Currently baking out of Macrina Bakery & Cafe Cookbook by Leslie Mackie

Right from the start, me and this tart didn’t get along. It all started when I went to the market to get some plums. You see, the original recipe calls for plums, not nectarines, and for several days running, the market had piles and piles of beautiful plums. Except for the day I went to buy some. On that day, not a plum in sight. But they did have nectarines . . .

Next up was the crust. Mackie calls it a sweet almond dough that is pressed into the pan, rather than rolled out. The dough is made by combining ground almonds, sugar, flour and melted butter. The mixture is crumbled into a tart pan and pressed into place. Sounds easy. Should be easy. It wasn’t. The dough started hardening up right away and made it hard to cover the pan evenly. Eventually, after a lot of swearing and pressing, I got a fairly even crust. That went into the oven to blind bake until golden brown.

After 25 minutes of baking, my crust, when I peeked underneath the beans, was still white and wet. Out came the beans. In about 10 more minutes of baking, I had a browned crust. While the crust cooled, I started on the filling.

Cream cheese, eggs, sugar, lemon zest, cornstarch and nutmeg (basically a cheesecake batter) are mixed and spread onto the crust. Then the fruit is laid on top of the filling and the whole thing is covered with a crumb topping (flour, sugar, cinnamon and chilled butter mixed until crumbly). Again, sounds fairly simple.

My filling was very liquidy and it poured into the crust. And my lovely, beautiful nectarines had no flavor. None. Zip. At this point, I was going to finish this recipe come hell or high water. So, on went the sliced nectarines where they promptly sank into the filling. Adding the crumb topping only submerged them further, but at this point, I didn’t care. I popped the whole thing in the oven and started scraping bits of crust dough off my kitchen floor.

The tart baked for just over an hour and the thing actually had the gall to look and smell really lovely. I let the tart cool for a couple of hours and then cut a slice. Really, I didn’t have any hope that it would taste good (those nectarines . . .). I took a bite. Not bad. I took another bite. It was actually pretty good. Another bite. This is delicious. Something happened while that tart baked. The nectarines got some flavor, the filling firmed up and the crust and crumb topping gave the tart some texture and bite.

In the headnotes to the recipe, Mackie says this is an “easy-to-prepare” tart. Don’t believe it. It has multiple steps and components, not including cooling times. But the end result is completely worth the time and trouble. I was prepared to hate the tart, after all the work and trouble it caused me, but the result was worth it.