Experimenting with pate de fruit

Over the past week I've made four separate batches (and flavors) of pate de fruit. Each one has turned out differently. I must have been enjoying a bit of beginner's luck, because the first recipe I tried (cranberry-apple) produced the best result. This was exactly what pate de fruit should be: slightly chewy and packed with gorgeously concentrated flavors of fresh fruit.


I pressed a violet into the top of one of the squares just for kicks. Technically it's an edible flower, but I got it at a garden center nearby and it has probably been sprayed with 4000 cancer-causing chemicals, so it's really just for show.

The other three batches demonstrated the various ways in which one can fail at making pates de fruit. The pineapple-lime flavored candies were flabby; the raspberry version never set and remained a pile of red goo in the pan; and the cranberry had too much pectin, giving it a texture that was more rubbery than chewy. Eventually they all wound up in the trash or in the freezer, awaiting resurrection in a new form.

Pate de fruit seems simple, but really it's one of those wonderfully French recipes that requires piles of fruit and tons of work (including standing over a hot stove stirring gooey, burbling sludge for an hour) in order to produce a minuscule result. When the minuscule result turns out properly, it is indeed a beautiful, gemlike thing. In other cases, however, it becomes ice cream topping or filling for cookies and sweet breads. Which isn't so bad either, I suppose.