When you host your friends and family for Christmas dinner, you’re likely planning to spend all day in the kitchen as you build out your holiday-themed main course. So when it’s time for dessert, you likely want something easy that will please everyone and save you a bit of time and effort. That’s where Nancy Fuller‘s Rustic Ginger Plum Tart comes into play. It’s imperfect and simple to make, yet has the sweet holiday flavors you and your guests will crave after dinner.
To assemble this tart, you first want to make a buttery, flaky crust. You can, of course, use store-bought pie dough if you’re in a pinch, but the homemade version is easy to make and gives the tart that super rustic feel. Combine flour, salt, and butter in a large bowl using a pastry cutter or a bench scraper. When the butter bits are about the same size as peas, slowly add in ice water until the dough comes together. Form your dough into a disk, wrap it in plastic, and refrigerate for at least a half hour before rolling it out.
Now, you’re ready to move on to the plum filling. Fuller uses about a pound and a half of sliced plums placed directly onto the rolled-out pie dough — and yes, she puts her plums on the dough even before she adds her sugars and spices!
“Here’s a tip: always taste the fruit, which will then determine how much sugar you want to use,” Fuller says in the clip below. If the fruit is already very sweet, take away a tablespoon of the brown sugar you add to the slices. But if the plum slices are super tart, add that tablespoon back in.
Then, add a bit of ginger, vanilla, lemon juice, salt, flour, and butter right on top of the sliced plums before pulling up the edges of the tart and tucking the fruit slices in for a long winter’s nap.
“However your pie ends up looking, that’s how it should be,” Fuller says. “There’s no right or wrong. That’s the beauty of ‘farmhouse rules’ cooking.” She brushes a bit of milk onto the pie crust before sprinkling it with turbinado sugar and popping the whole thing into the oven.
The hardest part of baking this tart is waiting for it to cool so you can dive in. Serve this to your guests at your next holiday dinner party and everyone will leave with the biggest smiles on their faces. Grab the full recipe here and add this dessert to your arsenal just in time for Christmas.
Satisfy your sweet tooth with more awesome Costco bakery items seen in the gallery below.
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