However, if we are being completely honest, I would love love love love love to exchange the custard mixture for a cream cheese custard (i.e. I mentioned that the custard filling gave me pause but we ended up liking it a lot, it was less of a jiggly baked custard and more like something that bound the plums nicely together. The aroma from your kitchen will beckon strangers to your door it weakens steel dessert wills. So how does it taste? Fantastic, but considering that it involves butter, hazelnuts, nutmeg, cinnamon, brown sugar and plums, you probably don’t need to tell me that.

Three years ago: Slow-Roasted Tomatoes and Kefta and Zucchini Kebabsįive years ago: Chocolate Caramel Cheesecake Two years ago: Grilled Eggplant and Olive Pizza and Peach Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Frosting Word is, this one didn’t last an hour which means I think my work here is done. Unfortunately, we’re now in the dessert section, which has been heralded with the purchase of a terrifying amount of butter a reignited intimacy with the gym abject terror: What on earth am I going to do with 25 desserts? As if a magic wand had been waved, earlier this week I had the opportunity to meet my husband’s coworkers they bought me beers and in exchange I apparently agreed to send all of my desserts directly to them forever more. I’ve worked my way through my book section by section there was a lot of salad last fall, a lot of breakfast in January and a wonderful month this spring where we had a real home-cooked meal for dinner almost every night.

Instead, I’ll finish with a funnier story. Hm, aren’t I just a bundle of cheer today? I’m seeing plums everywhere these days, and I love them, but they’re always a little bittersweet to me, as they’re one of the last fruits to appear before apples, and everyone knows that while you munch through buckets of apples, late summer turns to fall and fall turns to winter and suddenly, they’re the last fresh fruit you see until rhubarb - which isn’t even a real fruit, but one that likes to pretend it is - appears in the late spring. So why this week? Like most things in my life right now, it relates to a still (yes, still) unfinished but imminently due manuscript, and my inability to think about much else, which has turned into a perfect time to outsource a bit, by dusting off recipes I’ve had on my To Cook list for eons - especially those that involve plums. I was living in Washington D.C., dating a terrible idea and trying to figure out how I could find a place in New York that didn’t charge more than $600/month rent. This recipe was actually published in a 1999 Martha Stewart Living.

But the filling gave me pause - a custard? a custard that suspends fruit? How odd, right? Or delicious? I went back and forth over the odd-versus-delicious line for the better part of a decade before deciding to finally make it this week. And guys, I love a buttery, flaky, ethereal pie crust woven over cherries and bronzed in the oven as much as the next person, but the idea of choosing it over a crumbly composite of butter, brown sugar, cinnamon and sometimes nuts is pure madness. There are few paths that led to this recipe but the main one is that it instantly reminded me of the kind of crumb pies I remember from bakeries growing up, not the kind with a crumble topping but ones with a crust also composed of pressed crumbs.

Almond plum tart