts at Cannelle et Vanille is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen. It follows the same basic idea of the average fruit tart with a white, creamy custard set in a crisp shell, but dresses it up by including rich sheep’s milk cheese in the custard and setting it in a chocolate shortcrust shell. The fruit arrangement is simple, natural and mouthwatering.
- Speaking of tarts, Cafe Fernando takes a fruit tart in a different direction with an Apricot Cherry Galette. Instead of using fresh fruit to top off the tart, this one has fresh fruit enveloped in a rustic pastry crust and gets baked in the oven until the fruit is tender and the crust is browned. With ripe fruit, this couldn’t be easier and it’s not difficult to adapt the technique used in the recipe to other summer fruits, like nectarines or plums, for example.
- The Mascarpone Sourdough Rolls with Raspberries from Brown Interior started off with the premise that “everything is good baked into bread. Especially cheese.” Naturally when BI found some leftover mascarpone cheese in the fridge, it was only a matter of time before some bread dough was worked up to go around it. I really like the fact that this recipe uses sourdough as a base, instead of doing something more conventional, like using a brioche dough. Sourdough will give the rolls a bit of a tang that should contrast nicely with the cheese and berries in the filling.
- Banana bread is my default when I find myself with a few too many fruits to use up, but there are lots of other things to be done with bananas as alternatives to bread. Happy Home Baking used up some ripe bananas in a batch of Homemade Banana Chocolate Jam. The jam looks shiny and rich, like a fudge sauce that you might drizzle on top of dessert. It would probably taste good served that way, too, since it uses lots of dark chocolate and a bit of rum. The jam is easy and the recipe makes a small batch, so if you’re going to use it quickly, you don’t need to fuss with serious canning/storage techniques.
- Good ingredients should never go to waste if it’s at all possible to use them up. Leftover lemon juice, for instance, can have many applications. Cookie Baker Lynn happened to have a lot of it and needed a recipe that used up more than a few tablespoonfuls at a time. She ended up turning it into Lemon Gelato. Described as tasting like lemon meringue pie without the crust, the gelato is rich with egg yolks, milk and cream, but keeps a light and refreshing taste because of all the lemon juice in the mix.
- I’ve seen the fruit dessert known as a “buckle” described in many different ways and presented in many different forms, and typically it’s a cake-like batter that has lots and lots of fruit in it, almost like a cobbler. The Blueberry Buckle at The Spiced Life fits this description fairly well, although the description given of it in the post as “one giant blueberry muffin” makes it sound even better. The recipe uses lots of fresh blueberries and has a lovely streusel topping sprinkled generously over everything.
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Laura
July 30, 2008Hey thanks for the blurb! I love your blog–your Double Chocolate Peppermint Chip Cake is one of the best things I have ever eaten. 🙂 I made it pre-blog, around the holidays, or it would be on my blog with a big shout out. I’ll probably make it again this coming year…
Brooke
July 30, 2008Fresh fruit is so versatile! We eat a lot of it as-is, but sometimes want to turn it into something a bit more special, for dessert, guests, or just because it’s Tuesday!
You’ve got some great recipes listed here, thanks!
ashanti
July 30, 2008i love the idea of banana chocolate jam, but do you think one could do the same with plums. In the supermarkets I have seen strawberry-chocolate jams, never tried it but I most definitely will.