Pear, Almond and Marscapone Tart

Each Sunday, Neil Perry has recipes featured in Sunday Life magazine in The Age.  If I fancy making the recipe, I'll tear it out in the hope that I'll remember it in the future.

A couple of weeks back, Neil featured a recipe for Pear, Almond and Marscapone Tart, which is published online here.  It looked right up my alley, and besides, I had some marscapone to use up from another project.

Instead of using store bought pastry, I made Maggie Beer's  sour cream pastry for the tart shell. 

I used a Corella pear instead of a Beurré Bosc. I hadn't realised that you had to poach the pear for the tart, as Neil has written it in the ingredients instead of the method (grrrr).  I used Orangette's directions for poaching pears, a la Nigel Slater. 

Here is the golden, baked frangipane filled tart:

 

Once the tart has cooled, it is topped with a mixture of whipped cream, beaten egg whites and marscapone, then decorated with toasted slivered almonds:

Again, Neil put part of the method in the ingredients, so my egg whites were not beaten and my cream was not whipped.  As a kind of after-the-fact attempt at fixing my topping, I beat the whole lot together with a hand held electric mixer.  This did give it some volume, and in the end, I thought it tasted pretty good, even if it was not as fluffy as Neil's version.

I thought this tart was elegant and delicious.  I had no occasion to make it other than that I wanted to, but isn't that half the fun?