Life Lessons: The Fragility of the Frangipane Tart

I made this Frangipane Tart with Strawberries and Raspberries last week. I have been gleaning many of my recipes from Epicurious because my beloved cookbook collection has been languishing in storage (along with pretty much everything else I own) since last September. Funny, that's about when I started this blog. Hence the "migration" part of the title, I suppose. Migrants generally don't tote along garages full of crap on their adventures, and so I am reduced to typing in things like "strawberries raspberries" into the Epicurious search engine and seeing what appears. If it has earned three and a half forks or more, I just might take the plunge.

My mom brought home large quantities of dangerously peaking fruit from Michigan, and something needed to be done quickly. The raspberries were turning darker by the hour, and the strawberries were starting to get that pale, withered aspect that is heart-breaking to see when you are painfully aware of how short their season is.

Epicurious suggested the frangipane tart, and who was I to argue? It came out quite deliciously, and the extra frangipane and pate brisee also lent themselves to being transformed into some delicate, rich cookies. However, I learned two important lessons from this particular experiment (and isn't that what cooking always is? A crazy experiment in an entirely uncontrolled environment?) that I will now share with you:

1) Fruit tarts really should only be attempted with the most gorgeous and perfectly ripe (or even slightly underripe, I suspect) fruit one can find. Overripe fruit should not be trotted out and put on display for all the world to see. Instead it should be encouraged to remain in the shadows and contribute its strengths in more subtle ways.

2) When it is in the low '90s with high humidity and for some perverse reason nobody in the house wants to turn on the air conditioning, do not leave a pretty tart that has been bedecked with already-peaking, exhausted fruit out on the countertop overnight. If you do, you will find that a thin layer of fuzzy white mold and a fruit fly cotillion will have rendered the creation absolutely repulsive and inedible by morning.

The End.